Will Ferrell, having moved on from the anchor desk and NASCAR, at long last ridicules a hallowed profession. I refer, of course, to men’s figure skating. Who until now has dared to mock the sequined costumes, the fondness for power ballads, the Spandex pants? Luckily Our Man Ferrell is up…
Sleeping Dogs Lie (First Look) Writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait takes a subversive concept (honesty is overrated) and marries it to an outrageous scenario (a woman’s family learns that she once, uh, performed for a dog) to create . . . a romantic comedy? Well, sort of. Like Goldthwait’s underrated Shakes the…
The Aura (Genius) Avatar: The Last Airbender — Book 2: Earth, Volume 2 (Paramount) The Batman: The Complete Third Season (Warner Bros.) Beneath Still Waters (Lions Gate) Bobby (Weinstein) Coming Soon (Lions Gate) Dead and Deader (Anchor Bay) A Guide for the Married Woman (Fox) Life of the Party (THINKFilm)…
There exists some debate about audience familiarity with the term “grindhouse,” and even a certain confusion about the origins of the word itself — whether it refers to the movies that comprised a gilded age of exploitation cinema, or to the all-night urban theaters in which they were regularly shown…
Sharply adapted from the William Joyce book A Day with Wilbur Robinson, this speedy animated film features Lewis (voiced by Daniel Hansen and Jordan Fry), a bespectacled science geek and orphan who, though well cared for by a loving foster mom (velvety-voiced Angela Bassett), is too weird to get himself…
Twin Peaks: The Second Season (Paramount) So, here it is: perhaps the most infamous shark-jumping in TV history. The first season of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s comedy-horror-mystery-soap opera caused a cultural frenzy of “damn good coffee” quips and questions over who murdered prom queen/town doorknob Laura Palmer. It’s also…
All That Jazz: Special Music Edition (Fox) The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour (Image) Back Stage (Strand) Bong Water (First Look) The Brady Bunch: The Complete Series (Paramount) Charlotte’s Web (Paramount) Copying Beethoven (MGM) Dancing With the Stars: Cardio Dance (Lions Gate) Entourage: Season Three, Part One (HBO) Jump In!:…
At various times over the last decade, David Fincher, Sam Mendes, and Michael Mann were all slated to direct Scott Frank’s screenplay for The Lookout, about a brain-damaged high school hockey stud who’s smooth-talked by distant acquaintances into robbing a small-town bank. That Frank — best known for straightening and…
War movie, horror movie — the difference is negligible in the grim sequel to last year’s hit remake of Wes Craven’s 1977 mutant thriller. After a grisly childbirth and some gory killings, the real action starts with a group of gung-ho National Guardsmen blasting their way through Kandahar. It proves…
Children of Men (Universal) Set in a tomorrow that looks like yesterday, Alfonso Cuarón’s wrenching adaptation of P.D. James’ novel feels more like documentary than fiction. In the movie’s world, women have gone barren, and immigrants are tossed into prison camps; it’s the proverbial nightmare to which we might actually…
Bow (Tartan) Comeback Season (First Look) Curse of the Golden Flower (Sony) The Eden Formula (Westlake) The Addams Family: Volume 2 (MGM) Errol Flynn: The Signature Collection, Volume 2 (Warner Bros.) Fantastic Four: World’s Greatest Heroes, Volume 1 (Fox) Following Sean (New Video Group) Hacking Democracy (Docurama) Happy Feet (Warner…
In the same week that sees Adam Sandler playing a grieving 9/11 widower in Reign over Me, another lone figure reeling from post-traumatic stress fills the central role in the new Antoine Fuqua-directed thriller, Shooter. Named Bob Lee Swagger and played with appropriately gruff machismo by Mark Wahlberg, he’s a…
As Charlie Fineman, a New York dentist who lost his wife and three young daughters in one of the September 11 plane crashes, Adam Sandler sports a mass of bedraggled locks and walks with his head hung low, the sounds of the city drowned out by The Who or Bruce…
The feature debut from South African director Sunu Gonera is straight from the sports-film playbook, the one in which an underdog team coached by an obstinate overachiever overcomes obstacles and adversity to take home the gold. It’s Hoosiers in a swimming pool — well, Glory Road, anyway, given this is…
Blood Diamond (Warner Bros.) Ed Zwick’s Blood Diamond, about the civil war over diamonds that devastated Sierra Leone in the late 1990s, plays like a guilt-ridden Jerry Bruckheimer movie. It’s little more than action-adventure pulp drenched in someone else’s blood — which it tries to wash off by proselytizing to…
Batman Beyond: Season Three (Warner Bros.) The Bridge on the River Kwai (Sony) Burning Annie (Warner Bros.) The Caine Mutiny (Sony) The Care Bears Movie: 25th Anniversary Limited Edition (MGM) Come Early Morning (Weinstein) Eragon (Fox) The Guns of Navarone (Sony) JAG: The Third Season (Paramount) Justice League Unlimited: Season…
The space-time continuum smacks the shit out of Sandra Bullock in Premonition, the latest in nonlinear nonsense, but the fun really gets going when she starts to smack back. As Linda Hanson, humdrum mom from Anywhere, U.S.A., Bullock sets things up by doing her thing, effortlessly establishing the girl next…
I Think I Love My Wife From the makers of Pootie Tang, one the greatest movies ever made, comes I Think I Love My Wife, the most unlikely remake in the history of cinema. Director, co-writer, and star, Chris Rock, claims his comedy is an update of Chloe in the…
American Cousins (BFS) Appetite for Deconstruction: A Punk Rockumentary (MVD) Barbie Fairytopia: Magic of the Rainbow (Universal) Bloody Reunion (Tartan) Blood Trails (Lions Gate) The Ed Wood Collection: A Salute to Incompetence (Passport) Favela Rising (Netflix) Fires on the Plain: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) The Gene Autry 100th Anniversary Collection…
Casino Royale (Sony) James Bond gets a stirring shake-up in the best — yeah, Goldfinger fans, the best — film in the series’ 44-year history. Daniel Craig’s 007 has more going on above the neck and below the waist than even Sean Connery’s. He’s a genuinely compelling character — a…
Long ago there reigned a clan of Speedo-wearing militaristic psychopaths called the Spartans. They lived beneath a copper-colored sky, on a copper-colored land, amid copper-colored fields, in copper-colored homes made from copper-colored stone. Legend has it they would outline their copper-colored pecs and abs with ash to enhance their manly…
When the editorial-cartoonist-turned-amateur-sleuth Robert Graysmith published Zodiac, his sprawling, meticulously researched account of the eponymous San Francisco serial killer, he wrote that the tale was “the most frightening story I know.” It was easy to understand why. Graysmith was writing in 1985, some 16 years after the Zodiac killer’s last…
