| A Beautiful Mind [DVD] |
Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind, which tells the story of Nobel Prize-winning mathematical genius and paranoid schizophrenic John Forbes Nash, Jr., constantly plays with this line, but the film ...
|
| A Bug's Life [Blu-Ray] |
The underdog-fueled story concerns an anthill that is under the control of a group of menacing grasshoppers, led by the maniacal Hopper (voiced with sadistic glee by Kevin Spacey). The grasshoppers ...
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| A Canterbury Tale [DVD] |
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger achieve something similarly powerful and deeply meaningful near the beginning of A Canterbury Tale, their 1944 wartime ode to the beauties of rural ...
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| A Christmas Carol |
The answer might be that every generation gets the version of A Christmas Carol it deserves, thus Robert Zemeckis’ Disney-branded 3-D computer-animated spectacle is right up the alley of ...
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| A Civil Action |
"A Civil Action" is based on a true story, an actual lawsuit that took up eight years of Schlichtmann's life and drained him of every dime and every possession he owned. In the film, the lawsuit is ...
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| A Clockwork Orange |
Through a first person narrative, the film traces the adventures of its hero Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell), and his gang of Droogs (Warren Clarke, James Marcus, and Michael Tarn). The film is set ...
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| A Dirty Shame |
“Oh, it’s a sick world,” one character grouses in Waters’ latest bad-taste opus, A Dirty Shame, and you can almost hear Waters cackling joyfully behind the camera, “Oh, yes ...
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| A Fish Called Wanda [DVD] |
This, better than anything, describes the approach actor/writer John Cleese and cowriter/director Charles Crichton took with A Fish Called Wanda. As a London-set comedy about a jewel heist ...
|
| A Generation (Pokolenie) [DVD] |
Like other painters-turned-filmmakers, Wajda has an eye for beauty in even the harshest environments, and A Generation's depiction of war-torn Poland is replete with elegant tracking shots ...
|
| A History of Violence |
In many ways, A History of Violence carries forward some of the same themes and issue he developed so well in his last film, Spider (2003), particularly the slippery nature of ...
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| A Life Less Ordinary |
Nevertheless, "A Life Less Ordinary" is a slightly better movie than it was made out to be, although it comes nowhere close to the astounding achievement of "Trainspotting," or even Boyle's freshman ...
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| A Love Song for Bobby Long |
Living in the void Lorraine left behind is Bobby Long (John Travolta), a former academic superstar who is slowly deteriorating in the dilapidated house he shared with her. Bobby has long since given ...
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| A Man Called Horse [DVD] |
Another revisionist Western of that era was A Man Called Horse, a film that attempted to portray in anthropological detail the daily lives of a Sioux Indian tribe in the Dakotas of the early ...
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| A Mighty Heart |
John Orloff's straightforward, no-nonsense script is based on Mariane Pearl's memoir about the abduction and subsequent murder of her husband, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl ...
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| A Night to Dismember [DVD] |
Only the most ardent exploitation and fringe cinema fanatics would argue that Doris Wishman is a good filmmaker in any sense of the word, but she is nothing if not opportunistic. Having gotten her ...
|
| A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) [DVD] |
Like George A. Romero’s horror masterpiece Night of the Living Dead (1968), it intelligently draws its terror from deep-seated primal feelings (in this case, it digs into the fear that ...
|
| A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) |
Whether purposefully or not, Jackie Earle Haley’s reinterpretation of the razor-fingered man in the dirty fedora and red-and-green sweater is quite different from Englund’s (and not just in his ...
|
| A Perfect Murder |
The man behind it all is a cold-hearted Wall Street tycoon named Steven Taylor, played with ruthless efficiency by Michael Douglas with perfectly-gelled hair and slick, expensive suits. His ...
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| A Prairie Home Companion [DVD] |
With 81 years of life under his belt, Altman has certainly mellowed with edge. Much like his 1999 film Cookie’s Fortune, A Prairie Home Companion’s big heart and warmly inviting ...
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| A Prophet (Un prophète) [Blu-Ray] |
A quiet, illiterate teen with no family or friends when he is first incarcerated in a maximum-security prison, Malik would seem to be a born victim (socially, economically, legally, interpersonally, ...
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| A Serious Man |
The everymensch hero of A Serious Man is Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), an absolutely ordinary and generally well-meaning middle-aged husband and father of two who is within a week ...
