THE FILM:

My reviewing duties at DVD Talk allow me to screen a wide variety of films. By happenstance, I have watched a number of tough films of late, both narrative and documentary. These films speak to cruelty and compassion, and pose disturbing, perhaps unanswerable questions about human nature. Bully is such a film. Lee Hirsch's documentary reveals the subjective effects of bullying through intimate portraits of several middle and high school children. The stories are sad, and parents recall the ...Read the entire review

Waxing excitedly about a Quentin Tarantino movie is almost starting to feel like a knee-jerk reaction. As a writer, I've been here, done it before. Tarantino makes it pretty easy, though. It probably doesn't hurt that he only makes a feature film every couple of years, but when he does, they are insanely easy to like. He represents the filmmaker as a showman, the cineaste who entertains first and foremost, but with a flair all his own. There is a scene in his latest, Django Unchained, where Christoph Waltz, playing the bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz, is talking about buying a slave to put in the fight ring, and he expresses his desire to have a gimmick to sell the warrior. The man he is going to buy from, Leonardo DiCaprio's Calvin Candie, corrects him and says first he ...Read the entire review

Damn, it's hard to be a gangster. Particularly in this economy. Don't be fooled. When your wallet's empty, the bad guys are feeling the pinch, too.

Or so we come to learn in Killing Them Softly, the new feature from Andrew Dominik, the long-awaited follow-up to his masterful The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The writer/director is working from a novel by author George V. Higgins here. Higgins also wrote the source material that became the cult 1970s crime film The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a film it'd be ...Read the entire review

Sometimes a movie and its subject intersect in ways that transcend the traditional narrative and the creative process serves to illustrate exactly what the film is about. In Paul Thomas Anderson's latest, The Master, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Lancaster Dodd, an author and philosopher who is trying to start a movement called "The Cause," in which he endeavors to explain and cure man's ills by looking through each individual's past lives and seeking the historical roots of their every malady. When he meets Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a veteran of the second World War with post-traumatic stress disorder, his attention becomes focused on containing Freddie's madness.

And one could say Anderson's endeavor here is not dissimilar. Making The Master was like try...Read the entire review

I don't know the story behind Bachelorette or how quickly it got hustled into production after the success of Bridesmaids, but it's a shame this raunchy comedy is going to get stuck with the comparison. It feels hacky of me to even bring it up, I'd more than love to ignore it, but there's a good chance anyone reading this has already made a judgment based on the similarity in concepts, and I want to make sure you people know to just forget that. Because Bachelorette is very funny and entertaining in its own right.

This is the debut feature from writer/director Leslye Headland, whose resume otherwise includes contributing to the brilliant and much-missed television series Terriers. ...Read the entire review

So, at one point in Piranha 3DD, a lil' razor-toothed fish swims up into a chick's hoo-hah, chomps onto her boyfriend's dick when he starts screwing her afterwards, and then he has to hack off his own prick with a butcher knife.

I know! It kinda does sound like Piranha 3DD was tailor-made for me. It's more deliriously over-the-top than Alejandro Aja's Piranha 3D was

