Highly Recommended In 10 Words or Less The eye is the window to the story Reviewer’s Bias* Loves: The Criterion Collection, good monologues Likes: Spalding Gray, Steven Soderbergh Dislikes: Hates: Anything bad involving eyes The Movie Thanks to a bootleg VHS tape of Gray’s Anatomy I first discovered Spalding Gray in college, while a performance of his It’s a Slippery Slope at Lincoln Center …
Rent It The premise of Bad Ass — a riff on the “Epic Beard Man” viral video with Danny Trejo as the ass-whupper — suggests a certain kind of movie: a goofy, modern Death Wish with over-the-top action. Unfortunately, the budget and a mixed bag of ideas and influences pull the film in so many opposing directions that it ends up going nowhere at all, stalling between a less-outrageous Machete and …
DVD Talk Collector Series Reviewed by Glenn Erickson These days anyone wanting to learn about the Beatles or to see endless fascinating film and videotape from their career(s) need only consult the many documentaries available, or just cruise the web. But back in the 1960s we teenaged Beatle fans had access to their records and little more
Rent It The Movie: The third and final film in Sam Raimi’s trilogy, 2007’s Spider-Man 3 picks up where the second film left off and catches up with Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) as he’s started to build his life back together after things got pretty dismal for him. He’s started to rebuild his relationship with Mary Jane (Kirstin Dunst), the love of his life, and he’s more comfortable in his role …
Highly Recommended THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are promotional and are not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review. Thanks to The Criterion Collection, summer 2012 is, aptly , Bergman season: In concurrence with their release of the Swedish master’s 1953 turning-point film Summer with Monika , they’re also making available an earlier sea-and-sun youthful-romance reverie, his …
Highly Recommended THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are promotional and are not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review. The inbuilt (and not really disprovable) suspicion on the part of young people in love that some latent tragedy always lurks within their overpowering emotions has long been a perpetually renewable resource for storytellers who can convincingly confirm it, with …
Highly Recommended Certified Copy recreates a world that, down to the most minute detail, is entrancingly, enthrallingly real until it’s not. Such a dramatic statement likely brings to mind the ambitious sort of science fiction that encourages viewers to question everything in front of them.
Recommended The Movie: Littlerock is the story of Rintaro (Rintaro Sawamoto) and Atsuko (Atsuko Okatsuka), siblings from Japan, on their way to San Francisco.
Recommended Survival horror isn’t exactly a new genre. From John Carpenter’s The Thing to Lord of the Flies and The Descent , these films often focus on unwitting strangers who gradually get picked off by predators, environmental disasters or, in some cases, each other.
Highly Recommended THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are taken from promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition under review. An old-fashioned, progressive social-problem film, Mario Monicelli’s energetic, down-to-earth 1963 strike drama The Organizer combines the lyrical beauty of socialist realism with a Neorealist tough-mindedness of sensibility, avoiding the much-maligned slack …