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| A Simple Plan |
In "A Simple Plan," this scenario is acted out in a beautifully wrought, tragic morality play in the cold, snow-washed backdrop of northern Minnesota in the dead of winter. The film is deceptively ...
|
| A Walk to Remember |
Having played the mean, popular cheerleader who makes life difficult for the awkward heroine in last summer's The Princess Diaries (2001), pop singer Mandy Moore now adds the opposite pole of ...
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| A Woman is a Woman (Une femme est une femme) [DVD] |
Although A Woman is a Woman was his third feature film, audiences saw it before Le petit soldat, and thus was viewed largely in comparison to Breathless. And the two films ...
|
| A.I. Artificial Intelligence |
A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a science-fiction parable that's hard to wrap your mind around, which is exactly as the late Stanley Kubrick would have wanted it. This project had been ...
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| About a Boy |
But, of course, because Will is played by Hugh Grant, he is never entirely dislikable, even when he is at his most unpleasant. Grant has played sly variations on this kind of role before, whether it ...
|
| About Schmidt |
Some people have been describing About Schmidt as a black comedy, and while it does have its share of darkly comedic moments, overall it is an earnest existential drama about a 67-year-old ...
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| Ace in the Hole [DVD] |
Said bastard is Chuck Tatum, a big-city newspaper reporter played with a lethal combination of charm and bile by Kirk Douglas. Tatum, having been fired from seven different newspapers but still ...
|
| Across the Universe |
The storyline follows a half-dozen characters (each of whom is named for a Beatles song) as they traverse the turbulence of America in the late '60s, from the Vietnam war, to violent campus ...
|
| Adaptation. |
Adaptation. is an absurdist black comedy and brilliantly sustained meta-joke on the modern entertainment industry. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Confessions of ...
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| Adventureland [Blu-Ray] |
The semi-autobiographical story takes place over the pre-recession summer of 1987 in Pittsburgh, where the film’s hero, a recent Oberlin College graduate named James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg), ...
|
| Affliction |
Paul Schrader's "Affliction" is a powerful, bleak family drama about a son's
tragic inability to not become his father. Set in the bitter cold of the
wintry deer hunting season in Lawford, New ...
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| After.Life [Blu-Ray] |
The crux of the story is that a young woman named Anna Taylor (Chrisina Ricci) gets into a car accident and ends up on the slab in a funeral home run by the quiet and meticulous mortician Eliot ...
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| Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes) [DVD] |
Aguirre takes place in 1561, after the Spaniards, under Gonzalo Pizarro
(Alejandro Repulles), have conquered the Incan empire in Peru. The story is loosely based
on actual events, although ...
|
| Air Force One [Blu-Ray] |
If you can get over the extensive suspension of disbelief it requires to accept the heroic perfection of this fictional President of the United States, Wolfgang Peterson’s Air Force One is ...
|
| Airplane II: The Sequel [DVD] |
Having already honed and perfected their unique brand of guerilla comedy in their
long-running Kentucky Fried Theater and 1977's The Kentucky Fried Movie
(which was directed by John Landis), ...
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| Airplane! [DVD] |
Having already honed and perfected their unique brand of guerilla comedy in their
long-running Kentucky Fried Theater and 1977's The Kentucky Fried Movie
(which was directed by John Landis), ...
|
| Alex & Emma |
The ads for Alex & Emma, both in print and on television, proudly declare that it comes to us from Rob Reiner, “the director of When Harry Met Sally,” but don’t be fooled. For ...
|
| Alexander |
In the grandiose tradition of old-school Hollywood visual splendor, Alexander explores the life of the pre-Christian Macedonian king Alexander the Great (Colin Farrell) who, by the time he ...
|
| Alexander Nevsky [DVD] |
The Soviet genius Sergei Eisenstein was the rarest of all filmmakers: one who was also a
film theorist. There have been many film critics who became directors; the French New
Wave is full of ...
|
| Ali |
In Ali, his ambitious biopic of the great boxer Muhammad Ali, director Michael Mann (The Insider) creates a seething texture of American culture in the crucial decade between 1964, ...
|
| Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf) [DVD] |
>Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst ...
|
| Alice in Wonderland [Blu-Ray] |
Rather than a straight adaptation of Carroll’s stories, Woolverton has chosen to stage her story 13 years after the events in the books, which essentially makes this film a sequel of sorts; its ...
|
| Alien Nation [DVD] |
Alien Nation takes a fascinating sci-fi idea and squanders it on a routine
police procedural that is less complex and engaging than a typical one-hour TV ...
