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…
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 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…
Travis Mathews, the documentarian whose short film I Want Your Love has been met with near universal acclaim on the worldwide queer film festival circuit, was denied permission to show his film in Australia, reports The Sidney Morning Herald. Citing inconsistencies with film festival guidelines, Lesley O’Brien, the director of the classification board (Australia’s equivalent of…