Read the entire review ]]> Theatrical http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=57848 Tue, 28 Aug 2012 12:41:37 PDT Highly Recommended Musician-turned-screenwriter Nick Cave and director John Hillcoat last teamed for The Proposition, a brutally effective bit of business set in the Australian outback in the 1880s. That picture had the feel of myths being simultaneously made and undercut, and their latest collaboration, Lawless, has much of the same aim: set in Franklin County, Virginia ("the wettest county in the world") during the Prohibition, it is ripe with gangster-picture iconography. But it melds those images and themes with leftover artifacts of the Western (domestic and Spaghetti) to create a bubbling stew of badassery and violence. It's one of the more entertaining films of the summer. Cave's script tells the true story of the Bondurant family, three moonshining brothers trying to make...Read the entire review ]]> Theatrical http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=57833 Tue, 28 Aug 2012 11:05:53 PDT Highly Recommended Lawless is the latest in a long line of motion pictures set during American Prohibition, reinforcing our country's love of outlaws and the mythological tradition of anti-heroes who did bad things because caving in to "the Man" would be a whole lot worse. Based on the true story of the Virginia-born Bondurant family, as chronicled in Matt Bondurant's book The Wettest County in the World, Lawless reteams writer and musician Nick Cave with director John Hillcoat, who previously redefined the Australian western via their bloody tale of brotherly vengeance, The Proposition. Lawless is a bit of a distant cousin to that violent action movie. It focuses on the three Bonduran...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=54955 Wed, 30 May 2012 18:33:19 PDT Highly Recommended Ever wonder about one ofthe most discussed romances of the 20th century? I certainlyhadn't,but the subject seemed quite interesting: The story backdrop of W.E. is about the love affair betweenKing Edward VIII (James D'Arcy) and Wallis Simpson (AndreaRiseborough), an Americanwho charmed him and began a lifelong romance that would be discussed byanyperson with a passing level of interest. It was considered one of those...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=54911 Thu, 24 May 2012 04:04:43 PDT Highly Recommended THE FILM: Ralph Fiennes chews through William Shakespeare's dialogue in Coriolanus, a modern wartime update of one of the playwright's lesser-known works. Fiennes, who portrays Caius Martius Coriolanus and also directs the film, works from a script by John Logan, who expertly streamlines Shakespeare's complicated dialogue to fit the modern setting. Coriolanus despises the common man he has spent his life protecting, and is banned from Rome following an uprising of the people. Coriolanus then joins rebel and former enemy Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler) and plots to overthrow the government. Coriolanus is an actor's paradise, and Fiennes and Butler, along with Jessica Chastain, Brian Cox and Vanessa Redgrave, give stage-worthy perform...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=54568 Mon, 16 Apr 2012 03:55:01 PDT Highly Recommended I must admit to taking Meryl Streep for granted most of the last 30 years. After a pretty amazing early film career in films like The Deer Hunter (1978), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), and Sophie's Choice (1982), for me Streep's movies began a big downward slide beginning with the absurdly overrated Out of Africa (1985). But recently she's managed one revelatory role after another, from her spirited leading performance in the musical Mamma Mia! (2008) to her latest, as British Prime Minster Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (2011). It's a sort-of biopic that's been widely misunderstood, although Streep's performance has been hailed by almost literally everyone who has seen it. Regardless of the film's merits, Streep's frail Lady Margaret struggling with dementia is one the greatest film performances I've ever seen. That ...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=53884 Wed, 14 Mar 2012 10:13:37 PDT Highly Recommended My Week With Marilyn isbased upon the diariesof Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) and his experience in getting to knowactress MarilynMonroe over the short course of a week in which she opened up to himemotionally and became close. The script is told through hisperspective as thestory is based upon his own memories of the ...Read the entire review ]]> Theatrical http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=54672 Thu, 16 Feb 2012 17:12:04 PST Highly Recommended Coach Bill Courtney disputes the notion, commonly distributed by his fellow high school football coaches, that football builds character. "Football reveals character," he insists. He would know; for years before he took over as coach at Manassas High in North Memphis, Tennessee, the team would go entire seasons without a victory; they had never won a playoff game. The team had been infected by the malaise that had overtaken the town, once the booming home of a Firestone plant, now just another abandoned industrial center. But Courtney knew the materials were there for a championship team. Daniel Lindsay and T. J. Martin's extraordinary documentary Undefeated follows them through what looks like a championship season, resulting in something akin to a non-fiction Fr...Read the entire review ]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=53033 Sat, 28 Jan 2012 06:29:32 PST Skip It I Don't Know How