Men are literally disposable in Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver. But the film, particularly for fans of the gynophilic, flamboyantly color-coordinating maker of loco melodramas, is essential. The title translates as Coming Back — as in “back from the dead,” referring to the matter-of-fact resurrection of Irene (Carmen Maura), an old grandmother…
If anything could tempt an adult to go see a dancing penguin movie, it’s the phrase “from the guy who brought you Babe.” That movie got everything right about talking animals, but, alas, George Miller does not live up to his earlier work here. Happy Feet starts out well enough…
Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (Warner Bros.) At long last, Richard Donner’s much-whispered-about “original version” of Superman II sees the light of day, and it quickly joins the ranks of the reconstructed Touch of Evil, Apocalypse Now, and Blade Runner as films made superior in the recutting and retelling…
The Ant Bully (Warner Bros.) Criminal Minds: The First Season (Paramount) Dane Cook: Vicious Circle (HBO) The Ellen DeGeneres Show: DVD-licious (Warner Bros.) Foo Fighters: Skin and Bones (RCA) Hot Wheels Accelerators: The Ultimate Race (Warner Bros.) Joan of Arcadia: The Second Season (Paramount) Jamie Kennedy’s Blowin’ Up (Paramount) Little…
Okay, so Jerry Bruckheimer and Tony Scott were asking for it by naming their latest megaproduction Déj Vu. These dudes aren’t exactly paragons of innovation, unless taking rhetorical hysteria to awesome new heights counts. As the opening credits roll — by which of course I mean roll, zip, flicker, fade,…
For progressives lifted, however temporarily, by the swell of a turning tide, Bobby can be seen clearly for what it is — an Airport movie with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as the central calamity and an all-star cast deployed like multiple George Kennedys. Juggling some 22 main characters…
Todd Field’s second excursion into middle-class unease, after his intelligent but overrated In the Bedroom, unfolds at a leisurely, insidious pace. It posits a suburb full of hypocrites busily persecuting their local child molester (a compellingly creepy Jackie Earle) so as not to face up to their own subterranean secrets…
An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount) This isn’t exactly the kind of DVD you buy to watch again and again; the ending doesn’t get happier, and there are no twists to decipher with repeated viewings. The producers hope instead that you buy it and share it; it’s less movie, after all, than…
American Slapstick (Image) Alias: The Complete Fifth Season (Buena Vista) Boston Legal: Season Two (Fox) The Cry Baby Killer (Buena Vista) Devil Times Five (Code Red) Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist: Season Two (Paramount) Fall Out Boy: Solid Gold Uncertainty (Music Video Dist.) A Fish Called Wanda: Collector’s Edition (MGM) Freedom…
By all rights, 2002’s Die Another Day should have been and could have been the final James Bond film. It was packaged like a cynical, weary best-of concert coughed up by an aging dinosaur, offering copious nods to the franchise’s past without bothering to offer any new material of consequence…
For Your Consideration pulls off the neat trick of skewering the movie industry while remaking it in its own image. The latest ensemble comedy by Christopher Guest and company takes place in Los Angeles, but its imaginative provenance lies somewhere between the La La Lands of Entourage and Mulholland Dr…
Cops-gone-wild movies and TV shows are the Angry White Guy counterpoint to thug-life melodramas: fantasies of abusing rather than seizing power, operating above the law rather than outside it. This caffeinated fit of antihero worship — the directorial debut of screenwriter David Ayer, who made detective with his bad-cop thrillers…
Forbidden Planet (Warner Bros.) Long available as faded discount product, Fred McLeod Wilcox’s 1956 masterpiece — the movie without which Star Trek, Star Wars, 2001, and, oh, Lost in Space wouldn’t exist — at last gets its proper due; this double-disc collection comes with everything but stardust and rocket fuel…
Brothers of the Head (IFC) Cary Grant: The Franchise Collection (Universal) CSI: The Complete Sixth Season (Paramount) Cream: Royal Albert Hall (Rhino) 49 Up (First Run) Friends: The Complete Series Collection (Warner Bros.) The Green Mile: Two-Disc Special Edition (Warner Bros.) Hate Crime (Image) He Changed Our World: Steve Irwin…
Once an actor gets big enough to take whatever kind of role he wants, it makes sense that the biggest stretch imaginable, given his current situation, is the part of a powerless man with no control over the world around him. Call it a “nice” movie — a vehicle designed…
Pity Max Skinner, emasculated over his lamb chops. On a gray afternoon, at London’s hot spot du jour, his gloating superior unveils a plot to poach his most lucrative client, divesting him of a six-figure bonus (pounds sterling) in the process. Fuck it. The bummed-out bond trader hands in a…
The third collaboration between Britain’s Aardman studio and DreamWorks animation, this puckish charmer about a posh Kensington mouse flushed down the loo into London sewer country is to action-adventure what Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was to Hammer Horror. Aardman’s first foray into CGI might spell woe…
The Junky’s Christmas (Koch) They just aren’t cranking out claymation Christmas specials like they used to, which makes this a welcome one. Nicer still, it’s got heroin! A mixture of stop motion with a little puppetry and live-action shots of William Burroughs (who may himself have been a Muppet), this…
Anna Karenina (Kino) Arrested Development: Seasons One-Three (Fox) The Best of the Scripps National Spelling Bee (ESPN) Beverly Hills 90210: The Complete First Season (Paramount) Cinema Paradiso (Weinstein) The Fallen Idol (Criterion) Freak Out (Anchor Bay) Jag: The Complete Second Season (Paramount) The James Bond Collection: Volumes One and Two…
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is funnier than its malapropic title — the audience with whom I saw the movie wasn’t laughing so much as howling — and even more difficult to parse. Eyes wide, face fixed in an avid grin, Sacha Baron…
Milestone in motion picture history: On Halloween weekend 2006, Saw III grossed $34.3 million to become the Iraq war-era’s bloodiest chart-topping torture movie whose victims don’t include Jesus of Nazareth. Only God or Jack Valenti knows how this work of pure entertainment got away with an R rating “for strong…
When a red-blooded, macho, flag-waving, Bush-voting American country-music fan looks at a gorgeous blond who also happens to make his kind of music, one doesn’t normally expect him to pay particular attention to the actual substance of her conversation. Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines didn’t think anyone would either,…
