courtesy of eOne Films COSMOPOLIS* starOpens Friday It must have seemed like solid math at the time: Cerebral director David Cronenberg (+) postmodernist writer Don DeLillo (x) ascendent movie star Robert Pattinson (=) edgy art film with box office potential. Sometimes, the numbers just don’t add up. Cronenberg’s tedious and talky Cosmopolis, adapted from DeLillo’s […]
Glenn McDonald
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DVD+Digital: H.P. Lovecraft, Lovely Molly and Halloween in August
courtesy of Image Entertainment When The Blair Witch Project was released in 1999, it broke all sorts of molds. The creepy faux-documentary, about three student filmmakers who get lost in the woods, was the first to leverage the “found footage” idea into a full-length, mainstream horror movie. The film also employed new digital age promotion […]
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DVD+Digital: Anniversary reissues, Hollywood lore and Good Will Hunting
courtesy of Lionsgate Home Entertainment Believe it or not, it’s been 15 years since Good Will Hunting came out of nowhere to turn Matt Damon and Ben Affleck into Oscar winners and ginormous movie stars. The story behind the 1997 film has since become filmmaking legend; the kind of thing aspiring actors tell to one […]
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DVD+Digital: Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory and the agonizing story of the West Memphis Three
The disturbing saga of the West Memphis Three has been playing out for nearly 20 years now. In 1993, three teenagers in West Memphis, Arkansas — Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley — were tried and convicted for the horrific murder of three young boys. The teens were accused of performing a Satanic ritual […]
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The Bourne Legacy takes the texture and fun out of a great spy franchise
courtesy of Universal Pictures THE BOURNE LEGACY** starsOpens Friday When The Bourne Identity hit theaters in 2002, it jostled loose in me old fanboy quirks I hadn’t experienced since Star Wars and Indiana Jones. It’s a little embarrassing, but I would sometimes pretend to be an amnesiac superspy in airports and shopping malls—scanning the crowds, […]
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DVD+Digital: Marley, subtitles and the importance of sound design
courtesy of Magnolia Pictures Two of the great benefits of home video, in my embarrassingly considered opinion, have to do with sound and subtitles. I watch a lot of movies on DVD and Blu-ray, and have learned to appreciate having control over audio specs and closed captioning. Sound design in theaters is usually great. There’s […]
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DVD+Digital: Clive Owen, hooded specters and Intruders
courtesy of Millennium Entertainment Film critic Pauline Kael once famously wrote, “Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.” A genre-specific update these days might read: Horror films are so seldom watchable that we should appreciate anything that isn’t contemptible […]
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DVD+Digital: The melancholy comedy of Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco
Courtesy of the Criterion Collection Writer/director Whit Stillman’s films are populated by wealthy young people—preppies, snobs, One Percenters in the larval stage—and we shouldn’t really like them. And yet we do. In fact, we come to sort of love them, and if Whit Stillman can claim anything on his deathbed, it’s that: He made yuppies […]
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DVD+Digital: Anna Paquin, teenage wastelands and Margaret
courtesy of Fox Searchlight With its heavyweight themes, three-hour running time and addled sense of focus, director Kenneth Lonergan’s MARGARET is a glorious mess of a movie. Originally intended for theatrical release in 2006, the film was to be Lonergan’s directorial follow-up to his Oscar-nominated debut, You Can Count On Me. The project languished in […]
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DVD+Digital: The Graduate, Spinal Tap and adventures in direct-to-DVD
courtesy of MGM The doldrums of summer continue on the home video beat—July and August are traditionally the horse latitudes of DVD and digital distribution. This week’s most high-profile release is AMERICAN REUNION, the latest installment of the sex and bathroom humor franchise that I’ve been studiously avoiding for 13 years. I tried to make […]