Arts & Culture

The Ant Bully (Warner Bros.) Criminal Minds: The First Season (Paramount) Dane Cook: Vicious Circle (HBO) The Ellen DeGeneres Show: DVD-licious (Warner Bros.) Foo Fighters: Skin and Bones (RCA) Hot Wheels Accelerators: The Ultimate Race (Warner Bros.) Joan of Arcadia: The Second Season (Paramount) Jamie Kennedy’s Blowin’ Up (Paramount) Little…

For progressives lifted, however temporarily, by the swell of a turning tide, Bobby can be seen clearly for what it is — an Airport movie with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as the central calamity and an all-star cast deployed like multiple George Kennedys. Juggling some 22 main characters…

OK, so Jerry Bruckheimer and Tony Scott are asking for it by naming their latest megaproduction Déjà Vu. These dudes aren’t exactly paragons of innovation, unless taking rhetorical hysteria to awesome new heights counts. As the opening credits roll — by which, of course, I mean roll, zip, flicker, fade,…

The first few minutes of Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny’ are something to behold: a four-minute rock opera cranked to 11. A doughy young boy with dirty-mop locks (Nacho Libre’s Troy Gentile, once more playing lil’ Jack Black) laments his tragic plight: He’s stuck in Kickapoo with “a…

Men are literally disposable in Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver. But the film, particularly for fans of the gynophilic, flamboyantly color-coordinating maker of loco melodramas, is essential. The title translates as Coming Back—as in “back from the dead,” referring to the matter-of-fact resurrection of Irene (Carmen Maura), an old grandmother who refuses…

An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount) This isn’t exactly the kind of DVD you buy to watch again and again; the ending doesn’t get happier, and there are no twists to decipher with repeated viewings. The producers hope instead that you buy it and share it; it’s less movie, after all, than…

American Slapstick (Image) Alias: The Complete Fifth Season (Buena Vista) Boston Legal: Season Two (Fox) The Cry Baby Killer (Buena Vista) Devil Times Five (Code Red) Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist: Season Two (Paramount) Fall Out Boy: Solid Gold Uncertainty (Music Video Dist.) A Fish Called Wanda: Collector’s Edition (MGM) Freedom…

By all rights, 2002’s Die Another Day should have been and could have been the final James Bond film. It was packaged like a cynical, weary best-of concert coughed up by an aging dinosaur, offering copious nods to the franchise’s past without bothering to offer any new material of consequence…

For Your Consideration pulls off the neat trick of skewering the movie industry while remaking it in its own image. The latest ensemble comedy by Christopher Guest and company may take place in Los Angeles, but its imaginative provenance lies somewhere between the La La Lands of Entourage and Mulholland…

Having animals act like humans on film is a storytelling device as old as time, so maybe it’s a little unfair to get tired of it just now. But back in the day wise old owls didn’t sing “Boogie Wonderland.” And whereas we used to give animals human souls, now…

Fast Food Nation, directed by Richard Linklater from Eric Schlosser’s 2001 bestselling exposé of the McDonald’s conspiracy, is an anti-commercial. It’s designed to kill desire and deprogram the viewer’s appetite. Linklater — who, along with Steven Soderbergh and Gus Van Sant, has staked out a particular outpost on the indie-studio…

Little Children, a second excursion into middle-class unease by Todd Field after his intelligent but overrated In the Bedroom, opens with a slow pan around a living room whose shelves are crowded with cheap china figurines of . . . little children. Twisted into insidious grins, their blood-red lips ooze…

When a red-blooded, macho, flag-waving, Bush-voting, American country music fan looks at a gorgeous blond who also happens to make his kind of music, one doesn’t normally expect him to pay particular attention to the actual substance of her conversation. Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines didn’t think anyone would…