Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Fox) The pairing of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, both in real life and on celluloid, is so obvious as to be almost cartoonish. So even though both are better actors than they need to be, they perfectly belong in this goofy, explosiony world. Married assassins,…
A few weeks ago, Harold Ramis was sitting in a hotel conference room discussing the subtext of The Ice Harvest, his new film based on the novel by Scott Phillips and adapted by Robert Benton and Richard Russo. Ramis explained that he took the project, which Benton (Nobody’s Fool, The…
It seems like so much nitpicking, but why is the Johnny Cash biopic called Walk the Line when a far better name would have been Ring of Fire? Surely co-writer and director James Mangold would insist he chose the former because of its lyrics dealing with the temptations that crop…
Born to Run: 30th Anniversary 3-Disc Set (Columbia Home Video) The centerpiece of this three-disc boxed set isn’t the classic 1975 album, but the two DVDs that come with it. On one, shot in London in 1975, Bruce and the band tear through most of Born to Run and its…
Keira Knightley, who is all of twenty but has the grace and gravitas of someone a good decade older, probably considers herself the luckiest lass in all the world at present. Just as Pride & Prejudice begins filling the cineplex with dewy, hopeless romantics who can’t get enough of Jane…
Beavis and Butt-head: The Mike Judge Collection, Volume One (Paramount) This three-disc, 40-episode volume chronicling Beavis and Butt-head’s early years will come as a relief to anyone who was stuck in a teenage wasteland when the MTV series first hit the air; turns out, we weren’t just stoned — this…
With a name like Prime, a movie had better be about something more than an older woman digging on a younger man, much to the disapproval of the younger man’s mom. It ought to be about, oh, I dunno, math or something — like Pi or Proof or even Primer,…
If Jarhead, director Sam Mendes and writer William Broyles Jr.’s adaptation of Anthony Swofford’s 2003 Gulf War memoir, seems at all familiar — like, say, a DJ’s mash-up of Full Metal Jacket and Three Kings — there’s good reason for it. Swofford, twenty years old during Operation Desert Storm in…
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (Lucasfilm Ltd.) The final installment of the Star Wars saga actually plays better at home: You can watch it, then pop in the original trilogy and chart the evolution of Anakin, and have it all actually make sense. Though it’s still a…
The Weather Man, starring Nicolas Cage as a disappointment of a son and a failure of a father, was screened for critics in the spring, before its April release was pushed to October, ostensibly to allow for the off chance that Cage or Michael Caine (as Cage’s father) might be…
Writer and director Noah Baumbach has made three light films, one so slight (1997’s party-hopping Highball) that it didn’t see release until five years after its completion (and even then it snuck onto video-store shelves credited to a pseudonymous writer and director). There was nothing in his filmography — not…
Titanic: Special Collector’s Edition (Paramount Home Video) Loved and loathed in equal measure, Titanic nonetheless is among the few modern-day movies deserving of lavish treatment; this boxed set, three discs with three hours of new stuff, feels almost as big a production as the feature itself. Writer-director James Cameron, never…
This fall, the roll call of gigantic ghosts inhabiting cinematic biographies continues unabated, with Joaquin Phoenix as a shrunken Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, David Strathairn as an inscrutable Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the ambitiously manipulative Truman Capote in…
Cameron Crowe recalls how, in 1982, he had to fight with Universal Studios execs over the soundtrack to a little movie he had written called Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The studio wanted a conventional score — strings and things, very old-fashioned. Crowe demanded something the SoCal kids in the…
It happened almost with the first step off the airplane at the Toronto airport last month. Someone, a friend or merely a concerned stranger, would stop to warn you of impending peril. They would plead with you to avoid the danger ahead in Elizabethtown, the Cameron Crowe film that screened…
Arrested Development: Season Two (Fox Home Entertainment) The best show on TV — which you’d know, if you actually watched the thing — also serves as one of the best reasons for the existence of DVD: No show has ever rewarded multiple viewings the way Arrested Development does. The second…
Director Curtis Hanson, a journeyman only recently bestowed with the title of Great Director, has already made his horror movie (1973’s The Arousers), his kiddie action comedy (1980’s The Little Dragons), his teen sex romp (1983’s Losin’ It ), his handful of Hitchcock riffs (1987’s The Bedroom Window, 1990’s Bad…
Serenity, Joss Whedon’s big-screen spinoff of the 2002 TV show Firefly, which didn’t even last a dozen episodes, is already a cult phenom well before its opening. The show’s DVD boxed set lines the shelf of every fanboy who dreamed of gunslinging in space alongside preachers and prostitutes, and already…
Into the Blue offers precisely what one would expect from the director of Blue Crush and the writer of Torque: beautiful stupidity. Its every frame dripping from a noxious recipe of suntan oil, summertime sweat and salt water, this heist movie (or whatever it is, which isn’t much) delivers a…
Any thing can be anything to anybody, particularly in the case of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. If you want to believe that his new film, a loose adaptation of a little-known graphic novel, is a work of damning criticism aimed at the hypocrisy of Americans who believe violence…
Flightplan, starring Jodie Foster as a mother who’s either lost her daughter or her mind during a flight from Berlin to New York, is a wonderful movie for about an hour — a moving, gripping rumination on loss, grief and sanity. It works primarily because of its star, whose delicate,…
Ain’t nothing in this world more tedious than highbrow erotica, which works itself into a lather and then wipes off the sweat before anyone notices how awfully and inappropriately worked up it got. Asylum, adapted by Closer’s Patrick Marber and Chrysanthy Balis from the novel by Patrick McGrath, is just…
