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…
The Jerry Lewis chromosome is running amok again inside Jim Carrey, and in this remake of the 1977 George Segal-Jane Fonda farce, he revels in his usual quota of rubber-faced, talking-in-tongues set pieces. Otherwise, this sometimes pointed, sometimes pointless comedy is pure post-Enron — the tale of a prosperous suburban…
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…
Ab-Normal Beauty (Tartan) Art of the Devil (Tokyo Shock) Bram Stoker’s Dracula/Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Sony) Caged Heat (Buena Vista) Dark Water (Buena Vista) Diary of a Mad Black Woman: The Play (Lions Gate) Empire of the Wolves (Sony) 15 Things You’re Not Supposed to See (Xtreme) Happy Here and Now…
The gifted Irish novelist and filmmaker Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Michael Collins) says that his overriding concern is “how individuals work with what they’ve been given.” Case in point: Jordan’s new feature, Breakfast on Pluto. This bittersweet, gender-bending drama takes a page from Candide — its beleaguered hero, too,…
In 1968 it was a movie. In 2001 it became a musical. Now it’s a movie again? Yes, and there’s actually good reason to return The Producers to the screen. The original film, though intermittently inspired, was slow and often boring, and its homophobic, misogynistic humor no longer plays well,…
The notion that Wolf Creek is opening nationwide Christmas Day brings to mind the scene from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, in which a young boy opens up his holiday gift and finds a severed head. The movie is about as diametrically opposed to the concept of “goodwill toward…
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…
Serenity (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…
(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…
The Amazing Race: The Seventh Season (Paramount) Battlestar Galactica: Season 2.0 (Universal) The Biggest Loser: The Workout (Lions Gate) Bob the Butler (First Independent) Cry_Wolf (MCA) ER: The Complete Fourth Season (Warner Bros.) The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Sony) Frankie & Johnny Are Married (MCA) The Great Raid (Miramax) Ice…
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…
Bad News Bears (2005) (Paramount) The Beautiful Country (Sony) Death Race 2000: Special Edition (Buena Vista) F.I.S.T. (Columbia/Tristar) Gallipoli: Special Edition (Paramount) Gilmore Girls: The Complete Fifth Season (Warner Bros.) The Island (Universal) Kiss: Rock the Nation Live! (Image) The Last Day (Strand) Marvin Gaye: Behind the Legend (Red Dist.)…
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…
If you’re a fan of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, all you need to know is this: Disney has done right by The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It’s impossible to imagine it done much better, in fact. If you’re not a fan, perhaps you’re among…
This romantic tragedy about two lean, wind-burned cowpokes (Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal) who secretly live to poke each other probably won’t play well in John Wayne country. But in its groundbreaking assault on the mythology of the American West, Ang Lee’s controversial drama challenges us to reconsider what constitutes…
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…
Dirty Love (First Look) Dragonball Movie Boxed Set (Funimation) Everybody Loves Raymond: The Complete Fifth Season (Warner Bros.) Fun With Dick and Jane (1977) (Columbia/Tristar) The Future of Food (Cinema Libre) Gilbert Gottfried: Dirty Jokes (Image) God Save the Queen: Punk Rock Anthology (Music Video Dist.) Hellbound (Warner Bros.) He-Man…
You’d think anyone possessed of the notion that “the Jews” collectively think and act alike need only look at, say, wrestler Bill Goldberg, Hollywood hottie Natalie Portman, shock jock Howard Stern, and nebbishy right-wing scold Michael Medved to have that idea instantly dispelled. Yet conspiracy theories persist; you’ve probably heard…
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…
For those of us who dug Rob McKittrick’s recent comedy Waiting…, Just Friends offers up some good news: Ryan Reynolds and Anna Faris are together again as a dysfunctional couple. He’s a slick music executive named Chris Brander, still traumatized at having gotten the “Let’s just be friends” speech from…
A tale of deception, betrayal, and revenge, this contemporary Greek tragedy — complete with an unwitting Medea — becomes so overwrought in the last act that it’s sure to lose your sympathies. Three likable and fundamentally decent individuals — a Hollywood studio executive, his wife, and a screenwriter whose script…
