dvd of the week Amy Poehler and Tina Fey are as great a comedy team as any, and whether on Saturday Night Live, hosting the Golden Globes, or in the silly Baby Mama (2008), their easy connection and thrilling repartee is pure joy to watch. In Sisters, they again play opposites, though in a switch,…
dvd of the week An assured and stunning Saoirse Ronan is Eilis, who leaves stifling small town Ireland for expansive and exciting Brooklyn in the early 1950s. She falls in love with an Italian-American plumber (Emery Cohen, in a star-making performance) but then returns home after a death in the family, suddenly unsure where she…
dvd of the week Ryan Coogler’s Rocky sequel-cum-reboot turns Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) into the trainer and Apollo Creed’s illegitimate son Donny (Michael P. Jordan) into the boxer with something to prove. The plot is a by-the-numbers boxing movie, but Stallone’s seventh turn as Rocky Balboa is arguably his best, and Michael P. Jordan is again…
dvd of the week Michael Fassbender was nominated for an Oscar playing Apple founder Steve Jobs, who is on screen at virtually every moment in the film written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Danny Boyle. Few of his dialogue partners – played by Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen and Jeff Daniels, among others – are…
dvd of the week Steven Spielberg’s by-the-numbers spy suspense film stars Tom Hanks as James Donovan, a respected lawyer who is assigned to defend a Soviet spy in the late 1950s. Despite occasionally violent opposition to his treating Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) as deserving of due process and legal assistance, Donovan soldiers forth, the pinnacle…
dvd of the week Surprising to many, Ant-Man, the movie about one of the Marvel Universe’s more minor characters that went through a tortured development, turned out to be a damn fine film, much more enjoyable and coherent than the massively hyped Avengers: Age of Ultron. Paul Rudd plays Scott Lang, a thief with a…
dvd of the week Tangerine, a masterpiece of LGBT cinema, is about one day in the lives of two transgender prostitutes in Hollywood. Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor) are about to share a celebratory donut – it’s Christmas Eve, and Sin-Dee has just gotten out of jail – when Alexandra accidentally blurts…
dvd of the week Amy, Asif Kapadia’s excellent and disturbing documentary about Amy Winehouse’s life, is composed entirely of home movies, television video and voice-over of interviewed friends and family. Chronically depressed as a teenager, which she blames on her parents’ divorce, she became bulimic and then self-medicated with alcohol and pot; when she was…
Best of Enemies, impeccably crafted by Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon, tells the story of the televised debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. during the 1968 Republican and Democratic National Conventions. In order to create excitement for their coverage of the conventions, ABC decided to pit the two most entertaining political wits…
dvd of the week The sequel to Magic Mike, the movie about the surprisingly smart male stripper with a heart of gold, is as star and writer Channing Tatum promised, more what people expected from the original film. It’s not remotely dark, and there’s a lot more dancing, and that dancing is all about hot…
