Get Down With Dave

The world premiere of Dave Chappelle’s Block Party at the Toronto International Film Festival last September had the vibe of a sold-out concert — all those spotlights beaming to and fro in front of a venerable old theater, all that pushing and shoving for the best seats, all those celebs…

All the President’s Men

All the President’s Men (Warner Bros.) It’s no mystery why Warner Bros. chose to rerelease All the President’s Men now; at last we know how much — which is to say how little — Mark “Deep Throat” Felt really looked like Hal Holbrook. A new doc on former FBI second-in-command…

Grind It Out With Pam

Comedy Central Roast of Pamela Anderson: Uncensored! (Paramount) This sucker’s vulgar — duh — but not shocking in the least bit; Sarah Silverman swears, and Courtney Love drinks and smokes . . . who knew? That said, this roast ranks among the meanest ever televised; why Bea Arthur shows up…

The Price Is Wrong

Freedomland manages a seemingly impossible feat: It’s both turgid and overwrought, eliciting the shriek that fades into a yawn without anyone ever noticing. It’s a wholly dreary piece of work, yet another dismal entry on the resumé of director Joe Roth, an only-in-Hollywood hack who’s allowed to make movies –…

Clay’s the Thing

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (DreamWorks) Not since Finding Nemo has there been a movie so easy to recommend for all ages and tastes. But despite having crafted a near-perfect film, directors Nick Park and Steve Box second-guess themselves constantly on their audio commentary, as well as…

Idle Curiosity

That Curious George existed at all — much less as a franchise, an icon enduring some 65 years — was a result of “happy circumstance,” wrote Houghton Mifflin publisher Anita Silvey with some understatement in 1991, upon the fiftieth-anniversary publication of The Complete Adventures of Curious George. Silvey and critic…

Hacked

It is often written of Harrison Ford that he’s the most profitable movie star in history, to the tune of some $3.8 billion in box-office receipts worldwide. Of course, once one subtracts from that total the first three Star Wars movies, the Indiana Jones trilogy and two outings as CIA…

Like Star Trek With Worms

Dune: Extended Edition (Universal) On paper it sounds insane: A mammoth sci-fi epic directed by David Lynch, based on an intensely weird Frank Herbert novel about ecology and giant worms. What resulted was a flop that has yet to be remedied by multiple edits through the years. This disc includes…

Now Dirtier Than Ever

The Aristocrats(Lions Gate) The single joke around which Paul Provenza’s documentary revolves has a standard beginning and ending, like pieces of bread that make a sandwich stuffed with excrement, incest, and whatever other foulness the teller can come up with. Provenza and Penn Jillette recorded more than 100 comedians riffing…

Swindled Art

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Magnolia) The best two hours you’ll ever spend learning about accounting, Enron is one part civics lesson, one part Greek tragedy, and one part political cartoon. Director Alex Gibney makes no pretense of objectivity; he wants you to hiss and boo at Ken…

Who’s Laughing?

Albert Brooks, the once-funny comic-turned-filmmaker, plays a once-funny comic-turned-filmmaker named Albert Brooks in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, which he also wrote and directed. It’s the second time Brooks has played himself, more or less; the first was in 1979, when he made Real Life, in which he…

Double Fault

The critical consensus has Match Point as Woody Allen’s finest film since…oh, let’s see…Bullets Over Broadway, is it? Or perhaps Deconstructing Harry? Or maybe Sweet and Lowdown? One forgets where the good stuff left off, because there’s been so much bad stuff since. It’s not difficult to understand the accolades…

A Bounteous Bunch

Sam Peckinpah’s Legendary Westerns Collection (Warner Bros.) At a mere $42 through most websites, this four-film boxed set ranks among the best ever compiled; not only does it contain the restored version of one of the greatest movies of all time (The Wild Bunch), but also three other brilliant westerns…

The Flunk-Out

Buck Henry walks into a studio boss’s office and pitches him a movie. Says it’s gonna be a sequel to a movie he wrote called The Graduate, the beloved Mike Nichols film starring Dustin Hoffman as 21-year-old Benjamin Braddock, and Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross as the mother and daughter…

The Reel Truth

If you go to Rotten Tomatoes, the website that compiles more than 100 film critics’ reviews each week, you will find at the top of the “Certified Fresh” list a single movie that was the very best-reviewed of 2005. It was not a remake or a sequel, nor did it…

Cult Hit for Nobody

Nowhere Man (Image Entertainment) There’s good reason why you’ve never heard of this UPN show from the mid-’90s, which lasted 25 episodes before getting shuttled off to, well, nowhere. It’s a convoluted mind-fuck that owes its existence as much to The Prisoner as The Fugitive, and if you missed one…

Tragedy Re-Revisited

Those who will sit around wondering whether Munich is the work of an anti-Israeli or just a self-hating Jew — which is to say, Steven Spielberg, who has been branded both by Israeli officials and newspaper columnists in recent weeks — give the movie and its maker far too much…

Oh, Joy

One cannot, in good conscience, describe the countless strands of plot and strains of characters skittering through The Family Stone without knowing that description merits at least a snickerŠokay, all right, bellowing guffaws. The movie’s too overstuffed by half with pointless people and plotlines that dangle like warning signs, begging…

Ape Escape

For whatever reason, the modernized, comic redo of King Kong released exactly 29 years ago has become less the “pop classic” that Pauline Kael insisted it was at the time than a dimly remembered punch line. It barely registers with modern-day movie-goers, who remember it as a campy, eco-aware update…

Love the Sin

Sin City: Recut, Extended, Unrated (Buena Vista) Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s near frame-for-frame adaptation of Miller’s bone-crunching comics finally gets a rewarding DVD treatment, following a shamefully sparse edition earlier this year. The theatrical cut boasts two commentary tracks (with Quentin Tarantino and Bruce Willis, among others), but there…

Blood for Oil

Warner Bros. put $50 million into Syriana and allowed writer-director Stephen Gaghan as much time and travel as necessary to research and write his story. The company would be well advised to pony up a few extra bucks to provide film-goers with a flow chart that connects the myriad scattered…

Sweat Along With Russell

Cinderella Man (Universal) Back in the Great Depression, boxing matches only cost a nickel, and the ring was uphill both ways. That’s the central message of this well-made if sappy bio of 1930s boxer Jim Braddock. Ron Howard’s direction and a stellar cast save the film from its one-dimensional characters…