The Program:
They say ignorance is bliss, and there's a part of me that remembers with some fondness the old days when watching television was a lot less complicated. It hardly seems very long ago that, so long as your VCR was plugged into the TV with a simple RF coaxial cable (the type with the pointy spike on the end), you were pretty much good to go. If the picture didn't look right, fiddling with the obscurely-labeled knobs on the set's front panel was about all there was to be done about it. Then I think about the dreadful quality those old TVs offered and my nostalgia fades away.

These days, the quality of television imagery has reached an entirely different plane of existence. A good HDTV can produce a picture of breathtaking vibrancy and clarity, but only when set up correctly. The downside to the march of technology is the added complexity that comes along with it. Today's ...Read the entire review

The Program:
They say ignorance is bliss, and there's a part of me that remembers with some fondness the old days when watching television was a lot less complicated. It hardly seems very long ago that, so long as your VCR was plugged into the TV with a simple RF coaxial cable (the type with the pointy spike on the end), you were pretty much good to go. If the picture didn't look right, fiddling with the obscurely-labeled knobs on the set's front panel was about all there was to be done about it. Then I think about the dreadful quality those old TVs offered and my nostalgia fades away.

These days, the quality of television imagery has reached an entirely different plane of existence. A good HDTV can produce a picture of breathtaking vibrancy and clarity, but only when set up correctly. The downside to the march of technology is the added complexity that comes along with it. Today's ...Read the entire review

The Program:
They say ignorance is bliss, and there's a part of me that remembers with some fondness the old days when watching television was a lot less complicated. It hardly seems very long ago that, so long as your VCR was plugged into the TV with a simple RF coaxial cable (the type with the pointy spike on the end), you were pretty much good to go. If the picture didn't look right, fiddling with the obscurely-labeled knobs on the set's front panel was about all there was to be done about it. Then I think about the dreadful quality those old TVs offered and my nostalgia fades away.

These days, the quality of television imagery has reached an entirely different plane of existence. A good HDTV can produce a picture of breathtaking vibrancy and clarity, but only when set up correctly. The downside to the march of technology is the added complexity that comes along with it. Today's ...Read the entire review

"A whole family lost to car crashes. Enough to make a person buy a bike."

The Movie:
Few filmmakers can honestly be called visionaries. While there are plenty of talented directors who can shoot beautiful photography, rare are those who actually see the very nature of the medium differently than it has ever been used before, who create indelible images that burn into a viewer's subconscious. With only a small handful of movies to his credit, none of them big box office draws, New Zealander Vincent Ward nonetheless falls into that category. The director initially made a small splash on the art house scene with his 1988 film The Navigator, about a group of medieval English villagers fleeing from the Black Plague who dig a tunnel so deep that it leads all the way to the 20th Century. He followed that in 1993 with Map of the Human Heart, an epic romance spanning from...Read the entire review

"Oh, you gotta be shittin' me!"

The Movie:
Darkman, huh? "Dumbman" would be more like it.

Long before he was handed the keys to the Spider-Man franchise, which he's taken on a rollercoaster ride in three successive entries ranging from generally tedious to pretty good to completely unwatchable, back in 1990 director Sam Raimi tried his hand at creating his own comic book-styled superhero with Darkman. It's not based on an actual comic book, mind you, just done in the style of Batman, Dick Tracy, and other movies for which Danny Elfman provided the score (a de rigeur requirement for the genre). Raimi is certainly a talented guy, and has a sizable fanbase for his Evil Dead pictures, but he's also wildly uneven, as we've all been recently reminded with Spider-Man 3. Though it has a small cadre of fans who will defend it a...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Somewhere in the middle of the 18th Century, the French countryside is being terrorized by the "Beast of Gévaudan", a creature officially classified as a really big wolf. Really big. We're talking huge. And mean. This thing doesn't just hunt its prey, it stalks women and children, picks them up, and smashes them to a bloody pulp. No one has gotten a close look at the monster and lived, but the locals are convinced that it's supernatural in origin. Sent to investigate is the Royal Naturalist Sir Grégoire de Fronsac (Samuel Le Bihan), a handsome studmuffin with a skeptical, scientific mind. Fronsac brings along his best friend/bodyguard Mani, an American Indian who can commune with the animal spirits and also knows kung-fu, which of course comes in handy when hunting wolves (Man...Read the entire review

