The Movie:

Jack and Diane is a great example of why I love to watch movies without knowing very much about them beforehand. The only thing I knew about this going in was that it was a love story between two girls, which it is, but it's got some weird stuff going on. Since you're reading this review, you likely do want to know a bit more about it so I'll tell you without spoiling too much.

Juno Temple (daughter of director Julien Temple) is Diane, in New York visiting her aunt before heading off to school in Paris for a year. She meets Jack, played by Riley Keough (granddaughter of Elvis Presley- really!) and they quickly fall in love. Jack is mu...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Compliance is not a pleasant film. I sat on the edge of my seat, infuriated to the point of moving the remote so I wouldn't throw it at the screen. "How the hell is this happening?!" I thought. The story would be an unbelievable house of lies and senseless players if it weren't true. Compliance is based on events that occurred in 2004 at a Mount Washington, Kentucky, McDonald's, where a prank caller convinced the assistant manager that he was a police officer investigating an e...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

In 2004, the quietly masterful Japanese director Kore-Eda Hirokazu (After Life, Still Walking) made Nobody Knows, a shattering film based on a true story, using nonprofessional child actors, and in large part utilizing an off-the-cuff, quasi-documentary style to effectively drive home the grim situation of siblings whose mother abandons them. Kore-Eda's latest feature, the winsome I Wish, just now being released to DVD, reveals itself to be very much a companion to Nobody Knows (the two would make a ...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Please Note: The stills used here are taken from promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

A doctor getting a god complex is a well-worn genre trope, explored in movies as far apart as Stanley Kramer's Not as a Stranger (1955) and the Alec Baldwin vehicle Malice (1995). With those movies, the story usually involves the docs overestimating their power to save lives and taking extraordinary measures to maintain their reputation. In The Good Doctor, a little-seen indie starring Orlando Bloom, the focus is far tighter. Instead of a doctor seeking to save the world, Bloom's Martin Blake tries to save just one gi...Read the entire review

Right after viewing 360, I sat down at my computer to write my review, and by pure coincidence, I got sidetracked cleaning out a document folder. Inside was a transcript of a conversation from years ago, in which I recounted the sequence in Benjamin Button about the nature of chance. It's almost eerie: not only is 360 essentially a feature-length extrapolation of that very idea, but the fact that I happened to stumble upon a description of that sequence -- which I can say for sure I would not have remembered except for complete chance also serves as a perfect illustration of that very concept.

Scripted by Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon), 360 opens with the story of Mirka (Lucia Siposov ), who is in the process of setting herself up as an escort to help pay her bills. She is accompanied to the meeting by her sister, Anna (Gabriela Marcinkova), who disapproves of her siste...Read the entire review

As the last couple weeks of 2012 wind down and I look back on The Cabin in the Woods, Detention,

The Movie

Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview is a presentation that was briefly shown in theaters of a 70-minute interview with Steve Jobs (with Steve doing 99% of the talking), shot on video for a TV show called "Triumph of the Nerds" which aired in 1996 on PBS in the US and the BBC in the UK, and currently available separately on DVD.

It starts with a short intro with the original interviewer Robert Cringely (who also worked briefly with Jobs at Apple), as he explains that only short clips from the interview were actually used on the show, and the complete master tape was lost in shipment. A complete VHS copy was recently found by Paul Sen,...Read the entire review

The Show:

A lot of people take a look at Zane Lamprey's show Drinking Made Easy on the HDNet (now AXS TV) cable network and wonder how a guy could host a drinking show which focuses on various points of the country and their drinking culture. More to the point, when would Lamprey's liver sue him for nonsupport? But while Drinking Made Easy certainly includes drinking in the foreground, in the background it is also a travelogue of sorts where drinking happens to occur, and I think that proves to make the appeal of the show far more than just one of a half hour weekly bar crawl. Now in its third season, the show's second season was recently released on video for obvious promotion and enjoyment.

The show's premise is simple: going from place to place and enjoy the culture and have a beer or a drink every so often. For those longtime viewers of the show, one of the things t...Read the entire review

Within half an hour of leaving the screening for Compliance, I was alternately asked if I liked the movie and what I generally thought of it. Both are very straightforward queries, and yet in correlation with this film, very difficult to answer. This, I would wager, is by design. Writer/director Craig Zobel wants you to have an uneasy relationship with his creation.

