Glenn McDonald

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

courtesy of Entertainment One The Fourth of July holiday is traditionally a slow week for DVD releases. Studios and distributors assume everyone is out grilling or watching fireworks, and not interested in home videos. I’m what you call an indoorsy person, though, and so have dutifully gone through this week’s slim pickings. JESUS HENRY CHRIST […]