The best thing about Michael Haneke’s Caché (Hidden) is the way it draws on contemporary fears without ever mentioning them. The War on Terror era has given us new things to be afraid of — being prey for terrorists, the government’s response — and they all make people feel insecure…
Good Woman, Mike Barker’s adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play Lady Windermere’s Fan, has been gathering dust for some time. It played the Toronto Film Festival in the fall of 2004 before opening in 2005 in every country in the world except this one. Such dawdling doesn’t bode well for…
Anthony Hopkins lends style points to any movie in which he appears. Roger Donaldson’s real-life tale about an eccentric fellow New Zealander, who fulfilled a lifelong dream in 1963 by racing his ancient Indian motorcycle across Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats, is a case in point. Donaldson (Thirteen Days, Dante’s Peak)…
Dune: Extended Edition (Universal) On paper it sounds insane: A mammoth sci-fi epic directed by David Lynch, based on an intensely weird Frank Herbert novel about ecology and giant worms. What resulted was a flop that has yet to be remedied by multiple edits over the years. This disc includes…
The diversity is breathtaking. This year’s Miami Jewish Film Festival sprawls with four venues featuring a batch of motion pictures that seem to cover everything Jewish under the sun. Hitler and Stalin, the Holocaust and Heaven, klezmer and ska, ambitious masterpieces, family dramas, slapstick comedies, and earnest documentaries add up…
America — and by extension Hollywood — has an obsession with innocence and the loss thereof. Every generation has that Moment When Everything Changed, from Pearl Harbor to JFK’s assassination to 9/11. The impact takes awhile to settle in, then people forget again, and future generations are similarly traumatized. But…
The critical consensus has Match Point as Woody Allen’s finest film since Bullets over Broadway. It is not difficult to understand the accolades and affection: It resembles one of his very best movies, 1989’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, down to the plot point in which Martin Landau’s affair with Anjelica Huston…
The Aristocrats (Lions Gate) The single joke around which Paul Provenza’s documentary revolves has a standard beginning and ending, like pieces of bread that make a sandwich stuffed with excrement, incest, and whatever other foulness the teller can come up with. Provenza and Penn Jillette recorded more than 100 comedians…
Address Unknown (Tartan) Anyone Can Dance: Nightclub Freestyle (Delta) National Lampoon’s Barely Legal (MGM) Dallas: The Complete Fourth Season (Warner Bros.) Educating Rita (Sony) Flightplan (Touchstone) The Fog (2005) (Sony) God Save the Queen: A Punk Rock Anthology (Music Video Dist.) Hooked (Eclectic) Ludacris: Southern Smoke (Music Video Dist.) My…
Over the centuries, the legend of Tristram and Iseult has fueled the derring-do of King Arthur, aroused Richard Wagner’s operatic thunder, driven poets as diverse as Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Edwin Arlington Robinson to the heights of passion, and helped stock the back streets of Manhattan with companies of leaping Jets…
With the release of The White Countess, the much-honored Merchant Ivory canon is complete. Bombay-born producer Ismail Merchant died in May 2005 at age 68, and whatever direction his long-time collaborator and life-companion, director James Ivory, now chooses, the working partnership that gave us a dozen elegantly furnished period pieces…
This artful and brooding period piece follows John Wilmot (Johnny Depp), a scandalously debauched earl of the English Restoration who apparently was not in contact with feelings of compassion or sympathy. The film opens with an attack — “I am John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, and I do…
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Magnolia) The best two hours you’ll ever spend learning about accounting, Enron is one part civics lesson, one part Greek tragedy, and one part political cartoon. Director Alex Gibney makes no pretense of objectivity; he wants you to hiss and boo at Ken…
Adventures of Superman: The Complete Second Season (Warner Bros.) Asylum (Paramount) Casino (MCA) Celebrity Mix (TLA) Final Destination: Scared 2 Death Pack (New Line) Gendernauts (First Run) Ghost in the Machine (Anchor Bay) Industrial Strength Keaton (Mackinac Media) Jamie Foxx Presents Laffapalooza! 6 (Image) Junebug (Sony) Lois & Clark: The…
The Wild Bunch (Warner Bros.) At a mere $42 through most websites, this four-film boxed set ranks among the best ever compiled; not only does it contain the restored version of one of the greatest movies of all time (The Wild Bunch), but also three other brilliant westerns (The Ballad…
According to Occam’s Razor (Elite Entertainment) Black Books: The First Complete Series (BBC/Warner) The Chumscrubber (DreamWorks) The Constant Gardener (Universal) Dead Poets Society: Special Edition (Touchstone) Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: Bueller … Bueller … Edition (Paramount) The Flash: The Complete Series (Warner Bros.) The Gambler (Time Life) Hawthorne Heights: This…
Over the years, moviegoers who double as sports fans have had ample opportunity to pick and choose their favorite miracle — Shoeless Joe Jackson emerging from the tall corn, Rudy suiting up for Notre Dame, Rocky going the distance with Apollo Creed, the U.S. hockey team taking down the Russkies…
The studied British theatricality and sharp wit of Stephen Frears’s comedy are likely to make it a favorite among nostalgists, theater buffs, and the tea-and-crumpets set. Sailing along on the strength of another showy performance by Judi Dench (Shakespeare in Love), this is the real-life story of an imperious widow…
Broken Flowers (Universal Home Entertainment) Bill Murray, who long ago swapped manic kineticism for melancholy deadpan, is once more mired in a middle-aged funk; what else is new? As Don Johnston, an aging lothario whose latest young girlfriend is walking out as the audience is just settling in, Murray’s on…
All in the Family: The Complete Fifth Season (Columbia/Tristar) Annie Duke’s Beginner’s Guide to Texas Hold ‘Em (Big Vision) As Time Goes By: Reunion Special (PBS) The Cave (Sony) Dumb and Dumber: Unrated (New Line) Football Collection: Radio, Jerry Maguire, and Rudy (Sony) The Gospel (Sony) Green River Killer (Lions…
For your Heath Ledger holiday-movie options, you have (a) a cowboy in love with another man, and (b) history’s most infamous womanizer. Since the name Casanova is synonymous with an unquenchable thirst for straight sex with women (or at least boasting about it), the role might seem to be a…
Hands down the funniest bit from the summer’s raunch smorgasbord The Aristocrats was hearing Sarah Silverman tell the infamously profane family-act joke at the center of Paul Provenza’s documentary. Where Robin Williams, Drew Carey, George Carlin, and a hundred other funny folks were serving up naughty variations in various shades…