Compliance is based on a widely reported story from the early part of the last decade. A man passing himself off as a police officer called his local fast food chain restaurant and told the manager that the girl working the front counter was suspected of stealing from a customer's purse. The alleged cop told the manager to take the girl to the back room and search her belongings. When that yielded no...Read the entire review

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THE FILM:

Roger Brown is a bit of a cad. Brown is a slick, successful headhunter who recruits and vets executives for major corporations. Trouble is, Brown confesses in an opening voiceover, that he is only 5' 6" tall and has a smoking hot wife, so he compensates by owning a home he cannot afford and showering her with jewelry. Brown consistently avoids his wife's pleas to start a family, and sees another woman on the side. To support his dependents, Brown also steals expensive artwork and resells it on the black market. Things get tricky when Brown steals a rare piece from a ruthless owner unwilling to let it go without a fight. Headhunters, adapted from Jo Nesb 's novel "Hodejegerne," is best appreciated by viewers who take its twisty ride ...Read the entire review

The Film:

In 2007, actress Julie Delpy (Three Colors: White) branched out and wrote and directed her first feature-length film. 2 Days in Paris was a well-made romantic comedy (of sorts) that borrowed heavily from the Before Sunrise/Before Sunset series (which Delpy starred in). It was a talky relationship picture about two people together in a specific space during a specific amount of time.

Five years later, Delpy picks up the story of her avatar, a late-30s photographer named Mari...Read the entire review

Sometimes, a movie is so inventive, so unusual, so exciting, that you laugh at the pure audaciousness of what's happening on screen. As a story about a character, Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stj rne Nilsson's Sound of Noise isn't as compelling as it ought to be, struggling to tie everything together, but the heart of the film consists of several of these transcendent moments, bursting with an enthusiastic creative energy that few movies muster during their entire running time.

Amadeus (Bengt Nilsson) is a police officer. His whole family, including his conductor brother Oscar (Sven Ahlstr m), is very musical, but Amadeus is tone-deaf, and as such, dislikes music. Already a bit of an outsider, Amadeus' situation takes a turn for the worse when a group of six renegade drummers begin wreaking a tuneful, rhythmic havoc on the city, leaving their calling-card metronomes, alarmed citizens -- and for ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Bob Marley's legacy and music has stayed visible for many in the fourth decade since his 1981 death from cancer, and with each passing year since his death the story of his life was retold with more and more fuzziness by the storyteller. With the release of Marley, many of these stories are told in an attempt to put in a post in the ground so that the history remains clear, but it also serves as an appreciation to the man as well as the musician.

The film was directed by Kevin MacDonald (The Last King of Scotland), who came to the project after Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme separately withdrew before or after principal photography. The film's executive producers are Marley's son Ziggy and Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records, which served as Marley's springboard to worldwide suc...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

"You have to fall in love with your work," Jiro Ono says. "You must dedicate your life to mastering your skill. That is the key to happiness." Jiro says this early on in David Geib's charming documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi; he looks straight into the camera, firm in this belief, but with a faint smile hinted on his lips. He looks, in that moment, like a man who has figured it out, and after spending an hour and a half with him, we're pretty sure he has.

Jiro's is the finest sushi restaurant in Tokyo, recipient of multiple awards and reams of praise. It seats ten people. Reservations must be made at least a month in advance. They serve no appetizers; their menu consists of exactly one item--the "chef's recommended special course"--priced at $30,000 yen (just shy of $400). No one complains about the lead-time, the limited choices, or the cost, because the sushi i...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Willem Dafoe, like actors Clint Eastwood, Marlon Brando and Liam Neeson, effortlessly commands an audience's attention, and easily carries a scene without speaking a word. In Australian import The Hunter, Dafoe is sent by a mysterious company to locate a rare Tasmanian tiger previously thought to be extinct. This task gives Dafoe plenty of time to wander the beautiful Tasmanian landscape, setting traps and tracking the possibly imaginary beast. The Hunter is a quiet movie, and Dafoe's interaction with a local family anchors the story, which is a bit thin despite several startling revelations. Ultimately, Dafoe's performance and the consequences of his haunting mission make The Hunter of interest.

Martin David (Dafo...Read the entire review