dvd of the week Steven Soderbergh’s last studio film is basically a long, relatively well-acted Law & Order episode, complete with discussions of double jeopardy and a “shocking” but offensively retrograde ending. Emily (Rooney Mara) is married to Martin (Channing Tatum), who is being released from prison after serving five years for insider trading. As…
dvd of the week David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas, considered one of the greatest literary achievements of the last two decades by many critics, was thought to be impossible to adapt for film. There are six narratives that take place in wildly different times and spaces and they’re connected in weird and wonderful ways. The…
dvd of the week When I read that Silver Linings Playbook was about two psychologically troubled people, I was initially concerned. So many film depictions of crazy are just crazy awful. I wasn’t encouraged when the first few scenes of the film took place in a mental hospital. But shortly after Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper)…
dvd of the week I missed this wildly weird French movie when it was playing in San Diego this fall, but I saw it on DVD this past week and I was amazed. Leos Carax’s hypnotic, fascinating, and somewhat opaque film follows Oscar (Denis Lavant) as he goes from appointment to appointment in Paris, driven…
dvd of the week Tarentino’s homage to spaghetti westerns and blaxploitation films of the 1970s is his funniest movie by far and as nearly as fun to watch as Kill Bill Vol. 1. It’s also the movie that probably sets some sort of record for the use of the n-word, and it’s disconcerting, to say…
dvd of the week This under-seen crime drama is Andrew Dominik’s follow-up to the under-seen, but brilliant The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. This one isn’t as powerful, but it’s just as amazing to look at, taking the slow-motion violence style to the pinnacle of the artform. Brad Pitt plays a…
dvd of the week A couple weeks ago, Australia’s film censor banned I Want Your Love for being too sexually explicit, and that is also probably why the Travis Mathew’s film never found a nationwide distributer in the U.S. A gorgeously shot, naturalistic story of the last 36 hours that Jesse (the quite amazing Jesse…
dvd of the week Based on Victor Hugo’s classic 1862 French novel about an ex-convict struggling to overcome his past (among several other plots), the musical version of Les Misérables is one of the few Broadway blockbusters that is as good as it is popular. When Tom Hooper, fresh from winning an Oscar for The…
dvd of the week Ang Lee won his second Oscar for directing this gorgeous adaptation of Yan Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi, a book that begins with an old man saying that “I have a story that will make you believe in God.” The film begins similarly, with Pi Patel (Irrfan Khan) telling…
dvd of the week When I saw that The Intouchables was a true story about a quadriplegic, I found other movies to see. I just didn’t want to do the work. And when I tell you that it is in French and subtitled, you may not want to do the work either. But The Intouchables…
