When Jude Law is peeling the paint off the walls with his intense recital of writer-director Richard Shepard’s fabulous and filthy monologues, Dom Hemingway is mesmerizing. The plot does not live up to the promise of the many great individual scenes, but those scenes! The plot – involving bank robbers, car crashes, murderous madmen and…
dvd of the week With Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer has made an indelible, hypnotic masterpiece of an art film. In dark and rainy Scotland, a particularly vapid Scarlett Johansson drives a van around Edinburgh, stalking men. After she finds a man who is alone, she seduces and when he is completely naked (and often…
dvd of the week David Lynch’s 1984 sci-fi epic Dune is one of the grander disasters in modern film: weird, long, campy and disliked both by fans of Frank Herbert’s novel and fans of David Lynch. Jodorowsky’s Dune is the fascinating and entertaining story about what Dune could and arguably should have been. The Chilean…
dvd of the week The complete third season of AMC’s low-rated but brilliant murder mystery was an under-watched marvel. The first season of the show, following two damaged detectives investigating the murder of a teenage girl in rainy and moody Seattle, was a huge success, but after the show failed on its promise to reveal…
dvd of the week In Prisoners, the Quebecois auteur Denis Villeneuve directed Jake Gyllenhaal to one of his best performances, as a cold and determined cop searching for two kidnapped girls. Enemy, based on Nobel Prize winner José Saramago’s book The Double, is as austere and difficult as Prisoners was pulpy and obvious. Gyllenhaal plays…
dvd of the week The Lego Movie could be the greatest advertisement ever made. I couldn’t prevent myself from buying Legos after seeing it. But it’s a great movie in and of itself, brilliantly animated, extremely funny and surprisingly emotional affecting. Emmet (Chris Pratt) is a construction worker in a city that runs with clockwork…
dvd of the week In Wes Anderson’s greatest film so far, it is 1932 and the Grand Budapest Hotel is in its heyday. A treasure of the fictional Eastern European nation of Zubrowka, it is packed with suited dignitaries and their bejeweled wives, and the regimented staff is legion; over all of it presides the…
dvd of the week Neil deGrasse Tyson’s reboot of Carl Sagan’s iconic PBS series Cosmos is the best nonfiction on television this year, updating Sagan’s science and the show’s visuals and using Tyson’s remarkable explanatory power to make astrophysics, evolutionary biology, geology and the history of science as entertaining as most network dramas. Tyson, who…
dvd of the week Also available at Vimeo on Demand The power of lust is at the heart of Stranger by the Lake. Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), a lithe and beautiful young man, comes to the beach every day to swim and cruise men and he is infatuated with a mustachioed man named Michel (Christophe Paou)…
dvd of the week The sweet high school comedy G.B.F. was barely released in theaters last year and received most of its publicity for being absurdly given an R rating by MPAA “for sexual references,” clearly a homophobic reaction to teenage boys kissing. G.B.F. stands for Gay Best Friend, which is what the three most…