The Movie:
When he adapted the Robert Ludlum potboiler bestseller The Bourne Identity back in 2002, director Doug Liman clearly set out to make a modern, topical spy thriller that would break out from underneath the shadow of the aging James Bond franchise, which had at the time grown bloated and indulgent in action movie excesses. Borrowing little more than the basic characters and premise from the novel, Liman's film gave us a smart, capable, and utterly no-nonsense intelligence operative who favors decisive action over bad puns and silly gadgets. Little did the filmmaker know how much influence he would actually have. Not only was his movie a big hit that spawned a pair of sequels, even James Bond himself has started taking cues from Jason Bourne, the venerable secret agent reinvented in the Bourne mode for his most recent outing Read the entire review

The Movie:
Andy Garcia directs and stars in The Lost City, a love letter to pre-Castro Cuba that the actor claims he'd been trying to make for 16 years. Unfortunately, as we've learned from similar such passion projects mounted by stars in the past, not all actors are meant to direct. As much love, energy, and hard work as he may have put into the production, the end result is as flaccid and dull as most of Garcia's recent acting performances.

Staged as a Godfather-like epic about the last days of Havana prior to the Communist revolution, the film stars Garcia as Fico, a successful nightclub owner whose family is as divided as the country itself. Fico cares not for politics and just wants to make an honest living putting on a good show in the club, but his two brothers both have a revolutionary bent, albeit for differing political factions. One follows Castro mind, bod...Read the entire review

"I think she's the fuck of the century."

The Movie:
Thank god for Paul Verhoeven. Nobody makes movies like he does, though many have certainly tried. For those who would argue that even the best director is nothing without a good script, just look at what the crazy Dutchman made from Basic Instinct, based on a completely idiotic screenplay that megalomaniac writer Joe Eszterhas had already sold once under the title Jagged Edge and would recycle again later for Jade. Broken down to a story level, these are all basically the same movie with only superficial changes in detail or character names. Yet Basic Instinct stands head and shoulders above the others, as well as above its own wretched sequel and countless imitators. It's the best (some would say t...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Luc Besson's fizzy, Europop sci-fi extravaganza The Fifth Element has been a popular home video staple for good reason. Its brightly colored, comic book production design and over-the-top visual effects make transfixing home theater eye candy. Even more importantly, the movie is gloriously goofy entertainment that never takes itself seriously for a second. Bruce Willis stars in the typical Bruce Willis action hero role, trapped inside an unabashedly cornball spectacle featuring flying cars, alien monsters, lots of explosions, a hot chick who kicks ass, and an impending apocalypse of pure evil that can only be defeated by love, man, true love. How freakin' awesome is that? The director first conceived the movie when he was still in high school, and some 20-odd years later ma...Read the entire review

"I understand Double-0s have a very short life expectancy."

The Movie:
Much fuss has been made about the latest James Bond action extravaganza Casino Royale "rebooting" the franchise. Daniel Craig steps in as the sixth star to officially play the role, and brings a decidedly grittier, rough and tumble interpretation to the character, in stark contrast to the suave pomposity of the Pierce Brosnan years. The movie takes a back-to-basics approach, stripping away a lot of the silly gadgets, diabolical madmen, and far-fetched world domination plots that have long been the hallmarks of the Bond formula. It's really quite an effective rejuvenation for a series that last tortured viewers with the abhorrent Die Another Day. And yet, to put things into perspective, any long-tim...Read the entire review

"All I'm saying is, I just want to be treated like a human being!"

The Movie:
In promotional interviews he gave back in 1989, Oliver Stone likened the difference between Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July to the progression from The Iliad to The Odyssey. It's an apt comparison. The former details the experience of war, both the glory and the horror, from the heart of battle itself, while the latter shows us that the warrior's journey home can be just as difficult. Despite its position in the director's Vietnam trilogy, Born on the Fourth of July spends very little time in combat or in the Southeast Asian region. The bulk of the story takes place right in the U.S.A., which at the time was almost as contentious a battlefield.

