Born to Run: 30th Anniversary 3-Disc Set (Columbia Home Video) The centerpiece of this three-disc boxed set isn´t the classic 1975 album, but the two DVDs that come with it. On one, shot in London in 1975, Bruce and the band tear through most of Born to Run and its…
Pay attention, Disney: This is how you do a family film right. Neither pandering nor dull, Zathura plays exactly like a no-limits replica of the kind of space adventure that imaginative kids left to their own devices might enact. Assuming there’s no Xbox to distract them, naturally. Loosely based on…
About halfway through Get Rich or Die Tryin’, the new movie starring rapper 50 Cent (a.k.a. Curtis Jackson) and loosely based on his life, 50’s character, Marcus, is in prison, being visited by his girlfriend, Charlene (Joy Bryant). Surprised by his inability to communicate with her, she asks the gangsta…
Chicken Little is a groundbreaking movie in more ways than one. Not only is it Disney’s first in-house all-computer-generated feature, but on select screens, it will be presented in “Disney Digital 3-D,” a brand-new system created with the help of George Lucas’ special-effects company Industrial Light & Magic. It’s revolutionary!…
To the knowledgeable comic book fan, all one need say about MirrorMask is that it was scripted by Neil Gaiman and directed by Dave McKean, with a final product that, while less plot-heavy than most of Gaiman’s writing, faithfully adapts McKean’s unique drawing/collage style into three dimensions. Since those who…
Her name is Domino Harvey, and she is a bounty hunter. If you’ve seen even one TV spot or theatrical trailer for Domino, you’ve heard that message ground into your brain like an annoying jingle. What you may not know is that Domino Harvey was a real person, daughter of…
All the publicity for Waiting… has focused on the scene in which an annoying customer at the fictional chain restaurant ShenaniganZ sends her food back to the kitchen, where it meets with all sorts of nasty modifications, courtesy of some dandruff, pubic hair, and mucus. The teaser posters depicted similarly…
It would take a critic more churlish than this one to sneer and bare chicken-like talons at Roll Bounce, a formulaic crowd-pleaser that hits familiar marks, but does so well enough that it’s hard to fault anyone involved. The retro-’70s vibe seems kind of obvious, and the irritating Mike Epps,…
If The Memory of a Killer were not mostly in Flemish, it would be easy to mistake for a Hollywood movie. The story of a hit man with a conscience and the cop who’s always a step or two behind him as they pursue the same villains, it’s full of…
Back in the mid-’90s, when MTV still flirted with (intentional) comedy shows, it ran one called The State, which featured performers who now appear on the Comedy Central hit Reno 911. There wasn’t all that much worth remembering about The State, but the show did make one significant attempt at…
If you’re a character in a movie, and the rain is coming down so heavily that you cannot see out of your car’s windshield, for the love of God, don’t drive! Mack-truck drivers interpret such conditions as carte blanche to be reckless and will assume that honking their horn provides…
It seems just about any movie featuring a positively gay character scares the bejeezus out of religious film critics like Michael Medved and Ted Baehr. So it was merely a matter of time before someone embraced that notion and made an all-out (pun intended) gay film that’s deliberately scary. That’s…
When one goes to see a movie titled El Crimen Perfecto (literal translation: The Perfect Crime), it might seem unlikely that the title of this Spanish film has been altered for American audiences. But it has — in Spain, the title is Crimen Ferpecto, which makes the crime a general…
A rich family returns to their nice home after a vacation, but something isn’t quite right. The place has been . . . burgled? No, not quite. The stereo that’s missing — it’s in the fridge. The chairs have been stacked into a tower. And there’s a note attached: “Your…
“I always cannot understand why girls don’t wanna be with me for a long time,” says Timothy Treadwell, subject of the documentary Grizzly Man. “I have really a nice personality — I’m fun, I’m very very good in the . . . umm, well, you’re not supposed to say that…
Fans of the last two Miramax films from Swedish director Lasse Hallström — Chocolat and The Shipping News — may be happy to know that he has stuck to the exact same formula for his latest, An Unfinished Life. Like its predecessors, this is the tale of an itinerant single…
Remember Nick Cannon? For a while there, he seemed to be the next big young heartthrob, right after starring in the marching-band movie Drumline and the remake of the ’80s comedy Love Don’t Cost a Thing. When Dave Chappelle joked that his son was leaving him for Nick Cannon, people…
Red Eye may not seem to be your typical Wes Craven movie. It’s not really horror, there are no marketable monsters, and unlike Cursed, Scream 3, and other recent Craven offerings, it’s actually an enjoyable time at the movies. But heroine Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) is very much in the…
“The most daring rescue mission of our time is a story that has never been told,” boasts the poster for The Great Raid. The credits of the film, however, reveal that it’s based on not one, but two books about the 6th Ranger Battalion, which ventured 30 miles into enemy…
The Aristocrats may be the foulest-mouthed movie of the summer, but Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo is the foulest in deed, actually depicting some of the nigh-unspeakable acts that are merely hypothetically talked about in the former film. It’s been a while since we’ve seen a big-time gross-out comedy, and European…
Remember the scene in X2 where Wolverine grabs a Dr. Pepper and enlists the aid of Iceman to make it cold? Take the tone of that scene and stretch it out to feature length and you get Sky High, a less angsty, more kid-friendly movie about teenagers attending a school…
Must Love Dogs, it should be clearly stated, is not the greatest romantic comedy ever made about a quirky couple who meet at a dog park. That honor goes to Dog Park, the oddball 1998 flick starring Luke Wilson and Natasha Henstridge, written and directed by former Kids in the…
