dvd of the week Last year’s best new drama, about two deep cover KGB spies living near Washington, D.C. in the early 1980s, returns for its second season at the end of February. The first season is now on DVD and you have two weeks to binge watch these 13 episodes. Keri Russell’s Elizabeth…
dvd of the week Dallas Buyers Club is the story of a man who fought the reprehensible policies of the FDA and the medical establishment during the worst of the AIDS crisis by selling unapproved drugs through a legally problematic buyers club. It is also the story of how a man was transformed from a…
dvd of the week Based on the famed 1976 Formula 1 competition between James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl), Rush traces the two very different men from their early days driving lesser Formula 3 cars to the pinnacle of car racing, the Formula One World Championship. Hunt was a gorgeous blond British…
dvd of the week In Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen has provided Cate Blanchett, arguably the greatest actress of her generation, her greatest role – a woman destroyed by her own pretensions. The film’s comedy is in the nervous discomfort of class warfare, the clueless vapidity of the rich and capitalistic. It is Allen going to…
Brie Larson and Keith Stanfield in Short Term 12 dvd of the week In one of the biggest hits of Sundance, a revelatory Brie Larsen plays the manager of a half-way house for troubled teenagers. Her character is heroically resilient, warm and funny, and she is damaged by her own adolescence and confused by her…
With inarguably the most important film released this year, out director Joshua Oppenheimer lays bare the emotional and moral reverberations of violence in a way no documentarian has ever done before. Interviews with several men who were leaders of death squads in Indonesia during the 1960s civil unrest become recreations of the hundreds of murders…
Jodie Foster and Matt Damon in Elysium dvd of the week Somehow, I missed Elysium, Neill Blomkamp’s follow up to the now-classic District 9. It’s about a future humanity where the rich and powerful live in a paradisiacal space station called Elysium, and the poor and desperate are still on Earth, scrounging for scraps and…
Hugh Jackman and Paul Dano in Prisoners dvd of the week The daughters of both Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and Franklin Birch (Terrence Howard) are kidnapped, and when Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) doesn’t work fast enough, Keller takes the law into his own hands. This is mostly at the expense of the mildly retarded Alex…
dvd of the week James Mangold’s The Wolverine is a great leap forward for the franchise, which has yet to reach its potential. Loosely based on a famed 1982 limited series written by Chris Claremont and drawn by Frank Miller, The Wolverine opens with our hero (muscle bear icon Hugh Jackman) living alone and depressed…
Lindsay Lohan in The Canyons dvd of the week: In this already infamous film, Lindsay Lohan is perfectly cast as Tara, a failed former model who is with a cruel man only for his money. She knows the dark side of Hollywood, and it seems that her travels through addiction, derision and being the object…
