I first saw Michael Sheen in his native England, in a 1999 National Theatre revival of John Osborne’s ”angry young man” play Look Back in Anger. I’d heard that he…
DVD Reviews
310 Articles
Scott Malchus
3 Min Read
Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces is another fine addition to his storied career. Here is a director who embraces his filmmaking influences to inform his movies. Almodovar creates unique visions of…
Ken Shane
4 Min Read
The famous story goes that T.A.M.I. Show (Shout Factory) Executive Producer Bill Sargent wanted the Rolling Stones to close the show. The Stones, however, had seen James Brown’s act, and…
Scott Malchus
3 Min Read
If you were like me, reluctant to watch Precious: Based on the Novel ”Push” by Sapphire (we’ll dispense with the full title from here on out) because of it’s hard…
Bob Cashill
2 Min Read
One of the few upsets at this year’s tepid Academy Awards was Precious beating Up in the Air for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film had won scripting awards from the…
Scott Malchus
2 Min Read
Old Dogs, the latest family comedy from Walt Disney Pictures, certainly lives up to its title. The jokes and situations are tired and have been seen hundreds of times in…
Bob Cashill
2 Min Read
Note to self: Sentiment outranks everything else when picking a Best Foreign Language Film winner in the Oscar pool. I’m not-so-secretly pleased that the stone-cold, auteurist-approved White Ribbon didn’t blue-ribbon…
Scott Malchus
4 Min Read
Halfway through Rebecca Miller’s excellent The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, I began to wonder whether actress Blake Lively (Gossip Girl) was channeling Robin Wright’s performance, or vice versa. Both…
Scott Malchus
2 Min Read
Gentlemen Broncos is the brainchild of Jared and Jerusha Hess, the creators of Napoleon Dynamite. Whereas that cult classic was able to capitalize on the quirks of small town Utah…
Bob Cashill
3 Min Read
The Forbidden Kingdom (2008) paired Jackie Chan and Jet Li in the nick of time. Two years later 55-year-old Chan is playing the Mr. Miyagi part in the Karate Kid…
Scott Malchus
4 Min Read
Outrageous, over the top and a purely visceral experience, Bitch Slap is a throwback to the grindhouse pictures of the ’60s and ’70s, the kind of films that featured women…
Scott Malchus
3 Min Read
The latest entry into the category of Kaufman-esque surreal comedies, derived from the name of writer/director Charlie Kaufman, whose films include Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, is Sophie Barthes’s Cold…
Scott Malchus
4 Min Read
I recently saw Hot Tub Time Machine and thought I’d seen the most ridiculous (yet hilarious) John Cusack movie in some time. I was wrong. 2012 is not only the…
Scott Malchus
2 Min Read
Writer-director Katherine Dieckmann’s new indie film, Motherhood, has the look and feel of an extended episode of Sex in the City, if Carrie Bradshaw settled down in an old apartment…
Bob Cashill
1 Min Read
The documentarian who co-produced The War Room enters the battlefield of fashion with Vogue editor Anna (“Nuclear”) Wintour in The September Issue, out on DVD.
Scott Malchus
2 Min Read
Robert De Niro stars in Everybody’s Fine, a remake of a 1990 Italian film starring Marcello Mastroianni. You can feel the sentimental influence from the earlier film all over this…
Scott Malchus
3 Min Read
Women in Trouble is yet another L.A. ensemble movie in which various strangers intersect on one day and all lives are altered in some way. This film is unique in…
Ken Shane
2 Min Read
“To live now, as human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” Howard Zinn (1922-2010) In these days of sneering…
Scott Malchus
5 Min Read
With the NBA All Star Game behind us and March Madness just around the bend, two new DVD releases about basketball should keep all you round ball junkies appeased when…
Bob Cashill
3 Min Read
Solid craftsmanship disguises some rickety timber in The House of the Devil. Writer/director/editor Ti West says in one of the DVD’s two commentary tracks that he had Polanski and Kubrick…
Bob Cashill
4 Min Read
Roberto Rossellini’s status as a father of neorealism is eclipsed by his notoriety as the father of Isabella Rossellini. His adulterous affair with Ingrid Bergman in the 50s touched off…
Scott Malchus
1 Min Read
”Everything I thought was one way turns out to be another.” I don’t proclaim myself to be a huge fan of the work of Joel and Ethan Coen, the writer/director/producer…
Scott Malchus
3 Min Read
In the film, Adam¸ we first meet Adam as he watches his father’s casket get buried. For the first time in his life, he is alone. He returns home and…
Jack Feerick
1 Min Read
Comedienne Kathy Griffin takes as her great subject the foibles of Hollywood celebrity culture. Part of the kick of Griffin’s TV show Life on the D-List and her stand-up routine…
Bob Cashill
4 Min Read
1984 was a great year for foreign-language and independent cinema in the U.S. Off the top of my head I can recall seeing the following at Chicago’s Fine Arts Theater,…
Scott Malchus
3 Min Read
I have never been to New York City, so I can not refute any of the criticisms I’ve read about New York, I Love You, a collection of short films…
Scott Malchus
3 Min Read
Within the first fifteen minutes of the film The Boys Are Back, sports journalist Joe Warr (Clive Owen) watches his wife, Katy, succumb to cancer in a series of heartbreaking…
Bob Cashill
4 Min Read
Giant insects were all the rage in the nuclear-obsessed 50s—the king-sized ants of Them! (1954) led to an all-out assault of creepy-crawlies, with Tarantula (1955), The Black Scorpion (1957), The…
Scott Malchus
2 Min Read
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (available today on DVD) should have been Ferris Bueller, the corrupt college years. Based on the exploits of successful blogger/author/self proclaimed asshole, Tucker…
Bob Cashill
3 Min Read
You’d think that with all the miracles that CGI is capable of someone in Hollywood would figure out what to do with Bruce Willis’ hair. In Surrogates, out today on…