dvd of the week Superman’s unfailing, idealistic, compassionate heroism has never existed in the real world, which is one of the most important reasons that he has been so attractive and so popular for so long. But in Zack Snyder’s massively hyped reboot of the storied franchise – which is written by David Goyer and…
dvd of the week Nat Faxon and Jim Rash won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay with Alexander Payner for The Descendants, and the The Way, Way Back is the first feature written and directed only by them. A coming-of-age comedy set in a summer beach town and its local water park, it is…
dvd of the week In this brilliantly funny satire, it’s Judgment Day, and among the few survivors are Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Craig Robinson, Jonah Hill and Danny McBride. They’re holed up in Franco’s mansion, trying to escape the gruesome demons loose from hell, and talking shit. Since all of the actors are…
Showgirls 2: Penny’s From Heaven dvd of the week Depending on who you talk to, Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls is either one of the biggest cinematic disasters of the last 30 years – ineptly acted, written and danced – or it is a camp masterpiece for the ages – deliberately funny, ironic and sly. I’m not…
Michael Douglas and Matt Damon in Behind the Candelabra dvd of the week Steven Soderbergh’s film about Liberace and his last lover, the young, blond and clueless Scott Thorson, was too gay and too sexy to be a feature film, supposedly. HBO, however, was thrilled to produce Behind the Candelabra, which stars Michael Douglas as…
dvd of the week The second in JJ Abram’s reboot of the Star Trek franchise starts out a few years after the last film. A rogue Star Fleet officer (Benedict Cumberbatch) bombs a top secret weapons lab, and, then when they are assembled to discuss it, he kills half of Star Fleet’s leadership. Seeking vengeance,…
dvd of the week If you were offended by Zero Dark Thirty, and there’s good reason to be, you may find solace in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which is as subversively anti-American and anti-imperialist as Zero Dark Thirty was pro-American and pro-fascism. Based on the novel by Mohsin Hamid, it is the story of how Changez…
dvd of the week This is the first adaptation of a F. Scott Fitzgerald work that seems to be as in love with Fitzgerald’s writing as Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) is with Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan). When Nick Caraway (a most excellent Toby Maguire) isn’t narrating the Jazz Age tragedy with Fitzgerald’s own language, director…
dvd of the week After nearly twenty years of big name American directors circling an adaptation of the classic beat novel On the Road, it was the Brazilian Walter Salles, who directed Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries, who managed to get it made; his first English-language film. Nowhere near as acclaimed as those two…
dvd of the week Despite writer-director Derek Cianfrance’s Herculean efforts at creating country noir and Ryan Gosling’s smolder, the film doesn’t quite work. The main reason is the film’s conceit, that the plot, focusing on three men in upstate New York over a generation, would be completely linear. In the first act, a daredevil motorcyclist…
