dvd of the week Skeleton Twins, a dark comedy about two siblings haunted by their father’s suicide and their own failure to love the right person, was one of Sundance’s big hits this year, and it deserved the hype. The film opens with Milo (Bill Hader) drunkenly attempting to commit suicide with a razor…
dvd of the week Guardians of the Galaxy, Marvel’s surprise megahit, is hugely entertaining. Our hero Star Lord – played by crazily hot, adorable and very funny Chris Pratt –is joined by the furry Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper), hilariously taciturn and wooden Groot (Vin Diesel), a green lady named Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and a super-literal…
dvd of the week The sequel to the fantastic Planet of the Apes reboot, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a great science fiction action film, but despite what some fans are claiming, it’s hardly perfect. Dawn takes place ten years after the events in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, with…
dvd of the week Supposedly, Jersey Boys, the Four Seasons jukebox musical, deserved its adulation and four Tony Awards. But as a film directed by Clint Eastwood, Jersey Boys is nostalgic pabulum. The film is a typical musical biopic, tracing the rise, peak, fall and redemption of one of the most successful musical acts of…
dvd of the week Unlike 21 Jump Street, its sequel 22 Jump Street is, lucky for the gays, not a two-hour mockery of gay sex. The absurdist franchise about lame cops Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Schmidt (Jonah Hill) going undercover as much younger guys, this time in college, is based on the more earnest 1980s…
dvd of the week Maleficent was sold to us as Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of the villain, with Angelina Jolie vamping about and camping it up. It’s not: It’s a complete rewrite of the fairy tale. The story is structured by two neighboring kingdoms, one human and ruled by a nasty king, the other…
dvd of the week The plot of John Carney’s delightful musical Begin Again is slight, using a few of the clichés of the let’s-put-on-a-show! genre and focusing on a rather simple redemption narrative in order to string together a bunch of beautifully directed musical performances. Carney’s last major feature, the magical Oscar-winning Once, was emotionally…
dvd of the week Snowpiercer, Joon-ho Bong’s first English-language film and full of international stars, is an astonishing film, breathtaking in its visuals, bleak in its plot and enraging in its refusal to do what most American audiences expect from their science fiction action films. The film is set in 2031, 17 years after an…
dvd of the week In Bryan Singer’s latest X-Men movie, his third and the franchise’s seventh since 2000, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is sent back in time to 1973, when shape-shifting Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) is going to kill Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), the inventor of mutant-hunting robots called the Sentinels. The film includes every single X-Men…
In what has surely unnerved Tom Cruise and his agents, his latest film, the massively budgeted Doug Limon-directed sci-fi action movie Edge of Tomorrow, got among the best reviews of any of the summer’s blockbusters and barely managed to earn half of its budget back in the United States. (The film made a firm profit…
