The Aristocrats (Lions Gate) The single joke around which Paul Provenza’s documentary revolves has a standard beginning and ending, like pieces of bread that make a sandwich stuffed with excrement, incest, and whatever other foulness the teller can come up with. Provenza and Penn Jillette recorded more than 100 comedians…
The critical consensus has Match Point as Woody Allen’s finest film since Bullets over Broadway. It is not difficult to understand the accolades and affection: It resembles one of his very best movies, 1989’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, down to the plot point in which Martin Landau’s affair with Anjelica Huston…
The Wild Bunch (Warner Bros.) At a mere $42 through most websites, this four-film boxed set ranks among the best ever compiled; not only does it contain the restored version of one of the greatest movies of all time (The Wild Bunch), but also three other brilliant westerns (The Ballad…
Hands down the funniest bit from the summer’s raunch smorgasbord The Aristocrats was hearing Sarah Silverman tell the infamously profane family-act joke at the center of Paul Provenza’s documentary. Where Robin Williams, Drew Carey, George Carlin, and a hundred other funny folks were serving up naughty variations in various shades…
Broken Flowers (Universal Home Entertainment) Bill Murray, who long ago swapped manic kineticism for melancholy deadpan, is once more mired in a middle-aged funk; what else is new? As Don Johnston, an aging lothario whose latest young girlfriend is walking out as the audience is just settling in, Murray’s on…
Amid Hollywood’s zillion-dollar explosions and computer-enhanced trickery, plenty of quieter, better films sneaked into theaters virtually unnoticed this year. Following are our reviewers’ favorite overlooked movies of 2005. Some of them never made it to local screens, but many have since made it to the video store: Balzac and the…
Nowhere Man (Image Entertainment) There’s good reason why you’ve never heard of this UPN show from the mid-’90s, which lasted 25 episodes before getting shuttled off to, well, nowhere. It’s a convoluted mind-fuck that owes its existence as much to The Prisoner as The Fugitive, and if you missed one…
(Universal) Joss Whedon’s film version of his TV series Firefly came and went like a lightning bug in October; the predicted phenom stuck around the multiplex just long enough to lose millions. But like Firefly, which sold enough boxed sets to warrant a movie, Serenity’s bound to do well on…
Those who will sit around wondering whether Munich is the work of an anti-Israeli or just a self-hating Jew — which is to say, Steven Spielberg, who has been branded both by Israeli officials and newspaper columnists in recent weeks — give the movie and its maker far too much…
For whatever reason, the modernized, comic redo of King Kong released exactly 29 years ago has become less the “pop classic” that Pauline Kael insisted it was at the time than a dimly remembered punch line. It barely registers with modern-day moviegoers, who remember it as a campy, eco-aware update…
Sin City (Buena Vista) Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s near frame-for-frame adaptation of Miller’s bone-crunching comics finally gets a rewarding DVD treatment, following a shamefully sparse edition earlier this year. The theatrical cut boasts two commentary tracks (with Quentin Tarantino and Bruce Willis, among others), but there are also featurettes…
Warner Bros. plunked $50 million into Syriana and allowed writer-director Stephen Gaghan as much time and travel as necessary to research and write his story. They’d be well advised to pony up a few extra bucks to provide filmgoers with a flow chart that connects the myriad, scattered dots that…
Cinderella Man (Universal) Back in the Great Depression, boxing matches only cost a nickel, and the ring was uphill both ways. That’s the central message of this well-made if sappy bio of 1930s boxer Jim Braddock. Ron Howard’s direction and a stellar cast save the film from its one-dimensional characters…
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Fox) The pairing of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, both in real life and on celluloid, is so obvious as to be almost cartoonish. So even though both are better actors than they need to be, they perfectly belong in this goofy, explosiony world. Married assassins,…
Writer and director Noah Baumbach has made three light films — one so slight (1997’s party-hopping Highball) it didn’t see release until five years after its completion, and even then it snuck onto video-store shelves credited to a pseudonymous writer and director. There was nothing on his filmography — not…
Charlie Arglist (John Cusack) is a big-time attorney in a small-time town looking to make a break for it on Christmas Eve, so he and porn-makin’ partner Vic (Billy Bob Thornton) steal two million dollars from a mob boss. Charlie looks like he’s got his shit together, but he’s merely…
Born to Run: 30th Anniversary Three-Disc Set (Columbia Home Video) The centerpiece of this three-disc boxed set isn’t the classic 1975 album, but the two DVDs that come with it. On one, shot in London in 1975, Bruce and the band tear through most of Born to Run and its…
Beavis and Butt-head: The Mike Judge Collection, Volume One (Paramount) This three-disc, 40-episode volume chronicling Beavis and Butt-head’s early years will come as a relief to anyone who was stuck in a teenage wasteland when the MTV series first hit the air; turns out, we weren’t just stoned — this…
If ever there were a bit of material not in need of a good dusting, it’s this Jane Austen novel; no more mystery can be wrung from its machinations, after all. Yet what could have been dreary and old-fashioned, this potential montage of bodices and balls sure to glaze the…
If Jarhead, director Sam Mendes and writer William Broyles, Jr.’s adaptation of Anthony Swofford’s 2003 Gulf War memoir, seems at all familiar — like, say, a DJ’s mashup of Full Metal Jacket and Three Kings — there’s good reason for it. Swofford, twenty years old during Operation Desert Storm in…
The Weather Man, starring Nicolas Cage as a disappointment of a son and a failure of a father, was screened for critics in the spring. But its April release was pushed to October, ostensibly to allow for the off chance that Cage or Michael Caine (as Cage’s father) might be…
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (Lucasfilm Ltd.) The final installment of the Star Wars saga actually plays better at home: You can watch it, then pop in the original trilogy and chart the evolution of Anakin, and have it all actually make sense. Though it’s still a…
