Calling all pundits. It’s a baffling caprice of the Zeitgeist to have two studio westerns released in the same month, 30-odd years after the genre basically gave up the ghost. James Mangold’s better-than-competent and highly crowd-pleasing 3:10 to Yuma has provided a harmonica fanfare for something more ambitious and polarizing…
“Poker is a cosmic metaphor,” Woody Harrelson explains early in The Grand. “No matter how the cards fall, you think you can still beat them.” This apparently is the film’s guiding philosophy, for if the advance press is telling the truth, The Grand was largely improvised. As Harrelson (“One-Eyed” Jack…
AC/DC: Plug Me In (Sony) Bob the Builder: Ultimate Adventure Collection (Hit Entertainment) Bully 911: Stop Being a Victim (Bayview) Believers (Warner Bros.) Best Picture Collection (MGM) The Hoax (Miramax) Hollow Man: Director’s Cut (Sony) The Invisible (Disney) Ironside: Season 2 (Shout) The Jazz Singer: Three-Disc Deluxe Edition (Warner Bros.)…
Will you leave your kingdom to a heretic?” That was the question posed to a dying Queen Mary in 1998’s Elizabeth, director Shekhar Kapur’s grim and dingy film now viewed in retrospect as the origin story of a superhero: the Armored Virgin Queen, faster than a speeding lead pellet, more…
More of a remix than a remake of the Elaine May-directed 1972 original, Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s The Heartbreak Kid seeks to rekindle There’s Something About Mary’s critical and box office magic by casting Ben Stiller as a newly wed sporting goods salesman, and newcomer Malin Akerman (a blond Diaz…
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Season Three (Universal) Black Sheep Unrated (Genius) Bob Mould: Circle of Friends (Granary) Bruce Springsteen: Under Review-1978-82: Tales of the Working Man (Sexy Intellectual) Concert for Diana (Universal) CSI New York: The Third Season (Paramount) Man Push Cart (Koch Lorber) The Marx Brothers Collection (Passport) Meerkat Manor:…
You Kill Me (Genius) Funny thing seeing Philip Baker Hall in You Kill Me, because he’s already played the role of a drunken hit man’s boss in The Matador, to which this feels like a slapshtick-noir sequel. It’s also the photonegative of Sexy Beast: Once more Ben Kingsley plays a…
It will no doubt be said time and again of Michael Clayton: best John Grisham adaptation ever. Only, of course, it did not spring from the billion-dollar mind of the attorney turned franchise, but from Tony Gilroy, who made his big-screen bow 15 years ago as the screenwriter of the…
Caligula: Imperial Edition (Penthouse) (Spoiler alert: Fisting!) One day back in the swingin’ Seventies, somebody mentioned how “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and then Bob Guccione, Gore Vidal, Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, and Peter O’Toole said, “Let’s make a big-budget movie about that, with come shots.” And Caligula was born. Actually…
To some, the story of Christopher Johnson McCandless, the 24-year-old Emory University graduate who starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness in the spring of 1992, will never be anything more than a case of a spoiled bourgeois brat with half-cocked survivalist fantasies (and possible suicidal tendencies) who ran away…
Thomas Wolfe wrote that you can’t go home again — and for Luigi, the main character in La Terra, why even bother? Home, for the classy Milan professor, is a small town in southern Italy, chock full o’ intrigue, corruption, and dysfunction. When Luigi travels to his hometown to sign…
The Audrey Hepburn DVD Collection (Paramount) Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Collector’s Edition (Sony) Christmas Television Favorites (Warner Bros.) The Comedians of Comedy: Live at the Troubadour (Image) Criminal Minds: The Second Season (Paramount) Day Night Day Night (IFC) Entourage: Season Three, Part 2 (HBO) Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer…
Knocked Up (Universal) Apparently as Judd Apatow was making Knocked Up, he was also prepping for its DVD release, because most of the bonuses here were shot during breaks on location. And they’re no small treats, either — finally here’s a “collector’s edition” worthy of the moniker. Chief among the…
Behold the shark! “The very symbol of impending danger,” intones the narrator of an old air force training film. The scratchy black-and-white footage, cut into the opening reel of the new documentary Sharkwater, shows the piscine predators in a frenzy underwater as an airman floats on his makeshift raft above…
Four decades ago, the American space program was synonymous with the pinnacle of human achievement. Thirty-eight years later, the program that punched a hole in the heavens barely dents the public consciousness. It took a vengeful astronaut in diapers to put NASA back on the nation’s front pages this year…
Directed with considerable formal intelligence and brooding power by David Cronenberg, Eastern Promises is very much a companion to A History of Violence. Both are crime thrillers that allow Viggo Mortensen to play a morally ambiguous and severely divided, if not schizoid, action-hero savior; both are commissioned works that permit…
As You Like It (HBO) Babel: 2-Disc Collector’s Edition (Paramount Vantage) Broken (Weinstein) The Bronx Is Burning (ESPN) Building Bombs (New Video Group) Chalk (Arts Alliance America) Cinema 16: European Short Films (Warp) Cujo: 25th Anniversary Edition (Lionsgate) Davey and Goliath: The Lost Episodes (Starlight) Drawn Together: Season Two (Paramount)…
Saturday Night Fever: 30th Anniversary Special Collector’s Edition (Paramount) For all of its camp-classic status as the ultimate disco-fever dream, John Badham’s movie truly is remarkable — a foulmouthed, mean-streets masterpiece that just happens to feature a Bee Gees score that spreads like melted cheese 30 years later. And, of…
In the new Neil Jordan movie, Jodie Foster plays New York talk radio DJ Erica Bain, who survives a vicious Central Park mugging and becomes an urban crusader devoted to cleaning up the city — with a Glock instead of a broom. Yes, The Brave One is that movie: the…
After Hair and the mass marketing of tie-dye, can the Sixties be shrunk to fit any further? Yes, indeed, here comes that nervous popularizer Julie Taymor, incongruously partnered with the happily vulgarian British writing duo of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, to run this transgressively utopian moment through the…
Beyond the Gates (Fox) Blade: House of Chthon (New Line) The Boss of It All (IFC) Boston Legal: Season Three (Fox) Brothers and Sisters: The Complete First Season (Buena Vista) Catherine Deneuve: Essentials (Wellspring) The Condemned (Lionsgate) Deliverance: Deluxe Edition (Warner Bros.) Family Guy: Volume Five (Fox) Flashdance: Special Collector’s…
The Graduate: 40th Anniversary Edition (MGM) Fifteen years after its last home-video commemorative edition (extras from which appear here), The Graduate once more gets the bonus-laden makeover — and if ever a movie deserved its kudos, it’s Mike Nichols’s masterwork. That said, the movie is its own bonus. Not since…