|
| Alien Resurrection |
Wrong.
|
| Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem |
The majority of the film unfolds in the picturesque environs of a small Colorado town, which has the great misfortune of becoming ground zero for the ongoing war between Aliens and Predators (if ...
|
| Aliens: Director's Cut |
Aliens is a film that gets under your skin while blowing you out of your seat. Writer/director James Cameron crafted what is perhaps the ultimate science fiction war epic and gave it a twist ...
|
| All About Steve [Blu-Ray] |
Sandra Bullock, who also coproduced the film, stars as Mary Horowitz, the resident cruciverbalist of a small-town California newspaper. For those (like myself) who have no idea what a cruciverbalist ...
|
| All That Heaven Allows [DVD] |
There are few films that better illustrate the elasticity of film reception than the works of Douglas Sirk, a German émigré who made a series of Technicolor Hollywood melodramas in the ...
|
| All the Pretty Horses |
In Cormac McCarthy's 1992 novel All the Pretty Horses, it takes the main character,a young cowboy from Texas named John Grady Cole, almost half an hour to tell a judge thestory of what ...
|
| All the Real Girls |
Benjamin Disraeli once wrote that the magic of first love is our illusion that it can never end, a sentiment that is perfectly captured in writer/director David Gordon Green’s heartbreaking ...
|
| Allegro non troppo [DVD] |
Like all children who grew up in Italy in the 1940s and 1950s, Bozzetto grew up on the films of Walt Disney. He has said that he learned about ecology from watching Bambi (1942) and classical ...
|
| Almost Famous |
In the semi-autobiographical Almost Famous, writer/director Cameron Crowe
brings to the screen a version of his life as a teenage rock journalist for Rolling
Stone magazine in the ...
|
| Along Came a Spider |
In Along Came a Spider, Morgan Freeman reprises his role as Washington, DCforensic psychologist and police detective Dr. Alex Cross, the hero of five mystery novelsby James Patterson. Freeman ...
|
| Amarcord [DVD] |
Amarcord (the title literally means “I remember” in the dialect of Emilia-Romagna, the region in which the director was born) is Fellini’s quirky look back at his own childhood in the ...
|
| America's Sweethearts |
In America's Sweethearts, John Cusack and Catherine Zeta-Jones are the "sweethearts" of the title, Eddie Thomas and Gwen Harrison, two fictional movie stars who have recently broken up after ...
|
| American Beauty |
Mendes, working from a script by first-time screenwriter Alan Ball, alternates the tone of the movie with the confident hand of an old pro; he switches from laugh-out comedy to pained pathos to ...
|
| American Desi |
American Desi might best be best described as a comedy of cultural conflict. Ittakes a well-worn Hollywood genre--the teen/college movie--and inflects it with a new twistto explore the ...
|
| American Gangster |
The resulting film is an intriguing crime saga that is long on atmosphere and short on momentum. It is never boring, but it's never entirely gripping either. Steven Zaillian's screenplay is derived ...
|
| American Gigolo [DVD] |
In the opening moments of Paul Schrader's "American Gigolo," we are introduced to the titular character, a $1,000-a-night Hollywood gigolo named Julian Kay (Richard Gere). As the theme song by ...
|
| American History X |
At one point in the film, Derek Vinyard, a violent and brilliant young neo-Nazi skinhead played with glaring intensity by Edward Norton, is spending his second year in jail for having killed two ...
|
| American Madness [DVD] |
Prefiguring many of Capra's later classics, American Madness makes the most of its limited means in telling the story of a good-hearted banker in danger of failing at the height of the ...
|
| American Outlaws |
Most of the would-be young movie stars donning cowboy hats and six-shooters in American Outlaws were probably barely in their teen years when Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen, Kiefer ...
|
| American Pie 2 |
Alas, no pastries are violated in any way in American Pie 2, but the movie does feature its own share of new sexual misadventures and embarrassing situations in which to entrap its ...
|
| American Pie [DVD] |
With the resurgence in teen comedies in the late 1990s (Can't Hardly Wait, She's All That, Never Been Kissed), it was only a matter of time before someone broke from the ...
|
| American Pop |
Any one of these segments, properly and thoroughly explored, might have made an interesting film. Unfortunately, the way screenwriter Ronnie Kern has it set up, "American Pop" is like a tease -- ...
|
| American Psycho [DVD] |
Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 novel "American Psycho" was one of the most reviled books of the last decade. The venomous rhetoric that surrounded its publication was almost as gory as Ellis' intricately ...