Tom Cruise delivers one his best performances in the true story of Ron Kovic, a red-blooded, Patriotic kid from M...Read the entire review

"Dark and difficult times lie ahead. Soon we must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy."

The Movie:
When it comes to the Harry Potter movie franchise, viewers tend to divide into two camps. There are fans of the J.K. Rowling books who cherish the first two Chris Columbus films for their word-by-word faithful illustrations of the author's text, regardless of pacing or storytelling faults, and who generally dislike Alfonso Cuarón's third entry for daring to streamline and take liberties with its source material. Then there are those who feel the opposite, who found the Columbus films ponderously dull and pedestrian, and who appreciate Cuarón's vision for making the third chapter into a watchable motion picture. I personally fall into the latter category. For me, not only was The Prisoner of Azkaban a quantum leap improvement over its predece...Read the entire review

"Everybody got to have a dream."

The Movie:
Hustle & Flow is about a drug-dealing pimp who aspires to become a rapper. In the great and varied history of the motion picture art form, I can think of few movies whose subject matter I would be less inclined to find interesting. As many good things as I'd heard about the film, I remained skeptical right up until about the first scene, which is when it started to win me over. And that's exactly the genius of the picture, that it subverts all expectations set for it. Whether you go in anticipating a misogynistic, exploitative B-movie, or whether you've been inundated by the hype and awards hoopla and figure that it can't possibly live up, once the movie settles into its groove, it simply delivers a compelling story with fascinating characters, which is all anyone could hope for.

Character actor Terrence Howard stars as...Read the entire review

"Can you dig it?"

The Movie:
Walter Hill insists that he always wanted his 1979 macho action classic The Warriors to look and feel like a comic book, but after watching his 2005 Ultimate Director's Cut reworking of the movie, I get the feeling that the man has never actually read a comic. The film's cartoonish influences were always perfectly clear (the last time I checked, there weren't too many gangs dressed like mimes roaming the streets of New York City), but the new comic panel inserts the director has added just go too far. They feel out of place and drag down the pacing. Fortunately, the bulk of the picture remains intact as it's remembered, and even with these annoying revisions the movie is still a lot of fun.

"Sometime in the future....", a future that ...Read the entire review

Your regular reviewer Josh here. Though I am a great lover of all sorts of movies regardless of subject matter, an understanding of the chick flick genre continues to elude me. Some movies were just not made for me. For those, I must defer to the greater wisdom of an expert on the topic, and so I turn the movie portion of this Dirty Dancing review over to my wife Elizabeth, who previously helped me to make some sense out of The Devil Wears Prada. I hope that readers find a proper female perspective more useful than anything I could write. The 3.5 star rating you see to the side of this article is a composite score of our respective opinions on the film (I'll let you figure out for yourself which of us rated it higher and which rated it lower). I'll return for the technical portions of the article below.

"Thi...Read the entire review

"I grew up in a tough neighborhood. We used to say, you can get further with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word."

The Movie:
The Untouchables is what every Hollywood movie should be: a talented director, a great script, a top-flight cast, and the sort of lavish production values that only a major studio can provide combined together into a film that works on just about every level. Brian DePalma brings plenty of his auteur flourishes but stays on his best behavior, delivering an impeccable level of craftsmanship and visual flair while avoiding the outrageous excess he'd become notorious for. David Mamet's screenplay offers an engrossing story and cracking dialogue without lapsing into his artier affectations. Kevin Costner, still a young and hungry actor before his ego got the best of him, makes a fine leading man, with stellar supporting turns fro...Read the entire review

"I'm not too sure about her."

The Movie:
Bubble finds Steven Soderbergh in one of his artier moods. The movie was promoted solely based on the director's reputation ("Another Steven Soderbergh Experience" the poster tag line reads), and is the type of experimental work that he periodically uses to cleanse his palette between Ocean's 11 sequels. It's a film from the side of Soderbergh who's produced the likes of Schizopolis and Full Frontal, not so much the side responsible for mainstream-friendly fare like Erin Brockovich and Traffic. Viewers should set their expectations accordingly.

The picture was shot on the cheap in small town America using nonprofessional actors and largely improvised dialogue. The story concerns the workers at a doll factory, and I have no doubt that Soderbergh's main desire for making the movie was to shoot ...Read the entire review

"I think she's the fuck of the century."

