Highly Recommended THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are taken from promotional materials and the 2009 Criterion DVD edition , not the Blu-ray edition under review.
Highly Recommended THE SHOW: Please Note: The stills used here are taken from the series’ promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition under review. The second season of HBO’s New Orleans drama Treme takes the series into a comfortable stride, settling deeper into the characters and the city’s culture and proving that David Simon ( The Wire , Generation Kill ) is one of the more expansive …
Highly Recommended THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are taken from the 2006 Criterion DVD edition , not the Blu-ray edition under review. Whit Stillman ( Damsels in Distress ) is a magical filmmaker, and a challenging one, too, though in few of the ways that word might usually apply. He presents viewers (or at least, speaking for myself, a viewer like me) with the challenge of stories …
Highly Recommended THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are promotional stills provided by Sony Pictures Classics and are not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review. One of the movie moments that made the deepest impressions on me as a youngster/budding cinephile was the few minutes in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors where Judah (Martin Landau) revisits a scene from his …
Recommended The Series: To start – a recap of the series blatantly swiped from the review of the Season One Blu-ray set: Created by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady, The Big Bang Theory is based around the exploits of two roommates, Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki) and Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons), who share an apartment together and work as physicists at the California Institute of Technology …
Skip It THE FILM: Channing Tatum is in demand these days after stripping for Steven Soderbergh and fighting crime undercover with Jonah Hill. Step Up , released back in 2006, is not up to par with Tatum’s more recent films, and plays like a bland knockoff of the already-middle-of-the-road Save the Last Dance .
Skip It THE MOVIE: “C’mon guys, that was funny.” -Stiffler “Maybe in high school it was funny.” -Jim And there you have the trouble with American Reunion in a two-line nutshell, with this film that has gone to a tremendous amount of trouble to gather all of the players (no matter how minor) from the hit 1999 comedy, and has gone to no trouble at all to give them anything funny or interesting to …
Highly Recommended THE FILM: Chariots of Fire is a film I had seen parodied long before I actually saw it. The film’s ubiquitous title sequence of runners on a beach and its synthesizer-heavy score is known by many unfamiliar with the complete work. The Oscar-winning drama is quite good, too, and tells the story of two runners in 1920s Britain who deal with anti-Semitism and religious conviction …
DVD Talk Collector Series THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are promotional and are not taken from the Blu-ray under review. In the midst of Turkish writer/director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s ( Climates , Three Monkeys ) epically restrained crime drama/road trip of the soul, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia , its ostensibly central murder-investigation plot takes one more in a series of strange …
Recommended The Movie: Project X is the story of a couple of high school losers composed of Thomas (Thomas Mann), Costa (Oliver Cooper), JB (Jonathan Brown), and Dax (Dax Flame). Ha, I just noticed that everyone used their real names, with exception to Costa.