dvd of the week While you don’t need to see Dog Day Afternoon to understand The Dog, seeing it will help you appreciate both films more. Directed by Sidney Lumet at the height of his powers and written by great Frank Pierson, Dog Day Afternoon is one of the great films of the 1970s, which…
dvd of the week The sequel to the criminally underrated Captain America: The First Avenger is the fun and surprisingly political thrill-ride Captain America: The Winter Soldier. In the present day, the Captain (Chris Evans, a fine, if not terribly exciting, square jawed hero) is a member of the superhero team the Avengers and he…
dvd of the week In Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, an incandescent Tilda Swinton plays Eve, an achingly-sweet, centuries-old aesthete who happens to be a vampire. Her similarly afflicted husband Adam, played by Tom Hiddleston (who is Loki in the Thor films and The Avengers), is a glum musical genius who hides from the…
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 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 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 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…
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…
