What sets Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern’s rock and roll documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits apart from other similar films isn’t necessarily the music of defunct post-rock pioneers LCD Soundsystem, but the willingness to explore a deeper human element behind the creative process rather than simply stroking the egos of the people involved.
This week on DVD and Blu-Ray, takes on Mel Gibson in Get the Gringo, Lockout, Friends With Kids, Being FlynnA Bag of Hammers, and the fourth season of TV's Sanctuary, while Phil Brown sinks into American Reunion, Silent House, and Bobcat Golthwait's God Bless America.
In our archival home entertainment column for this week, we look at forms of grand theatre and the theatre of the somewhat absurd, as Phil Brown looks at Ken Russell's Altered States and takes a look at some classic Kenneth Branagh Shakespeare with Twelfth Night and the 80s cheeseball classic No Holds Barred.
Arriving in Toronto a few years after becoming New Zealand’s highest grossing film production of all time, Boy is a pleasant little surprise that finds just the right balance between stylized quirk and heartfelt emotion.
Episode four of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, "I’ll Fix You," is a fairly engaging episode which delves the furthest into Will’s personal and emotional life thus far. Despite the strong character moments for McAvoy though, it's beginning to seem as though the female characters on The Newsroom exist pretty much only to instigate plot.
Actor Martin Donovan's directorial debut Collaborator is a subtle, desperately dry dark comedy with thriller elements, a surprising amount of insight, and entertainment borne out of trapping two unique characters in a room together and watching them talk.
Pitched somewhere between a southern gothic, a fairly tale, and a hard luck life childhood, Beasts of the Southern Wild is an undeniably striking feature directorial debut from Benh Zeitlin. It’s a low budget, independent movie with the scope of an epic, nimbly weaving between acutely observed realism and wide-eyed child’s fantasy. Unfortunately, that combination of seemingly contradictory elements is both the film’s strength and shortcoming.
Although still nothing more than just another concert film collaboration between icons Neil Young and Jonathan Demme, it still works largely on the strengths of the talents involved.
In a busy week for little seen movies coming to DVD and Blu-ray, we take a look at Nicolas Cage in Seeking Justice, Willem Dafoe in The Hunter, director Morgan Spurlock's look at the San Diego Comic-Con, the offbeat comedy Jesus Henry Christ, Jon Voight in Beyond, and the aptly titled dark comedy Some Guy Who Kills People.
In this week's archival DVD column we look at some great re-releases including the 40th anniversary of Deliverance, a pair of Criterions featuring Spalding Gray from director Steven Soderbergh, Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, and some of the best no holds barred matches from the WWE.
In many of the series reviews I've read of The Newsroom, critics unanimously declared that the pilot, "We Just Decided To," was the strongest of the first four episodes. For me, however, this Sunday's episode, "The 112th Congress," is easily Sorkin's strongest stuff thus far, at least partly because of the episodes effective structural reliance on a device that Sorkin memorably used in David Fincher's The Social Network.
While not one of the more disposable films in the Woody Allen cannon, the filmmaker's latest To Rome With Love only manages to be a mildly amusing mishmash of four separate, mediocre, half-baked stories instead of just one really good one.
From the opening seconds following the Universal logo to the tooth gratingly awful cover of The Beatles “Here Comes the Sun” that plays over the film’s all too late THE END title card, there isn’t a more ungainly, unfocused, idiotic, and overall unpleasant film thus far this year than Oliver Stone’s Savages.
In the documentary Unfinished Spaces directors Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray look at Cuba's unfinished and grand looking National Art Schools in a poignant way to depict the grey areas where politics, art, and commerce meet.
After a promising but problematic pilot, the second episode of Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom should have brought things together and smoothed out some of the rough edges. Instead, it's very clear that the series is still struggling to find its feet. Worse, it almost squandered what interest we had in the series by repeating itself in just the second episode.
