dvd of the week If you forget that you hate Tom Cruise, you may like him in Oblivion, which is a serious, artful science fiction film hidden behind the veneer of a shoot-‘em-up blockbuster. Cruise plays Jack Harper, who along with his girlfriend Victoria (a most excellent Andrea Riseborough), is tasked with managing and repairing…
dvd of the week San Diego was never given the opportunity to see this road trip film about two aging lesbians, Dot and Stella (Oscar winners Olympia Dukakis and Brenda Fricker), on the run from a nursing home. The only way they can prevent Dot from being forced into elder care by her granddaughter is…
In Danny Boyle’s latest thriller, James McAvoy plays Simon, an art auctioneer who helps a group of thugs steal a $25 million Goya painting in a daring heist. Unfortunately, the crew’s leader Frank (Vincent Cassel) knocks Simon unconscious during the robbery and when Simon wakes up, he has forgotten that he stole the painting from…
The Newsroom returns to HBO July 14, and before then you can binge on the first season of Aaron Sorkin’s sometimes comic drama about the backstage goings on at a cable news show hosted by a truth-telling independent. Sorkin, who created The West Wing and wrote The Social Network, has a practically patented style of…
Robbie Jones and Jurnee Smollett-Bell in Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor dvd of the week If you happen to come across this DVD in someone’s garbage can – do not pay for it – you may enjoy a good couple hours of hate-watching. As ineptly written and directed as the worst of the Razzie…
dvd of the week When I saw Harmony Korine’s exploitation art movie Spring Breakers, I knew what I was getting into: I was hoping to be horrified by the wrongness of the movie, but the kids in theater where I saw it were surprised by how horrifying, pornographic, disturbing and weirdly funny the movie is….
dvd of the week If you don’t have Netflix, you probably missed their 13-episode original series about the cruel world of Washington politics, which was also easily the best thing on TV this year. Starring Kevin Spacey in his greatest role – which is saying a lot – he is supported by Robin Wright, Kate…
dvd of the week The moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens her front door, after her house was been thrown through the sky by a Kansas tornado and landed in Oz, and the black, white and very gray world becomes not just Technicolor, but incandescent and utterly alive is, to me, one…
dvd of the week The first seconds of Warm Bodies announces how different it is from almost every other zombie story. It begins with a zombified young man (Nicholas Hoult) wandering through an airport full of other hunched, shuffling dead people, and, shockingly, the young man has a witty, articulate voice over. This zombie can…
dvd of the week The plot is basically a standard supernatural star-crossed lovers tale, one that is rather familiar to young consumers of contemporary pop culture. But there is a snarky, dark edge to Beautiful Creatures, partly because of the potential evil in Lena (Alice Englert) and partly due to the wry insults the teens…
