Director Curtis Hanson, a journeyman only recently bestowed the title of Great Director, has already made his horror movie (1973’s The Arousers), his kiddie action comedy (1980’s The Little Dragons), his teen sex romp (1983’s Losin’ It ), his handful of Hitchcock riffs (1987’s The Bedroom Window, 1990’s Bad Influence,…

It happened almost with the first step off the airplane at the Toronto airport last month. Someone, a friend or merely a concerned stranger, would stop to warn you of impending peril. They would plead with you to avoid the danger ahead in Elizabethtown, the Cameron Crowe film that screened…

Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection (Universal Studios ) Alfred Hitchcock may be the best pop filmmaker in our history, and this gorgeous 14- film set is certainly worthy of the master. Licensing issues kept it from being as “definitive” as the box claims — missing, most notably, are Hitchcock’s classic…

Into the Blue offers precisely what one would expect from the director of Blue Crush and the writer of Torque: beautiful stupidity. Its every frame dripping from a noxious recipe of suntan oil, summertime sweat, and salt water, this heist movie (or whatever it is, which isn’t much) delivers a…

Serenity, Joss Whedon’s big-screen spinoff of the 2002 TV show Firefly, which didn’t even last a dozen episodes, is already a cult phenom well before its opening. The show’s DVD boxed set lines the shelf of every fanboy who dreamed of gunslinging in space alongside preachers and prostitutes, and already…

Anything can be anything to anybody, particularly in the case of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. If you want to believe that his new film, a loose adaptation of a little-known graphic novel, is a work of damning criticism aimed at the hypocrisy of Americans who believe violence is…

Robots (Fox) The story of a small-town ‘bot (voiced by Ewan McGregor) who bolts for the big city, Robots is the first non-Pixar film to compete with that studio’s razzle and dazzle; the thing’s stunning to look at. (And, frankly, it’s better to stare at than listen to, since listening…

Desperate Housewives: The Complete First Season (Buena Vista) ABC’s juggernaut drama is made up mostly of elements that have trickled down from HBO: black humor, self-awareness, the radical notion that women over 30 can arouse the national libido. The bonus deleted scenes don’t add much to the story, and behind-the-scenes…

Andrew Niccol’s first two films as writer-director, 1997’s Gattaca and 2002’s S1m0ne, were hollow, sterile sci-fi masquer ading as earnest satire: The former told of a near future in which parents could genetically engineer perfect children; the latter proffered an actress who became the most famous and beloved movie star…

Da Ali G Show: Da Compleet Second Seazon (HBO Home Video) Sacha Baron Cohen’s inching closer to Tom Green territory; come this time next year, his HBO show is likely to be on the pop-culture junk pile. Which isn’t to say this double-disc set doesn’t hold up — it ‘s…

The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which is based on a true story the same way Harry Potter and Star Wars movies are, is the latest — though certainly not the last — movie of this bloody (awful) year trying to scare the money right out of your wallet. It has…

The Man isn’t so much a movie as a parody of one, the kind of thing people in movies about the movie business pitch as outrageous, inept ideas when a director’s for the cheap and quick giggle. Only in movies like The Player or Bowfinger or Christopher Guest’s The Big…

Ain’t nothing in this world more tedious than highbrow erotica, which works itself into a lather and then wipes off the sweat before anyone notices how awfully and inappropriately worked-up it got. Asylum, adapted by Closer’s Patrick Marber and Chrysanthy Balis from a novel by Patrick McGrath, is just that…

Terry Gilliam’s last film featured the former Monty Python troupe member as an eccentric, demanding, and difficult director prone to destroying his ambitious projects before a single frame of footage was ever shot. “If it’s easy,” he says in the movie, “I don’t do it.” Alas, this was not a…

Pity the daily-newspaper critic who must review The Aristocrats without using such phrases as “a longshoreman’s arm up a little girl’s ass,” “then my wife goes down on my son while the dog’s licking his balls,” “my grandmother’s covered in my come,” and “is it shit before piss, or sucking…

The Skeleton Key ranks high on the list of 2005’s funniest films, bested only by the first two-thirds of The Wedding Crashers, all of The Aristocrats, and that part in Stealth where the airplane starts sassing Josh Lucas. Doubtful that was the intention of director Iain Softley (K-PAX, an inexplicably…

And so, once more, the googolplex emits the stink of the network rerun, this week offering yet another worthless big-screen take on small-screen detritus. As Hollywood wonders — cries, actually, over spilt spoiled milk — why audiences are staying away from theaters, offering theories ranging from the absence of such…

“Hit me,” says Mark Zupan — begs, actually, like a kid clamoring for a new toy. “I’ll hit you back.” He means it too, and his ripped pecs, buzzed scalp, tattooed back and arms, and bushy gangster goatee promise just as much menace. The dude’s bad and doesn’t need to…

Going to the theater this summer has been like stepping into a time machine where your fondest childhood memories are retooled by cynics and sadists. Bewitched, Herbie: Fully Loaded, last week’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and now Bad News Bears are meant to be gobbled like comfort food by…

Vince Vaughn probably has to check the bags under his eyes at the airport, and he’s about as in-shape as a toddler’s fistful of Play-Doh. This is no doubt why audiences dig him; he is us, dude, and we am him. Onscreen, he looks like any other buddy who’d loan…

Quite simply and quite literally, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds is Close Encounters of the Third Kind turned inside-out: They’re still out there, only this time the aliens are out for our blood, which they spray all over the countryside like so much red paint…