Which movies to see this weekend, July 27 While you can argue that the last thing the world needs is another reboot of a comic-book movie, the film gets off to a good start, with Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone in the lead roles. Benh Zeitlin’s damply poetic debut follows 6-year-old Hushpuppy (the elemental Quvenzhané Wallis), a denizen of a dirt-poor community in the wetness of the Louisiana …
New on DVD and Blu-ray, July 27 Footnote Two Talmudic scholars – a frustrated, traditionalist father (Shlomo Bar-Aba) and his successful, cutting-edge son (Lior Ashkenazi) – lock horns in writer-director Joseph Cedar’s vivacious, quirky film, a tale of academic maneuvering and mystery that has its little fun with suspense-film conventions.
New on DVD and Blu-ray, July 24 Untouchable” (2012), “Footnote” (2012), “Girl From the Naked Eye” (2012), “Girls’ Night: Spaghetti Western Collection (various dates) Treasure Island (2012).
DVD review: ‘Story of a Love Affair’ Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Mike Nichols, Stanley Kubrick and the Coen brothers are some filmmakers who seem to have sprung onto their first movie set fully developed. Michelangelo Antonioni deserves to go to the head of the class, as attested to by the recent release of a major digital restoration of his first movie, the all-but-forgotten “Story of a Love …
DVD review: ‘For the First Time’ Before this film, he lost a lot of weight, but still looks chubby – on three occasions the movie refers to his weight, in a self-deprecating and charming way.
Movies opening Friday, July 20 A Burning Hot Summer Love, art and the meaning of life thread through this tale of an Italian actress (Monica Bellucci) and a French painter (Louis Garrel) whose marriage hits a bump. The Dark Knight Rises Oh, Batman (Christian Bale), your shadowy ploy to escape works for a while, but now trouble’s afoot
New on DVD and Blu-ray, July 17 Feature: The Arsenal Stadium Mystery (1938), Assassination (1987), The Beat Hotel (2012), Black Butterflies (2011), Burke & Hare: Remastered” (1972), “Casa de Mi Padre” (2012), “Doomsday Prophecy” (2011), “Extraterrestrial” (2011), “The Fairy” (2011), “Fixation” (2011), “4:44: Last Day on Earth (2012), Friends With Kids (2012), Get the Gringo (2012), Goldberg P.I …
DVD review: ‘The Gold Rush’ The histories of literature and classical music contain many examples of artists going back years later and tampering with and diminishing their earlier work. Seventeen years later, wanting to rerelease the film, but finding himself in an era in which silent films had no audience, he eliminated the intertitles, made cuts in the story, changed the ending and added his …
New on DVD and Blu-ray, July 13 American Reunion The horny teens of “American Pie” (Jason Biggs, Seann William Scott et al) reunite as horny grown-ups for their high school reunion in this sequel, the fourth in the series, which is sloppy, witless and vacant. Being Flynn Robert De Niro plays the drunken father of a social worker in this well-acted but ultimately listless drama about the power …
New DVD and Blu-ray releases, July 6 God Bless America Writer-director-cynic Bobcat Goldthwait follows “World’s Greatest Dad” with this dark portrait of a man (Joel Murray) and teenager (Tara Lynne Barr) who go on a killing spree in their quest to wipe out rude Americans. In this film – whose only fault is that it’s simply not very entertaining, but it is reasonably interesting – Willem Dafoe …