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 […]
Glenn McDonald
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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 […]
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DVD+Digital: It’s indie quirk madness with Jesus Henry Christ
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 […]
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DVD+Digital: The quiet brilliance of The Artist
courtesy of the Weinstein Company It all seems a little too cute, doesn’t it? THE ARTIST is a black-and-white silent film, shot in the archaic 4:3 aspect ratio, about the Old Hollywood silent film era. And it’s French! And it won the Best Picture Oscar! I was skeptical, too—this seemed like the sort of artsy, […]
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DVD+Digital: The comic genius of Louis C.K.
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 […]
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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 […]
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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. […]
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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 […]
