courtesy of CBS Films THE WORDS** starsOpens Friday In 1922, Ernest Hemingway’s wife Hadley was traveling from Paris to Switzerland by train when she made a rather historic mistake. Getting up briefly to buy a bottle of water, she left behind a suitcase containing virtually all of her husband’s fiction writing up to that point. […]
Glenn McDonald
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DVD+Digital: In defense of the Jason Statham movie
courtesy of Lionsgate Home Entertainment Professional tough guy Jason Statham’s new film SAFE — new to DVD, Blu-ray and digital this week — is not a very good movie. But it’s not a bad one either, and it illustrates nicely the many reasons that Statham is the best action movie star working today. In Safe, […]
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Dialogue, density and Robert Pattinson in Cronenberg’s tedious Cosmopolis
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 […]
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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 […]