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 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 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…
dvd of the week While a great deal of the press about The Master is focused on how it is supposedly a fictional retelling of the birth of Scientology, I think this does a disservice to both the film and to Scientology. While it may have been inspired by L. Ron Hubbard’s early days, it…
