courtesy of Lionsgate Home Entertainment December always brings a flotilla of DVD and Blu-ray box sets aimed at holiday gift shoppers. Some are reissues of films and TV shows already available on disc or online, but most holiday bundles feature exclusive extras or new material. Below are some recommendations from this year’s batch of box […]
Glenn McDonald
Posted inCulture
DVD+Digital: Activist artists, Chinese dissidents and Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
courtesy of IFC Films One of the year’s very best documentaries, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry chronicles recent events in the life and work of China’s most famous artist, and one of its most tenacious political activists. The film made a splash at this year’s Full Frame festival in Durham and just this week was shortlisted […]
Posted inArt
A featherweight tone in Burning Coal’s As You Like It
As You Like It Burning Coal at Murphey School Auditorium Through Dec. 16 You can make the case that Shakespeare pioneered both the romantic comedy and the musical comedy with As You Like It, the light-hearted pastoral romp that’s been in production for, oh, about 400 years now. With its sprightly mix of song, witty […]
Posted inFilm & Television
On not leaving Las Vegas in Lay the Favorite
Lay the Favorite opens Friday (see times below) Our rating: Sometimes you can see exactly where a movie is aiming, and it’s a deflating experience to feel the trajectory dip as it falls ever shorter, minute by minute. Such is the case with Lay the Favorite, an increasingly desperate comedy that follows the kinda-true story […]
Posted inCulture
DVD+Digital: City gangsters, country bootleggers and Lawless
courtesy of the Weinstein Company Ask anyone around these parts and they’ll tell you — them Bondurant boys mean business. The Prohibition-era crime drama Lawless, new to DVD and Blu-ray this week, departs from the usual gangster film mold by moving the action out of the city and into the drowsy summers of the rural […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Silver Linings Playbook is more than a rom-com
Silver Linings Playbook opens Wednesday (see times below) Our rating: In Silver Linings Playbook, director David O. Russell’s unhinged and fearless romantic comedy, Bradley Cooper plays Pat Solitano, a Philadelphia school teacher recently released from an eight-month stint in the psych ward. Pat’s bipolar condition has cost him his job, his house and his wife. […]
Posted inCulture
DVD+Digital: Box sets, board games and Tarantino XX
courtesy of Lionsgate Home Entertainment John Travolta is a strange dude. In all the on-camera interviews I’ve seen, Travolta has a weird vibrating kind of energy, a spaced-out thing where he seems to be channeling a more remote version of himself from somewhere very far away. This is the traditional time for a Scientology joke, […]
Posted inCulture
DVD+Digital: Angry robots, stubborn rabbits and Pixar Short Films
Courtey of Disney/Pixar Is there a more trusted brand name in entertainment than Pixar? The innovative animation studio debuted in 1995 with Toy Story, and has since released 13 feature films and collected 26 Academy Awards. Pixar has yet to make a bad movie, although they came perilously close with Cars 2. It’s the only […]
Posted inCulture
DVD+Digital: Drunken sex, tricky endings and Your Sister’s Sister
courtesy of IFC Films Endings are hard. Plenty of writers will tell you they’re the hardest part of any story, and any movie lover can rattle off a dozen films with lousy endings, from memory. So when a movie ends just right, it should be savored. The romantic comedy-drama Your Sister’s Sister — new to […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Wreck-It Ralph is goofily charming
Wreck-It Ralph opens Friday throughout the Triangle (see times below) Our rating: Wreck-It Ralph, the title character in Disney’s agreeably goofy new 3-D animated film, is a 1980s-style arcade game bad guy in the tradition of Donkey Kong. He’s a blue-collar sort of fellow, clocking in each day to suffer ignoble defeat at the hands […]