dvd of the week Maleficent was sold to us as Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of the villain, with Angelina Jolie vamping about and camping it up. It’s not: It’s a complete rewrite of the fairy tale. The story is structured by two neighboring kingdoms, one human and ruled by a nasty king, the other…
dvd of the week The plot of John Carney’s delightful musical Begin Again is slight, using a few of the clichés of the let’s-put-on-a-show! genre and focusing on a rather simple redemption narrative in order to string together a bunch of beautifully directed musical performances. Carney’s last major feature, the magical Oscar-winning Once, was emotionally…
dvd of the week Snowpiercer, Joon-ho Bong’s first English-language film and full of international stars, is an astonishing film, breathtaking in its visuals, bleak in its plot and enraging in its refusal to do what most American audiences expect from their science fiction action films. The film is set in 2031, 17 years after an…
dvd of the week The latest remake of the iconic Japanese monster movie made a lot of money despite giving the actual monster very little screen time. Probably the darkest – both visually and thematically – of any of the 33 Godzilla films, this new one was directed by Gareth Edwards, who had made one…
dvd of the week The hugely successful tearjerker starring Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort, earned my tears, even if the filmmakers took a few shortcuts to get them. Unless you’ve managed to ignore all of the advertising and hype surrounding the movie, you know the movie is a story about kids with cancer. The narrator…
The second of Marc Webb’s reboot of the Spider-Man franchise starts shortly after the events in the previous film. Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield) is a superhero-about-town, trying to balance his heroics with his relationships with Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) and Aunt May (Sally Field). Peter’s childhood friend Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan) is determined to find a…
dvd of the week As I was walking out of Locke, a man behind me told his wife, “That’s my worst nightmare.” I was thinking of other clichés, too: for Ivan Locke, the events in the film are a shitshow, a tsunami, his Waterloo, a perfect storm. Most American audiences know Tom Hardy, who plays…
dvd of the week In the world of Divergent, everyone who has survived a horrible, global war now lives in Chicago, which is surrounded by a massive wall and where the population has been divided into five factions: Abnegation, who are selfless civil servants; Amity, who the peaceful, hippy famers; Candor, who are honest lawyers;…
dvd of the week Despite promises from the film’s distributor, Cuban Fury was never shown in San Diego. Now this delightful film is on DVD. Nick Frost plays Bruce, a chunky Brit with a job in middle management. As a teen, he had been something else: a confident champion salsa dancer. On his way to…
dvd of the week With Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer has made an indelible, hypnotic masterpiece of an art film. In dark and rainy Scotland, a particularly vapid Scarlett Johansson drives a van around Edinburgh, stalking men. After she finds a man who is alone, she seduces and when he is completely naked (and often…
