The Devil’s Sword (Mondo Macabro) Few trash movies live up to their reputation, but here’s a balls-out wonder that surpasses it. Grab a 12-pack of Bintang and cue up this jaw-unhinging slab of Indonesian sword-and-sorcery circa 1983 — a start-to-finish feast of martial arts, mullets, flying heads, vestal virgins, dry-ice…
After all that, just…this? After all the anticipation, all the hype, all the product available on toy-store shelves and kiddie sections at bookstores, after all the promise that this would be the most super of Superman movies, all we get is just this…this…remake? Because let’s first call Superman Returns what…
Night Watch (Fox Searchlight) Every once in a while, Hollywood needs somebody else to steal a genre and totally reimagine it; it keeps old ideas young, like celluloid Botox. Well, Hollywood’s gonna need one big needle to absorb Night Watch, an insane, insanely cool Russian action/horror/sci-fi brew that’s like nothing…
Valley of the Dolls Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Fox) Behold The Godfather and Godfather Part II of drag-queen cinema — two movies that provide the gateway to a lifetime of wig addiction. The films couldn’t be more different in temperament — the 1967 original is mile-high Hollywood kitsch,…
There is no movie more overrated in recent history than Napoleon Dynamite; it’s to cinema what the Doors are to rock and roll, a thing blindly and inexplicably championed as though it were a religion above being blasphemed by non-believers. And every time someone tries to explain its appeal –…
The John Wayne/John Ford Film Collection (Warner Bros.) Featuring the most epic pairing of director and actor in Hollywood history, this 10-disc box spews machismo all over. Wayne and Ford defined not only the western and war-movie genres, but also our culture’s image of rugged manhood. Among the highlights is…
Cars, the latest vehicle to roll off a Pixar assembly line that has thus far yielded nothing but spit-shined classics, answers that age-old question: What would Doc Hollywood have been like had it been populated entirely by, ya know, cars? If the promise of that particular premise — in which…
Will & Grace: Series Finale (Lions Gate) The way this got hustled to shelves, mere days after Will Truman and Grace Adler said their mushy farewells, you’d think it were some classic adios — another M*A*S*H or Cheers wrap-up. Alas, it was just another Very Special Episode of a show…
It’d be an understatement by half to claim that it’s been a strange and surprising trip for sisters and Chicks founders Emily Robison and Martie Maguire, especially since it was latecomer lead singer Natalie Maines who got their band into trouble in the first place and whose Bush-bashing from a…
Boston Legal: Season One(Fox) David E. Kelley’s latest legal drama is nothing more than a TV show about TV shows; hence the casting of Captain Kirk and Murphy Brown, with guest shots by Diane Chambers, Golden Girl Rose Nylund, and Alex Keaton. It’s like a Nick at Night mash-up, with…
Winter Passing (Fox) Try this, should you be inclined to rent this downer from writer-director Adam Rapp: Skip from chapter to chapter and see whether they all don’t begin with exactly the same image, accompanied by exactly the same sound. There is always someone (usually Zooey Deschanel as a would-be…
At this late date, it’s hard to tell one digitally rendered talking animal from another. Madagascar blends into Ice Age looks like A Shark’s Tale sounds like Shrek might as well be A Bug’s Life turns into Antz feels like Chicken Little could be Over the Hedge, which is really…
Fateless (THINKFilm) I’ve no patience for the Holocaust docudrama — didn’t even see Schindler’s List till years after its 1993 release, to my parents’ everlasting shame. And so it was I avoided Lajos Koltai’s acclaimed adaptation of Imre Kertész’ Nobel Prize-winning autobiographic novel; are we not already gorged on the…
Art School Confidential is very much like every movie pilfered from the Saturday Night Live playbook, in which the slight giggles of a four-minute sketch are wrung into two-hour yawns. The work upon which it’s based is a four-page excerpt from a fourteen-year-old comic book called Eightball, written and drawn…
Tennessee Williams Film Collection (Warner Bros.) All that’s missing from this boxed set — six movies, one doc, eight discs — is a jar of sweat; even Williams is here, in a 1973 documentary. Then there’s Brando, Beatty, Newman, Taylor, Burton, Gardner, Leigh, Malden, Huston, Kazan — the last of…
Aeon Flux (Paramount) Many things about this surreal sci-fi flick defy explanation, but nothing more so than the mystery of how it got made in the first place. On paper, it’s an archetypal setup for a bomb: a mostly forgotten cartoon, notable for its visual style and incomprehensibility, revived as…
United 93 — which uses the hijacking of one plane on September 11, 2001, to tell the story of what happened to all four aircraft seized that morning — may be the most wrenching, profound and perfectly made movie nobody wants to see. There is no reason to think that…
Ellie Parker (Strand) This extremely raw portrait of an actress trying — and failing — to make it in Hollywood showcases Naomi Watts in a wrenching and sympathetic performance. Writer-director Scott Coffey shot the movie over nearly six years, beginning in 1999, before Watts was a household name. Though they…
The Mel Brooks Collection (Fox) Talk about taking the good with the bad; how else to describe a boxed set containing Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (Brooks’ silly masterpieces), and Robin Hood: Men in Tights and History of the World, Part 1 (both overrated, even by people who can’t stand…
John Fante’s novel Ask the Dust, published in 1939 and all but forgotten till its 1980 reissue with a Charles Bukowski foreword, is very much a work of thinly veiled autobiography; only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. Its protagonist, a struggling writer named Arturo Bandini, shared…
A star who turned into a black hole somewhere between the release of, oh, The Wedding Planner and Sahara (or How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Two for the Money — really, where to draw the line?), Matthew McConaughey is better known of late for shooting tequila…
Walk the Line (Fox) No matter what a junkie does with his spare time — say, redefine country music, or forge one of history’s most enduring personas — movies about junkies are a drag to watch. So it’s too bad this Johnny Cash biopic is a by-the-numbers fall-and-redemption tale. A…