|
| American Reunion |
The result is an intriguing and often bittersweet drama that benefits from both the stripped-down aesthetic of the original Dogme 95 dictates and the more commercial flourishes added in the last ...
|
| American Wedding |
You’d think Jim’s dad (Eugene Levy) wouldn’t be surprised anymore when he caught his son (Jason Biggs) in a compromising position. Considering the regularity with which it happened in ...
|
| Amistad |
Like "Schindler's List" four years ago, Spielberg is dealing with one of the most atrocious aspects of recorded human history, but the similarities between the two films end there. While Spielberg ...
|
| An American Haunting |
Courtney Solomon's film version is based on Brent Monahan's book The Bell Witch: An American Haunting, which retells the story from a first-person perspective as if long-lost diary pages had ...
|
| An American Werewolf in London [DVD] |
In the opening credits sequence of An American Werewolf in London, writer/director John Landis makes it clear that this is not going to be your typical werewolf movie. As the plain credits ...
|
| An Ideal Husband [DVD] |
"An Ideal Husband" is an amusing comedy of manners that takes a sharp look
at love, marriage, honesty and public scandal. The film, adapted from the
play by Oscar Wilde and directed by Oliver ...
|
| An Inconvenient Truth |
That, in a nutshell, has long been the perception of Al Gore, even to many of those who agree with him politically. Stiff. Wooden. Humorless. Boring. Thus, the idea of sitting through a ...
|
| Analyze That |
Analyze That is the opposite of its predecessor, the hilarious Analyze This (1999). While reviewing that film three years ago, I wrote that the film’s ultimate strength and why it ...
|
| Analyze This |
Of course, the central joke of "Analyze This" is that all those characteristics that we take for granted in a character like Paul Vitti are beginning to corrode him emotionally. Simply put, he's got ...
|
| Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy |
This is not Chris Farley-style inhibition that involves throwing one’s body around physically and bashing into things. Rather, it is Ferrell’s willingness to constantly contradict the ...
|
| And God Created Woman (Et Dieu ... créa la femme) [DVD] |
Movie stars are rarely made overnight. Arnold Schwarzenegger lumbered through roles both small and large in some truly awful films in the 1970s ("Hercules in New York," anyone?) before becoming ...
|
| Angel Eyes |
Director Luis Mandoki and screenwriter Gerald Di Pego, who together adapted Nicholas
Spark's short romantic novel Message in a Bottle to the screen in 1999, have
taken the basic story--the ...
|
| Angela's Ashes |
Alan Parker's film version of "Angela's Ashes," Frank McCourt's wildly popular memoir of his impoverished childhood in Ireland, is a long, exhausting, almost completely humorless chronicle of misery, ...
|
| Angels & Demons |
However, if there is a deserving controversy related to Angels & Demons, it has nothing to do with how the film treats the Catholic Church and everything to do with what it has done to Tom ...
|
| Anger Management |
Most movies begin with basic concepts, and the good ones are those that find unique, interesting, or surprising ways to expand on them. This is not to say that every good movie has to rewrite the ...
|
| Anguish [DVD] |
More than a decade before the art-imitating-life -imitating-art postmodern horror theatrics of the "Scream" trilogy (1997-2000), there was Bigas Luna's "Anguish," a clever, if not wholly ...
|
| Anna and the King |
"Anna and the King" is visually beautiful, richly detailed, terribly long, and oddly unaffecting. One might even go so far as to say it's a little boring. For a movie that not only attempts to be a ...
|
| Antwone Fisher |
Antwone Fisher, which tells the story of a man who survived abuse, neglect, racism, and other horrors, is a generically uplifting movie, filled with the kind of bluntly life-affirming ...
|
| Antz |
If it seems odd for what is ostensibly a kid's feature to have serious underlying themes like the evil of totalitarianism, it is. However, "Antz" should not be taken as just a movie for little ...
|
| Any Given Sunday |
In "Any Given Sunday," director Oliver Stone indulges all of his worst impulses in the service of a storyline that is conventional at best, but he still manages to emerge with a mildly engaging film. ...
|
| Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier [DVD] |
Apocalypse Now is based loosely on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, with which it shares many similar thematic concerns about the tensions between civilization and savagery ...
|
| Apocalypto |
What is most remarkable about Apocalypto, though, aside from being a rare Hollywood production that views a foreign culture from within, is how thoroughly and effectively conventional it is. ...
