Titanic: Special Collector’s Edition (Paramount Home Video) Loved and loathed in equal measure, Titanic nonetheless is among the few modern-day movies deserving of lavish treatment; this boxed set, three discs with three hours of new stuff, feels almost as big a production as the feature itself. Writer-director James Cameron, never…

Director Curtis Hanson, a journeyman only recently bestowed the title of Great Director, has already made his horror movie (1973’s The Arousers), his kiddie action comedy (1980’s The Little Dragons), his teen sex romp (1983’s Losin’ It ), his handful of Hitchcock riffs (1987’s The Bedroom Window, 1990’s Bad Influence,…

This fall, the roll call of gigantic ghosts inhabiting cinematic biographies continues unabated, with Joaquin Phoenix as a shrunken Johnny Cash in Ring of Fire, David Strathairn as an inscrutable Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the ambitiously manipulative Truman Capote in,…

This fall, the roll call of gigantic ghosts inhabiting cinematic biographic continues unabated, with Joaquin Phoenix as a shrunken Johnny Cash in Ring of Fire, David Strathairn as an inscrutable Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the ambitiously manipulative Truman Capote in,…

It happened almost with the first step off the airplane at the Toronto airport last month. Someone, a friend or merely a concerned stranger, would stop to warn you of impending peril. They would plead with you to avoid the danger ahead in Elizabethtown, the Cameron Crowe film that screened…

With a name like Prime, a movie had better be about something more than an older woman digging on a younger man, much to the disapproval of the younger man’s mom. It ought to be about, oh, I dunno, math or something — like Pi or Proof or even Primer,…

Any thing can be anything to anybody, particularly in the case of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. If you want to believe that his new film, a loose adaptation of a little-known graphic novel, is a work of damning criticism aimed at the hypocrisy of Americans who believe violence…

Andrew Niccol’s first two films as writer-director, 1997’s Gattaca and 2002’s S1m0ne, were hollow, sterile sci-fi masquerading as earnest satire: The former told of a near future in which parents could genetically engineer perfect children; the latter proffered an actress who became the most famous and beloved movie star in…

The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which is based on a true story the same way Harry Potter and Star Wars movies are, is the latest — though certainly not the last — movie of this bloody (awful) year trying to scare the money right out of your wallet. It has…

Ain’t nothing in this world more tedious than highbrow erotica, which works itself into a lather and then wipes off the sweat before anyone notices how awfully and inappropriately worked-up it got. Asylum, adapted by Closer’s Patrick Marber and Chrysanthy Balis from the novel by Patrick McGrath, is just that…

Terry Gilliam’s last film featured the former Monty Python troupe member as an eccentric, demanding, and difficult director prone to destroying his ambitious projects before a single frame of footage was ever shot. “If it’s easy,” he says in the movie, “I don’t do it.” Alas, this was not a…

And so, once more, the cineplex emits the stink of the network rerun, this week offering yet another worthless big-screen take on small-screen detritus. As Hollywood wonders — cries, actually, over spilt spoiled milk — why audiences are staying away from theaters, offering theories ranging from the absence of such…

Hit me,” says Mark Zupan — begs, actually, like a child clamoring for a new toy. “I’ll hit you back.” He means it too, and his ripped pecs and buzzed scalp and tattooed back and arms and bushy gangster goatee promise just as much menace. The dude is bad and…

If Vince Vaughn puts any effort into what he’s doing, it doesn’t show, which is perhaps one of the benefits of always appearing to be hung-over. The man probably has to check the bags under his eyes at the airport, and he’s about as in shape as a toddler’s fistful…

Quite simply and quite literally, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds is Close Encounters of the Third Kind turned inside-out: They’re still out there, only this time the aliens are out for our blood, which they spray all over the countryside like so much red paint…

Anyone who would insist that movie reviewing is not a real job (‘Sup, Mom) hasn’t been forced to sit through screenings of Bewitched and Herbie: Fully Loaded in the span of five days — and by forced, I mean either you see both movies, write 800 words about each, or…

Bewitched may go down as the first movie about a fictional failed actor that creates a real-life failed actor. This hackneyed, hapless, and utterly useless redo of an overrated Sixties sitcom is excruciating to sit through for a dozen reasons. But nothing is more intolerable than the sight of Will…

DC Comics has kept its superheroes locked in a fortress of solitude for almost a decade, forcing the likes of Superman and Batman to warm the bench while long-time rival Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man, the Hulk, X-Men, and Blade galloped up and down the playing field. Not counting Catwoman, which is…

For all of their exceptionality, there is also a numbing sameness to the movies of Hayao Miyazaki, the revered animator who has bewitched Japanese audiences since the late Seventies and bewildered American ones since 1999, when Princess Mononoke was among the first of his movies to receive significant stateside release…

Lords of Dogtown is an odd, disorienting commodity — a fictional version of a documentary (Dogtown and Z-Boys) about the birth of skateboarding in 1970s Venice, California, that was written by the man who directed said doc, in which he was a central figure. Stacy Peralta, whose Dogtown and Z-Boys…

It’s fair to say that Madagascar, directed by one man who made Antz and another who used to work on Ren & Stimpy, is virtually plot-free — nothing more, really, than a scene or two from The Great Escape cut and pasted into an episode of Survivor. Its threadbare story…

Much of Crash, an LA-stories portmanteau about the suffocating embrace of racism, is hard to watch, harder still to listen to. Its characters — the creations of co-writer and director Paul Haggis but also representations of people who live next door to and perhaps even inside of you — say…