Highly Recommended THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are taken from the 2006 DVD edition , not the Blu-ray edition under review. In answer to the longstanding cinematic riddle that asks how you can transport your audience into a profound emotional state and move them in a way they’ve never been moved before, all while steering clear of contrivance, cheap manipulation, or sentimentality …
Recommended THE MOVIE: Please Note: The stills used here are taken from the film’s promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition under review. Jimmy Testagros (Ron Eldard, Super 8 , TV’s ER ) is having a bad day, and before he sees the next sunrise, it’s going to get a whole lot worse
Barbarella is a famous French comic-strip created by Jean-Claude Forest. In the late sixties, it was turned into the wild sci-fi film starring Jane Fonda, in one of her sexiest, and most iconic roles.
Highly Recommended One of the great things about DVD and now the Blu-ray format is how, occasionally, heretofore long-unseen movies turn out to be a lot better than their terrible reputations would suggest, diamonds in the rough, as it were. This proved true, for instance, when in 2006 Fox released to DVD their Laurel & Hardy movies from the 1940s, pictures long regarded as unfunny, painful …
DVD Talk Collector Series THE FILM: Please Note: The screen captures used here are taken from the DVD version included in the set, not the Blu-ray edition under review. A cinematic event years in the making, the 2010 restoration of Georges M li s’s technically pioneering, thematically prescient, eternally charming 1902 film A Trip to the Moon ( Le Voyage dans la Lune ) represents, for the …
Recommended The Film: Kathryn Stockett wrote her wildly-popular novel The Help as a way of fondly remembering the black women who helped raise her, and her close friend, director Tate Taylor, during and after the civil rights surge in the ’60s (and ’70s). Taylor obviously gets the fondness that Stockett crams into her book, because his film version follows a similar tone. While it’s still a …
Highly Recommended THE MOVIE: Melancholia opens with a series of painterly images, accompanied by Wagner and presented in agonizingly slow motion. That presentation gives the otherwise befuddling tableaus a weight and significance that we don’t fully grasp–except for the final one, which encompasses nothing less than the end of the world
Highly Recommended THE MOVIE: Roman Polanski’s Carnage begins at what appears to be the end. Two pairs of parents, the Longstreets (Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly) and the Cowans (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz), have met at the former’s apartment because their two sons have had a fight
Highly Recommended THE MOVIE: Please Note: The stills used here are taken from the film’s promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition under review. An expedition of four enters the Siberian wilderness.
Highly Recommended THE SHOW: Please Note: The stills used here are taken from the series’ promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition under review. I’ve been known to complain from time to time how, every Thursday night, my Twitter feed fills up with quotes from NBC’s comedy line-up. Every other tweet ends up being someone repeating a line from that evening’s 30 Rock , Parks & Recreation , or …