|
| Appaloosa |
But, given the constantly shifting tenets of the western genre and the fact that its mythological underpinnings were long ago dismantled by revisionist films, Virgil is hardly a typical western hero ...
|
| Apt Pupil |
This is the underlying dread that informs much of "Apt Pupil," a new film directed by Bryan Singer ("The Usual Suspects") from a 1982 novella by King, which was published in "Different Seasons," the ...
|
| Arlington Road |
Referring to extremist terrorist groups, one character in the new paranoia thriller "Arlington Road" notes, "It seems like theygot one ...
|
| Armageddon |
|
| Army of Shadows (L'Armée des ombres) [DVD] |
Melville's opening image, which establishes the film's tragic scope, would have been a shocker in 1969, and it still retains sublime power today: a line of German soldiers goose-stepping past the ...
|
| As Good As It Gets |
And what a bastard is Melvin. Homophobic, racist, anti-Semitic, and generally vulgar, he spends most of his time locked up in his neatly-ordered apartment, writing pulp romance novels (can you see ...
|
| Ashes and Diamonds (Popiól i diament) [DVD] |
A Generation is actually a fitting title for all three films, as they depict with particular clarity the effect of World War II on the generation of men and women who came of age during the ...
|
| Ashes of Time Redux (Dung che sai duk) [DVD] |
The film, which was Wong’s third, was originally shot over six months in 1992, and it proved to be so difficult to piece together in postproduction that Wong left it for a while to shoot ...
|
| Ask the Dust [DVD] |
A sad interracial love story set amidst the dusty decay of the Bunker Hill neighborhood in 1930s Los Angeles (meticulously recreated with sets in South Africa), Ask the Dust has every reason ...
|
| Assault on Precinct 13 |
The setting has been moved from a gang-overrun Los Angeles ghetto to the edges of Detroit on New Year’s Eve, which allows for cinematographer Robert Gantz (Mindhunters) to revel in shady ...
|
| Atlantic City [DVD] |
The film's backdrop is the titular New Jersey resort town, which was in the midst of a major transformation following the official legalization of gambling by the state of the New Jersey in 1976. ...
|
| Atlantis: The Lost Empire |
Throughout the 1990s, Disney released a string of critically acclaimed and commerciallysuccessful animated movies, including Beauty and the Beast (1991),Aladdin (1992), The Lion ...
|
| Atonement |
The story begins in the palatial estate of the Tallis family in rural England in the mid-1930s. We are first introduced to the gangly and precocious Briony (Saoirse Ronan), a 13-year-old would-be ...
|
| Au hasard Balthazar [DVD] |
In the simplest of terms, Au hasard Balthazar tells the story of the life of a donkey from birth to death. The film’s opening shot is a poignant scene of the baby donkey nursing at his ...
|
| Au revoir les enfants [DVD] |
Some of the best films about the Holocaust never set foot inside a working concentration camp. Think of Alain Resnais’s disquieting Night and Fog (1955), a half-hour documentary that ...
|
| Austin Powers in Goldmember [DVD] |
The first of the Austin Powers movies was a moderate theatrical success in 1997, but it became a smash hit on video, where millions more discovered its quirky spoofing of swinging '60s ...
|
| Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery |
This phenomenon is the central joke of "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery," a hilarious spoof of James Bond movies and the Swinging London scene of the late sixties. The title character, ...
|
| Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me [DVD] |
When "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery" was released in the spring of 1997, it wasn't meant to be the massive cult phenomenon it turned into. But, after $50 million at the box office and ...
|
| Australia |
The first 30 minutes of Australia are, in fact, quite dreadful, as Luhrmann sets the stage with an aggravating mixture of goofy but largely unfunny physical comedy, outsized caricatures that ...
|
| Auto Focus |
Nathaniel Hawthorne could have been thinking about Bob Crane when he wrote in The Scarlet Letter, “No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the ...
|
| Avatar |
The story is set almost entirely on a distant moon called Pandorum, which is covered with expansive jungles and mountains and holds a rich substance known as Unobtainium beneath its soil. It is also ...
|
| À nos amours [DVD] |
Pialat has been frequently compared to American independent auteur John Cassavetes, although their styles are actually quite different. Where Cassavetes always went in for the close-up to get the ...
|
| À Nous la Liberté [DVD] |
One of the great ironies of René Clair's À Nous la Liberté is that it is widely considered to be a groundbreaking movie in pioneering the use of sound, yet Clair had initially been one of ...
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