Little Children (New Line) In the eyes of Hollywood, our American suburbs are so filled with perversion and treachery that it seems the government ought to crack down on something. Until then, we can count on movies like Little Children to keep us informed. Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson are…

What is it with third installments of superhero film franchises? For whatever reason — and, oh, let’s just call it the lack of fresh ideas commingled with the love of money — they always strike out swinging. It happened with Superman, when Richard Pryor became a superfriend hatching the ridiculous…

Planet Earth (BBC/Warner Bros.) Roll over, Marlin Perkins, and tell Jacques Cousteau the news: There’s never been another nature series like this. You will spend forever glued to this five-disc collection, finding among such holy-shit discoveries a herd of never-before-photographed camels who live in the frozen wastelands, great whites dining…

Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show (Sony) The greatest boxed set ever — not so much for the made-up irritainment as for the real thing, which this collection serves up by the ton. There are 23 brilliant episodes of the HBO show here, but they pale in…

For all the huzzahs deservedly heaped upon 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, in which it took a good long while to discern the living from the walking deceased, the zombie-flick spoof was little more than an extended sketch taken, oh, nineteen minutes beyond its breaking point. But the movie, created…

Sleeping Dogs Lie (First Look) Writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait takes a subversive concept (honesty is overrated) and marries it to an outrageous scenario (a woman’s family learns that she once, uh, performed for a dog) to create…a romantic comedy? Well, sort of. Like Goldthwait’s underrated Shakes the Clown, Sleeping Dogs Lie…

Frylock, Meatwad and Master Shake — the three Stooges inhabiting Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters — will survive should you choose to avoid their movie. Truth be told, you’ve probably never heard of them anyway, unless you’re a regular viewer of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming…

Writers Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth receive sole credit for the movie Disturbia, which is surprising, as the film is clearly based on both a previously published work (a 1942 short story by Cornell Woolrich titled “It Had to Be Murder”) and the John Michael Hayes-penned, Alfred Hitchcock-directed, Academy Award-nominated…

Twin Peaks: The Second Season (Paramount) So, here it is: perhaps the most infamous shark-jumping in TV history. The first season of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s comedy-horror-mystery-soap opera caused a cultural frenzy of “damn good coffee” quips and questions over who murdered prom queen/town doorknob Laura Palmer. It’s also…

Children of Men (Universal) Set in a tomorrow that looks like yesterday, Alfonso Cuarón’s wrenching adaptation of P.D. James’ novel feels more like documentary than fiction. In the movie’s world, women have gone barren, and immigrants are tossed into prison camps; it’s the proverbial nightmare to which we might actually…

At various times over the last decade, David Fincher, Sam Mendes and Michael Mann were attached to direct Scott Frank’s screenplay for The Lookout, about a brain-damaged high-school hockey stud who’s smooth-talked by distant acquaintances into robbing a small-town bank. That Frank — best known for straightening and sharpening the…

Blood Diamond (Warner Bros.) Ed Zwick’s Blood Diamond, about the civil war over diamonds that devastated Sierra Leone in the late 1990s, plays like a guilt-ridden Jerry Bruckheimer movie. It’s little more than action-adventure pulp drenched in someone else’s blood — which it tries to wash off by proselytizing to…

Casino Royale (Sony) James Bond gets a stirring shake-up in the best — yeah, Goldfinger fans, the best — film in the series’ 44-year history. Daniel Craig’s 007 has more going on above the neck and below the waist than even Sean Connery’s. He’s a genuinely compelling character — a…

Revenge of the Nerds: Panty Raid Edition (Fox) Revenge of the Nerds is a great movie. No, really. It’s got a bitching new-wave soundtrack and some truly inspired performances — memorable enough to wreck the careers of Robert Carradine (Lewis) and Curtis Armstrong (Booger). But mostly it’s the mix of…

Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny (New Line) You probably already know where you stand on Tenacious D, the pudgy hard-rock comedy duo that made Jack Black famous. And if you haven’t heard of them, this isn’t the place to start: Their DVD of short films and music videos…

Wild Hogs — in which John Travolta, William H. Macy, Tim Allen and Martin Lawrence play emasculated suburbanites taking a cross-country motorcycle trip to rediscover their masculinity — doesn’t even sound like a real movie when you describe it to people. They give you that yer-shittin’-me stare, as though it…

Shut Up & Sing (Genius) It’s a shame that one of 2006’s best documentaries is being released without extras; it would have been nice, for instance, to hear feisty Natalie Maines talk with directors Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck about her reaction to the film, in which the Dixie Chicks…

In 2003, Mark and Michael Polish made Northfork, though just barely. The brothers — who are also responsible for art-house fave Twin Falls Idaho, about conjoined twins who fall for the same woman — lost funding just before shooting began and had to beg for money to finish their reverie…

Marie Antoinette (Sony) Sofia Coppola’s third feature grabs you by your frilly lapels from the jump, with Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not in It” showering guitar chords all over the credits as Kirsten Dunst nods to the audience, as if to say, Hang tight — this thing’s gonna be a…

You remember Andrew Ridgeley, don’t you? He was the other guy in Wham!, the one who found himself stranded in 1986 after George Michael had faith enough in his own talents to break up the act. Ridgeley went on to record one solo record before CBS Records decided, yeah, no…

In December 2002, ABC’s 20/20 ran a story on Eric O’Neill, an undercover surveillance specialist for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The piece was titled “Spycatcher,” because it was O’Neill who, at a mere 27, helped bring down Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who sold thousands of secrets to the…

The Science of Sleep (Warner Bros.) Feature films are to video directors what sitcoms are to stand-up comedians, and for every David Fincher and Seinfeld, there are dozens of artists who should have stayed in the field they know best. Michel Gondry, who made his name directing fantastic videos for…