Sesame Street: Old School Volume 2 (Genius) On the heels of the Electric Company boxed sets, which were at once educational and groovy as all get-out, comes the latest in greatest hits from Sesame Street, before the neighborhood was gentrified for Elmo’s protection. Chief among the copious highlights in this…
Rick McCallum had nothing to do with the original Star Wars. He was just 23 years old when it was released in 1977 and chasing his first job in the film industry. So, please, don’t age him unnecessarily: “I’m portrayed as 70 years old on the Internet because somebody thinks…
No End in Sight (Magnolia) Charles Ferguson’s debut doc, easily the most important in a year full of notable fact-gathering films, assembles some of the key players behind the invasion and occupation of Iraq and seems to ask them but one question: “What went wrong?” In short: Everything. But Ferguson’s…
John Cusack, who more or less began his career sneaking a peek at Molly Ringwald’s panties in Sixteen Candles, has finally become an onscreen daddy — took only, what, 23 years? But he’s not exactly the most fortunate family man in film: First, in Martian Child he plays a widower…
Alas, there’s only so much you can do with talking bugs that hasn’t already been covered in A Bug’s Life, Antz, and The Ant Bully — though hooking up Seinfeld’s buzzed-cut Barry B. Benson with a hottie human voiced by Renée Zellweger is a first, sort of a new spin…
Directors Series: Stanley Kubrick (Warner Bros.) Most of the old Kubrick DVDs were crap: full-screen editions with poor pictures and virtually no special features. This set makes up for them with 2001, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut (hey, who farted?), all looking great…
Dan in Real Life has this much going for it: It is not the worst Steve Carell film of 2007. That honor, of course, goes to Evan Almighty, which even the Lord walked out of during the second reel. Fact is, Dan in Real Life isn’t really much of a…
Transformers (DreamWorks) No doubt, Michael Bay’s slam-bang action-figure commercial doesn’t play nearly as well on TV, no matter how high-def your screen; this demands to be seen on a screen the size of a skyscraper and heard on speakers as large as jet engines. As such, the first half-hour plays…
You Kill Me (Genius) Funny thing seeing Philip Baker Hall in You Kill Me, as he’s already played the role of a drunken hit man’s boss in The Matador, to which this feels like a slapshtick-noir sequel. It’s also the photonegative of Sexy Beast: Once more Ben Kingsley plays a…
“Beautiful” and “cruel” — that’s how director Ang Lee describes Eileen Chang’s 1979 short story about obsessive love and effortless betrayal in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, a tale upon which Lee has based his epic-length Lust, Caution. Writing in the afterword to a recently republished version of the 54-page story, which took…
“Will you leave your kingdom to a heretic?” That was the question posed to a dying Queen Mary in 1998’s Elizabeth, director Shekhar Kapur’s grim and dingy film now viewed in retrospect as the origin story of a superhero: The Armored Virgin Queen, faster than a speeding lead pellet, more…
It will, no doubt, be said time and again of Michael Clayton: best John Grisham adaptation ever. Except, of course, it did not spring from the billion-dollar mind of the attorney who turned into a franchise, but from Tony Gilroy, who made his big-screen bow 15 years ago as the…
Caligula: Imperial Edition (Penthouse) (Spoiler alert: Fisting!) One day back in the swingin’ ’70s, somebody mentioned how “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and then Bob Guccione, Gore Vidal, Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, and Peter O’Toole said, “Let’s make a big-budget movie about that, with come shots. ” And Caligula was born…
“This is a mockumentary, right?” I’ve been asked that question at least a dozen times since The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters made its bow at the Slamdance Film Festival in January. Quite simply, some folks just don’t believe that Seth Gordon’s film about two men vying for…
Knocked Up (Universal) Apparently, as Judd Apatow was making Knocked Up, he was also prepping for its DVD release, as most of the bonuses here were shot during breaks on location. And they’re no small treats, either — finally, here’s a “collector’s edition” worthy of the moniker. Chief among the…
The Kingdom is the first film from Peter Berg since the actor-turned-director’s Friday Night Lights, which spawned an acclaimed, if struggling, franchise for NBC. There will be no small-screen spin-off of The Kingdom — there are too many corpses lying around to populate a sequel, much less a series. Besides,…
Saturday Night Fever: 30th Anniversary Special Collector’s Edition (Paramount) For all its camp-classic status as the ultimate disco-fever dream, John Badham’s movie truly is remarkable — a foul-mouthed, mean-streets masterpiece that just happens to feature a Bee Gees score that spreads like melted cheese 30 years later. And, of course,…
Until 2005, Richard Shepard’s was a lamentable direct-to-prop-plane filmography populated with such forgettable titles as Cool Blue, Oxygen, Mexico City, and The Linguini Incident, the latter of which was a heist film most notable for pairing David Bowie and Buck Henry — and that’s not even a punch line. For…
The Graduate: 40th Anniversary Edition (MGM) Fifteen years after its last home-video commemorative edition (extras from which appear here), The Graduate once more gets the bonus-laden makeover — and if ever a movie deserved its kudos, it’s Mike Nichols’ masterwork. That said, the movie is its own bonus; not since…
The Office: Season Three (Universal) After a shaky first season and a better-with-every-episode second, The Office proved itself one of the most consistent comedies in the history of the medium. The show has long since escaped the shadow of its BBC forebear and boasts an ensemble from which you could…
Year of the Dog (Paramount Vantage) It’s just about the First Commandment of Hollywood: Don’t kill the dog. So it’s a testament to the clout of writer-director Mike White (School of Rock) that killing off the dog is the first of many rules broken in this weird-ass movie. Folks fooled…
It’s impossible to write about David Wain’s The Ten without first making passing reference to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. The former, originally made for Polish TV 20 years ago and first shown in the United States in 2000, offered a modern-day take on the…
