Courtesy of FX Too much good TV, that’s the problem. It’s impossible to keep up with all the quality series on television these days – Mad Men, True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Homeland, Girls. Well, not impossible, but certainly tricky, and you have to give up things like family and […]
Glenn McDonald
DVD+Digital: Suicide solutions as Harold and Maude gets the Criterion treatment
Paramount Pictures The original indie quirk movie, director Hal Ashby’s HAROLD AND MAUDE has been re-issued this week on DVD and Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection, whose boutique home video releases are little artifacts of film goodness in and of themselves. The special edition features new digital restoration, a remastered soundtrack and a booklet of […]
DVD+Digital: Machine Gun Preacher and Curb Your Enthusiasm
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment One of the great joys of home video is inducing cognitive dissonance by scheduling an ambitious double feature night. Pick the right two films, and you can work alchemical wonders in your own mind. I was once talked into a Halloween double feature bill of Monsters, Inc. and The Exorcist. […]
DVD+Digital: Ralph Fiennes’ violent, modern version of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus
Larry D. Horricks/ The Weinstein Company In the rather startling CORIOLANUS, new to DVD, Blu-ray and standard digital platforms this week, actor-turned-director Ralph Fiennes smuggles an obscure Shakespeare tragedy into the contemporary war movie genre. Epic and bloody, Coriolanus tells the tale of Caius Martius (Fiennes), a fierce military general in “a place calling itself […]
DVD+Digital: Perfect Sense
Photo by Neil Davidson/ IFC Films Good science fiction premises are hard to come by. It’s just math, really. Ever since Mary Shelley kicked it all off with Frankenstein, countless authors and screenwriters have mapped the terrain of speculative fiction—examining issues, projecting trends and otherwise scouring the collective superconsciousness for story hooks. So when you […]
DVD+Digital: Norwegian Wood
Soda Pictures Based on a hugely popular 1987 Japanese novel, the quiet drama NORWEGIAN WOOD is a haunting coming-of-age story that explores love and loss against the backdrop of 1960s Tokyo. As his fellow students protest and march—Tokyo had its ’60s radicals, too—brooding college student Toru Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama) falls into a romantic affair with […]

