DVD & Blu-ray
These are our most recent DVD and Blu-ray reviews. Skip to the bottom of any review ("How to Use This DVD") for advice on which extra features are worth watching and which ones are a waste of your time.
Bless its bloody heart, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is a schlocky, gory, silly guilty pleasure. It earns a thumbs up... but they’re broken thumbs.
First, the good news: For a movie that’s two hours and 52 minutes long, Cloud Atlas does not present viewers with an endurance test. That’s no small accomplishment.
Writer/director David Chase — the estimable and obviously talented creator of HBO’s The Sopranos — returns to his native New Jersey to tell the story of a group of young men who form (what else?) a rock band.
The city’s in great shape; it’s the screenplay that’s broken.
Silver Linings Playbook
2012, David O. Russell
Love is not perfect, but it beats the next best thing
Movies don’t have to be perfect to be loved. It’s a good thing, too, or we might never love anything that reached the big screen. Because it’s a romantic comedy that spits in formula’s eye, because it’s built around winning performances and because it successfully mixes humor with a bit of edgy drama, Silver Linings Playbook deserves a big hunk of audience love.
Cloud Atlas
**1/22012, Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachowski, and Andy Wachowski
Mash-up works best if you don’t take it too seriously
Sitting through three hours of Cloud Atlas, I was struggling to take it seriously. Buzz from Toronto, respectful news of its giant budget, and the collaboration between crowd-pleasing Wachowskis and stylish fatalist Tom Tykwer had built it up. But the pounds of makeup and shallow philosophy on screen bring it down.
Devoted Barbra Streisand fans may turn out for The Guilt Trip, a comedy that tries to expand Streisand’s reach into the comic sphere in which Seth Rogen lives. I suppose it’s a natural progression for an actress who already played Ben Stiller ‘s mother in two Focker movies. What’s next? Babs as Jonah Hill’s mother?
The Central Park Five
2012, Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon
When hysteria trumps innocence
In the wake of the Connecticut school shooting, it may be time to redefine what we mean when we call a crime “horrific.” Back in the more “innocent” days of 1989, few crimes seemed as horrible as the brutal beating and gang rape of a female jogger in New York’s Central Park.
In Any Day Now, a drama about a gay couple fighting to adopt a teen-ager with Down syndrome, Alan Cumming plays Rudy, a drag queen whose humor and decency anchor what turns out to be a moving and thoughtful story.
Sitting through Gangster Squad is a bit like watching a bad Brian DePalma movie, maybe a low-grade version of The Untouchables. I felt cheated. If I’m going to watch bad De Palma, I’d prefer that it be directed by De Palma rather than by Ruben Fleischer , best known for 30 Minutes or Less and Zombieland.
Gangster Squad
***2013, Ruben Fleischer
Thanks to some good characters and a nifty theme, Gangster Squad earns a mild recommendation.
Gangster Squad covers familiar territory, but thanks to some good characters and a nifty theme, it earns a mild recommendation.
Somewhere along the line, it became mandatory for a certain kind of male hero to display as little emotion as possible, to become an icon of don’t-mess-with-me toughness. As played by Tom Cruise, former soldier Jack Reacher — the main character in a series of popular books by British novelist Lee Child and the title character in Cruise’s new movie — is one such man: decisive, physically fit, brutal when necessary and unencumbered by possessions. Reacher has only one shirt to his name, travels by bus and always seems to keep moving.
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
2013, Werner Herzog, and Dmitry Vasyukov
From Siberia, with Happiness
In the popular imagination, few places seem as forbidding and remote as Siberia. Many of us think of Siberia as a place where the banished languish in extreme poverty and numbing cold, an area where the comforts of civilization no longer soothe the troubled spirits of society’s outcasts.
Christmas Day is an odd release date for a film as bloody and violent as Django Unchained. But for those not put off by Quentin Tarantino’s body count, it’s a Red Rider BB Gun. That is to say, it’s the best present under the tree. (And by the way, the very second credit at the end of them film was ASPCA’s guarantee that no horses were harmed in the filming. Take that, Hobbit!)
Having taken vengeance for the horrors Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis in Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino shifts his attention to blacks in Django Unchained, a wild assault on the antebellum South: land of plantations, slavery, sexual perversity, leering sadism and bloody violence.