She Does It: This is really the question those who don't much like Sarah Jessica Parker are asking. Somehow, she keeps making movies, and despite the popularity of Sex And The City, none of those movies are very good. Yet she keeps on making them. And hey, people keep eating plain white rice, too. Whoops! Here's another one, in which she plays a sassy, tiny bit frumpy woman of means. In between being married to Greg Kinnear and working a high-powered job in finance, she begins to fall for a British Guy. It's standard SJP, so you already know the score. It seems like more and more movies these days, especially comedies, come in the faux-documentary format made ubiquitous by The Office. In addition t...Read the entire review ]]> Theatrical http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=54389 Fri, 27 Jan 2012 04:34:05 PST Highly Recommended Reviewed at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival If a single critic reviews Leslye Headland's Bachelorette and doesn't mention Bridesmaids, I'll eat my hat. The filmmakers probably won't mind the comparisons--after all, that wedding party comedy's monster grosses got this one the greenlight, and quick. It doesn't have that film's warmth or sweetness; this is a sharper, spikier comedy, where the laughs have a darker, murkier undertow. It will certainly not have the kind of wide appeal that Bridesmaids did. It feels more like that picture's scrappier, foul-mouthed little sister. Some will like that idea very much. You know who you are. The central ensemble is comprised of three high school frie...Read the entire review ]]> Theatrical http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=54272 Sat, 21 Jan 2012 04:56:57 PST Rent It Reviewed at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival Exactly how much of a film's running time are we willing to spend grappling with how to approach it? It's a question worth asking in the face of This Must Be the Place, which stars Sean Penn as an aging emo rock star who hits the road to find the Nazi who tortured his father at Auschwitz. That's right; less than a week after ingesting the trailer for FDR: American Badass!, here's Robert Smith: Nazi Hunter. It will not surprise you to hear that it is a deeply strange film. Twice over its course, Penn's "Cheyenne" says "Something is not quite right here," and it's only marginally less of an understatement the second time. Something's not quite right thr...Read the entire review ]]> Theatrical http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=54216 Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:50:08 PST Highly Recommended Ralph Fiennes first played the role of Coriolanus on the London stage nearly a dozen years ago, and appears to have been unable to shake it--it stayed with him for all of this time, and here we have, as his feature film directorial debut, a film adaptation of the play. It's not hard to guess why he wanted to immortalize his performance on film; it's a decathlon for the already intense thespian, full of giant acting arias. Every word spoken to the Roman peasants drips with acidic indifference ("Get you home, you... fragments"), and when he has had enough of their accusations, his speech is powerful, rafter-shaking even--nearly as terrifying as the quiet chilliness of his proposal to ally himself with his enemy. But this isn't a book-on-tape turn, the way some actors play their Shak...Read the entire review ]]> Theatrical http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=53889 Thu, 29 Dec 2011 13:23:19 PST Highly Recommended We first meet Margaret Thatcher in the new biopic The Iron Lady in her twilight years--long after her time as British prime minister, just another old lady buying milk. Confused and delusional, she sees (and converses with) her deceased husband, Dennis (Jim Broadbent); though still smart and perceptive, her sense of reality is a little hazy, and she finds her mind wandering into the past. "You can rewind it, but you can't change it," Dennis tells her. Thatcher is played by Meryl Streep, and if the movie exists merely as a vehicle for yet another of her showcase roles, well, then, so be it. She is, no surprise, magnificent as the British conservative--her accent is sharp, her physicality is flawless, and she's equally convincing in middle and old age. She plays the po...Read the entire review ]]> Theatrical http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=53765 Mon, 19 Dec 2011 06:30:56 PST Recommended The story of the transition from silent to sound cinema has been told before--most memorably in Singin' in the Rain, but also in plays like Once in a Lifetime and between the lines of Sunset Blvd. However, the idea of telling that story in the style of a silent movie is a new one, and it is executed in Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist with wit and grace; from the opening credits, everything (the music, the font, even the aspect ratio) is just right. So is the framing and shot selection within the film itself, and the authenticity extends past the look and sound (or lack thereof); the actors also work within the broadly drawn silent movie style, and do so without condescending or laughing at it. The Artist is an aesthetic triumph; what is less cer...Read the entire review ]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=52250 Tue, 06 Dec 2011 03:51:00 PST Recommended THE FILM: It is sort of unfair to call Ned Rockliffe an idiot. Sure, he sells weed to a cop and lets a guy talk him out of $800, but his intentions are so damn good. Paul Rudd plays the idiot brother to Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel and Emily Mortimer in Our Idiot Brother, a restrained, often-amusing look at a dysfunctional family. All the parties share the screen nicely in director Jesse Peretz's comedy, which unspools as unpretentiously as Ned's sunshine personality. After a stint in the pokey, Ned is released to find that his girlfriend (Kathryn Hahn) has moved on with a similarly dopey slacker (T.J. Mille...Read the entire review ]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=52054 Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:43:28 PST Recommended The Movie: On paper, director Gilles Paquet-Brenner's Sarah's Key has a curious lack of potential for being yet another Holocaust Drama. The plot, about a crusading journalist in contemporary times who uncovers a personal connection with one of France's most regrettable past tragedies, is based on a best selling novel which seems to have all the earmarks of an "inspiring" Oprah's Book Club selection. Luckily, the film itself is a generally satisfying and absorbing tale with some excellent performances to recommend it. Sarah's Key opens in 1942 Paris, as a small apartment occupied by a Jewish family with the name Starzynski is raided by the police. The parents (played by Natasha Mashkevich and Arben Bajraktaraj) are flustered by the sudden intrusion, but their 10 year-old daughter Sarah (M lusine Mayance) has enough presence of mind to quickly lock her younger brother inside a s...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=53061 Mon, 28 Nov 2011 19:34:46 PST Recommended "I'm...Officer...Omar...Coleman. I'm...your...parole...officer." "I'm Ned Rockland. Why're you talkin' so slow?" "I just figured -- lookin' at your sheet, it says you sold grass to a uniformed police officer -- that you must be retarded." "Yeah, I get that a lot." Our Idiot Brother is...movie...and camera...people act and funny... Wait, wait, this isn't working. There's something I've just gotta get out of my system first: Ah, there we go! Sweet, sweet release. I guess for full disclosure and all, I should mention that I can't really pan a movie that has Zooey Deschanel and Rashida Jones making out. Maybe I'm a cheap date, and maybe I'm an a...Read the entire review ]]> Theatrical http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=52790 Sun, 09 Oct 2011 18:45:39 PDT Recommended Reviewed at the 2011 New York Film Festival "Shall I be her?" asks Marilyn Monroe, and you see how she changes--she tarts it up, putting her hand behind her head just so, moving in that distinctive way, playing up the persona of Marilyn that was, it seems, quite removed from the real person in there, the damaged girl named Norma Jean who wrestled her entire short life with crippling insecurities and terrible addictions. The dichotomy between the person and the image has been explored memorably before (most obviously in the cable movie Norma Jean and Marilyn), and that split is the key to Michelle Williams's brilliant performance in My Week with Marilyn. And it is, make no mistake, a terrific pi...Read the entire review ]]> Theatrical http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=52042 Thu, 25 Aug 2011 17:53:30 PDT Recommended Ned is a good guy. Too good. The hippy-dippy fruit seller believes that the more trust you put in the world, the more you will be rewarded with happiness. And so it is that Ned ends up selling a police officer marijuana from his stall at a farmer's market in rural New York. Not an undercover police officer, but a cop in full uniform, that's how trusting Ned is. And that's how we're led into Our Idiot Brother, a likeable film that's not nearly as dumb as it appears on the surface. A little like Ned. He is played by the always-charming Paul Rudd, who dives all the way in for the role, burying his good looks under long hair, a beard, and some hideous tank top and shorts combinations. When Ned gets out of prison nearly a year later, he hopes to return to his old life on t...Read the entire review ]]> Theatrical http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=52046 Thu, 25 Aug 2011 17:53:30 PDT Recommended Jesse Peretz's Our Idiot Brother is the kind of movie that may very well play better on a second viewing, once your expectations have been adjusted and you know what they're going for. It is not, in spite of its broad premise and rather stock characters, a laugh-a-minute comedy; Peretz (and writers David Schisgall and Evgenia Peretz) go for a more muted, low-key affair. Then again, a second look might make all the more apparent the film's central flaw--that those two approaches are fundamentally at odds with each other. It is a good film, due primarily to the skill and pizzazz of its loaded cast. It is not a great film, though, because it doesn't seem sure of exactly what it wants to be. It is the story of Ned (Paul Rudd), a likable and utterly dim-witted hippie type,...Read the entire review ]]> Theatrical http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=51067 Thu, 21 Jul 2011 18:25:27 PDT Recommended "Submarine" is certainly a humane picture, but it's often so affected, a mouthguard should be issued with every ticket to prevent oral damage from all the reflexive teeth grinding triggered when writer/director Richard Ayoade blasts the screen with unrelenting quirk. It's a film that commences with fidgets and concludes partially asleep, yet between the artificial moments lies an astute comedy about teen anxiety and the cruel realities of first love. Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) is a teenager with a buzzing mind, always observing, working a constant inner-monologue as he navigates his English school years in the 1980s. His parents, Lloyd (Noah Taylor) and Jill (Sally Hawkins), are present but distant, working out their own marital troubles when Jill's first love, van-based myst...Read the entire review ]]> Theatrical http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=51068 Thu, 21 Jul 2011 18:25:27 PDT Recommended There are several abyssal melodramatic pits "Sarah's Key" has difficulty avoiding, but it proffers a tale of breakthrough that's engrossing, shedding light on a few dark corners of French history. Guided by Kristin Scott Thomas's focused performance, the picture depicts disturbing, paralyzing feelings of loss and guilt, though it achieves a few too many moments through clumsy hysterics. Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas) is a French journalist who's become obsessed with the story of Sarah, a young Jewish girl involved in the Vel' d'Hiv roundup in WWII-era France who convinced her little brother to stay locked inside a hidden closet until her return. Separated from her parents and dumped into a work camp, Sarah struggled to return home and free her sibling. Inheriting Sarah's apartme...Read the entire review ]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=50510 Mon, 20 Jun 2011 17:48:19 PDT Recommended A topical film that grapples (somewhat aloofly) with the importance of "work" in our daily lives, The Company Men is reasonably intelligent and well-acted - and it features Kevin Costner finally pulling off an accent. Writer-director John Wells tackles the ongoing recession with sensitivity, portraying three characters (played by Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, and Chris Cooper) whose positions within a single large corporation are affected in differing ways by the company's need to continue providing good quarterly results to investors amid an ongoing economic crisis. Yet Wells doesn't quite go far enough; these three characters' identities are very much bound up in their jobs, and Wells never properly examines the consequence...Read the entire review ]]> Theatrical http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=50424 Thu, 16 Jun 2011 15:06:11 PDT Highly Recommended Oliver Tate is a boy growing up in Wales in the mid-1980s. He has a heavy sailor's overcoat befitting his seaside locale, but with his shaggy haircut, it makes him look like something off of a cover of a 1960s record album. He also looks a little like Bud Cort from Harold and Maude, a happy coincidence, for sure, since Hal Ashby's movie has a heavy sway over Submarine. Replace Cat Stevens songs with new numbers from Arctic Monkeys-frontman Alex Turner, make the romance more age appropriate, and you've got a pretty good idea what Submarine is like. Which is to say that Submarine is very good. We can all use a little more Harold and Maude-like vibes in our lives. Twenty-year-old actor Craig Roberts takes the lead as Oliver, an imaginative ad...Read the entire review ]]> Theatrical http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=50135 Thu, 02 Jun 2011 16:22:05 PDT Highly Recommended I had a Jordana. I think we all did. Jordana is Oliver Tate's first--his first real kiss, his first sex, his first girlfriend, his first relationship, his first heartbreak. How they come together, and how they fall apart, is the subject (sort of) of Richard Ayoade's Submarine, but that description doesn't do the film justice: it makes it sound far more sentimental and nostalgic than it is. Ayoade (who wrote the script, from Joe Dunthorne's novel) doesn't just remember what it is to feel the first flush of love; he also remembers the moment when you discover that someone you fancy has the capability of being just awful. And the moment when you realize that maybe that's all an act. And the moment when you realize that you're capable of being awful too. Oliver (Craig Robe...Read the entire review ]]> Theatrical http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=49566 Thu, 28 Apr 2011 17:11:50 PDT Skip It Now here's a sequel nobody asked for. A modest box office hit, "Hoodwinked" cut through the competition with its brand of fairy tale satire and sarcasm, providing a budget "Shrek" experience for families hungry for something to see in January, 2006. The sequel limps to screens five years later (after a year gathering dust on the shelf), and while the technical effort shows some badly needed improvement, the jokes are as stale and dated as ever, making the second round a sleepy viewing event, despite the presence of a splashy 3D makeover to pinch a few more bucks out of paying customers. The Happily Ever After Agency has stumbled up a major case when Verushka the Witch (voiced by Joan Cusack) has kidnapped Hansel (Bill Hader) and Gretel (Amy Poehler), holding them for a special...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=47696 Mon, 18 Apr 2011 21:10:16 PDT Highly Recommended The Film: I'll be frank: there's really not much negative to be said about The King's Speech, Tom Hooper's biopic about the stammer-laden King George VI in pre-WWII England. Those who've seen the director's historical portraits The Damned United and HBO's miniseries John Adams will attest to his skill in recreating time periods with flair, both in composition and punchy performances from his leads. His talent feeds well into this clear-cut story of royalty confronting a debilitating condition to better his presence in the public's eye, which depicts this historical against-the-odds tale with a clear head and a concise eye, engineered to be an award contender through a level of polish that's hard to overlook. Even if David Seidler...Read the entire review ]]>