dvd of the week After nearly twenty years of big name American directors circling an adaptation of the classic beat novel On the Road, it was the Brazilian Walter Salles, who directed Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries, who managed to get it made; his first English-language film. Nowhere near as acclaimed as those two…
dvd of the week Despite writer-director Derek Cianfrance’s Herculean efforts at creating country noir and Ryan Gosling’s smolder, the film doesn’t quite work. The main reason is the film’s conceit, that the plot, focusing on three men in upstate New York over a generation, would be completely linear. In the first act, a daredevil motorcyclist…
dvd of the week If you forget that you hate Tom Cruise, you may like him in Oblivion, which is a serious, artful science fiction film hidden behind the veneer of a shoot-‘em-up blockbuster. Cruise plays Jack Harper, who along with his girlfriend Victoria (a most excellent Andrea Riseborough), is tasked with managing and repairing…
dvd of the week San Diego was never given the opportunity to see this road trip film about two aging lesbians, Dot and Stella (Oscar winners Olympia Dukakis and Brenda Fricker), on the run from a nursing home. The only way they can prevent Dot from being forced into elder care by her granddaughter is…
In Danny Boyle’s latest thriller, James McAvoy plays Simon, an art auctioneer who helps a group of thugs steal a $25 million Goya painting in a daring heist. Unfortunately, the crew’s leader Frank (Vincent Cassel) knocks Simon unconscious during the robbery and when Simon wakes up, he has forgotten that he stole the painting from…
The Newsroom returns to HBO July 14, and before then you can binge on the first season of Aaron Sorkin’s sometimes comic drama about the backstage goings on at a cable news show hosted by a truth-telling independent. Sorkin, who created The West Wing and wrote The Social Network, has a practically patented style of…
Robbie Jones and Jurnee Smollett-Bell in Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor dvd of the week If you happen to come across this DVD in someone’s garbage can – do not pay for it – you may enjoy a good couple hours of hate-watching. As ineptly written and directed as the worst of the Razzie…
dvd of the week When I saw Harmony Korine’s exploitation art movie Spring Breakers, I knew what I was getting into: I was hoping to be horrified by the wrongness of the movie, but the kids in theater where I saw it were surprised by how horrifying, pornographic, disturbing and weirdly funny the movie is….
dvd of the week If you don’t have Netflix, you probably missed their 13-episode original series about the cruel world of Washington politics, which was also easily the best thing on TV this year. Starring Kevin Spacey in his greatest role – which is saying a lot – he is supported by Robin Wright, Kate…
dvd of the week The moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens her front door, after her house was been thrown through the sky by a Kansas tornado and landed in Oz, and the black, white and very gray world becomes not just Technicolor, but incandescent and utterly alive is, to me, one…
