dvd of the week On DVD and Netflix After three seasons, Veronica Mars, the mostly excellent TV show about a much hipper Nancy Drew (Kristen Bell) in fictional Neptune, Calif. (but filmed in Oceanside), was cancelled. Creator Rob Thomas wanted Warner Bros. to make a movie, but they declined. Several years later, Thomas and Bell…
dvd of the week As Gloria in Gloria, Paulina García has such a gravitational effect on your eyes, ears and empathy that it’s nearly impossible not to be enrapt with her, as an actress and as a middle-aged Chilean divorcée coping with both loneliness and with falling in love again. Unfortunately, Gloria was not nominated…
dvd of the week Based on a book by Martin Sixsmith, Philomena tells the story of a retired Irish nurse (Judi Dench) who reveals to her daughter, 50 years after the fact, that as an unmarried young woman (Sophie Kennedy Clark), she had given birth to a son in a convent. As repayment to the…
dvd of the week The Broadway production of the Pulitzer Prize winning play August: Osage County is considered one of the great theater events of the last decade. An extended family, full of secrets and problems verging on mental illness, come together for a funeral. All hell breaks loose. It’s funny, moving and upsetting. Somehow,…
dvd of the week John Krokidas and Austin Bunn’s wonderful film about the beginnings of the Beats, the phrase “kill your darling” is spoken by an English professor with the usual purpose – edit down your extravagant writing – but it also means a great deal more. One of the first scenes in the film…
dvd of the week While I laud Disney for going back to basics with Frozen, for hiring Broadway stars to voice musical roles rather than stunt-casting them with super famous names, and I laud Disney for continuing their mission to give us stories about almost-feminist princesses who need their mothers or sisters more than they…
In this comic fictionalization of the Abscam scandal in the 1970s – in which the FBI gleefully and unethically entrapped more than a dozen politicians including six members of the House of Representatives and a senator – David O. Russell has made his best movie, and he’s the guy who gave us The Fighter and…
dvd of the week In the Coen brothers’ latest film, they focus on one of Greenwich Village’s folk musicians who failed. In the winter of 1961, Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is sleeping on the couches of the friends who aren’t angry with him, reeling from the suicide of his former singing partner and a furtive…
dvd of the week Steve McQueen’s remarkable 12 Years a Slave is based on the 1855 autobiography of Solomon Northup, played in the film by the great British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor. Solomon was born free and educated in upstate New York, and while his wife and children are away, he is kidnapped and sold into…
dvd of the week The plot of Gravity is quite simple. NASA astronauts have taken a space shuttle into orbit in order to repair the Hubble telescope. It is Matt Kowalski’s (George Clooney) last mission and Dr. Ryan Stone’s (a brilliant Sandra Bullock) first. While they are on a space walk outside the shuttle working…
