dvd of the week Disney’s live action remakes of its classic animated movies have all been good, and some great. Malificent was fun to look at, and featured a fantastic Angelina Jolie, but it was uneven in its retconning. Cinderella was remarkably beautiful and moving. But The Jungle Book is another thing altogether, an absolutely…
dvd of the week Continuing their string of damn fine moderately budgeted comedies –I Love You, Philip Morris, Crazy Stupid Love, and Focus – Glenn Ficarra and John Requa turned Kim Baker’s Afghanistan foreign correspondence memoir into a fantastic vehicle for Tina Fey and her deeply satisfying trademarked feminist comedy. Fey plays Kim, a bored…
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 Sometimes, you have to do it straight. Sometimes you need to resist the temptation to change a classic. Cinderella, one of the most indelible of Western fairy tales, has been re-interpreted countless times since it first appeared in print in the 17th century, but mostly the story stays true to its…
dvd of the week The wondrous Paddington was freely adapted from the children’s book series by Michael Bond that began in 1958. Paddington is a rare intelligent talking bear from Darkest Peru, and in Paul King’s film, he sets off for London to find a new home after the forest where he lived with his…
dvd of the week Barely released this winter, Maps to the Stars is Julianne Moore’s other great performance of 2014, and I think she’s better in this David Cronenberg movie about the darker side of Hollywood than in Still Alice, for which she won an Oscar. Moore is a needy, fading starlet trying to be…
dvd of the week The third film in the dystopian sci-fi series about income inequality, political cynicism and young people turned into killers against their will, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, is based on one half of the third novel of Suzanne Clark’s trilogy. The second and final part will be released next…
dvd of the week Both Mark Shultz (Channing Tatum) and his brother David (Mark Ruffalo) won gold medals at the 1984 Olympics, and while David parlayed his fame to a coaching job, Mark is at loose ends, living alone and training with scowl. One day, out of the blue, Mark is asked to fly to…
dvd of the week Innovative, hilarious, and moving, Birdman is a film about theater, film and actors, as well as regret, love, family, and, in a way, the meaning of life, and it soars. Michael Keaton is blockbuster star Riggan Thomas, who wants to earn respect by appearing on Broadway, so he writes, directs and…
dvd of the week David Fincher’s fantastic adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestseller about a missing woman and the husband who is accused of making her disappear was a huge hit this fall, and with good reason. Ben Affleck has never been better as an ethically challenged Midwestern man who desperately wants out of his marriage…