The Movie:
Thank god for Paul Verhoeven. Nobody makes movies like he does, though many have certainly tried. For those who would argue that even the best director is nothing without a good script, just look at what the crazy Dutchman made from Basic Instinct, based on a completely idiotic screenplay that megalomaniac writer Joe Eszterhas had already sold once under the title Jagged Edge and would recycle again later for Jade. Broken down to a story level, these are all basically the same movie with only superficial changes in detail or character names. Yet Basic Instinct stands head and shoulders above the others, as well as above its own wretched sequel and countless imitators. It's the best (some would say t...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Curse of the Golden Flower will no doubt be seen as the capper to Zhang Yimou's recent trilogy of historical wuxia action epics. Though no doubt true, it's also something of a melding of the two halves of Zhang's filmmaking career. The latest project mixes elements of his earlier, politically-minded dramas (many of which starred former girlfriend Gong Li, who reunites with the director here for the first time since 1995's Shanghai Triad) and his more recent martial arts fantasies Hero and House of Flying Daggers. In fact, Golden Flower has much more character drama, political scheming, and royal palace intrigue than it does high-flying kung-fu action.

Set during the Tang Dynasty of 928 AD, the film chronicles the back-stabbing, double-dealing, and twisted romantic entanglements of the court of Emperor Ping (Chow Yun-Fat). His royal conc...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Thai filmmakers Danny and Oxide Pang (identical twins) made an international splash a few years ago with their horror chiller The Eye. Blatantly inspired by The Sixth Sense's "I see dead people" theme, the movie may not have been terribly original but was clever, stylish, and genuinely scary, a real treat for horror fans. The success of that picture spawned a less-effective sequel, The Eye 2, which then led to a truly awful second sequel/comedy spoof The Eye 10. I don't know what they were thinking with that last one, but the Pang Brothers had nevertheless earned enough of a reputation to attract the attention of Hollywood. So now we have their American debut, The Messengers, a dull and shamelessly derivative PG-13 teen horror flick with almost nothing to distinguish itself from other recent entries in the genre.

The plot, such as it is,...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Produced for a mere $6 million, modest even by 1984 standards, the first Terminator movie was a surprise success that launched director James Cameron and star Arnold Schwarzenegger onto the Hollywood A-list. After respective careers each boasting bigger and bigger hits, the two finally reunited in 1991 for Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Greenlit by the now-defunct Carolco studio with an astounding budget in the vicinity of $100 million, not only was it the most expensive movie ever made at that point, the sequel's budget was somewhere more than three times larger than the entire domestic box office gross of the first film. It was a huge risk from a studio that eventually drove itself into bankruptcy making similar gambles (the company's finances were such a mess that ev...Read the entire review

"Men, we are honorable soldiers of the Emperor. Don't ever forget that. The only way left for us is to die with honor."

The Movie:
When he started pre-production on his WWII epic Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood did not originally envision the material split into two separate movies. As work progressed, however, the idea of retelling the story of the famous battle from the Japanese perspective kept gnawing away at him until eventually the companion piece Letters from Iwo Jima was launched for back-to-back production. Conceived as such practically as an afterthought, the latter movie (produced entirely in the Japanese language) surprisingly went on to much greater acclaim and largely overshadowed the original project.

The shot that opens Letters is a del...Read the entire review

"The right picture can win or lose a war."

The Movie:
There's no denying the impressive breadth of Clint Eastwood's ambition in making two back-to-back WWII films, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, each telling the story of the same infamous battle but from different perspectives. It's a conceit that had been attempted previously within individual movies, notably 1970's Tora! Tora! Tora! about the Pearl Harbor attack, but dividing the two sides into their own separate films enhances the purity of vision of each, presenting each viewpoint in its entirety without having to constantly switch back and forth between them. Unfortunately, anyone who's seen the two will tell you that the American half of this diptych, Flags of Our Fathers, is certainly the weaker of the pictures artistically. While that's true, it's the combination of the two ...Read the entire review

"Freaks are one thing. There's no objection to freaks, but this is entirely different. This is monstrous."

The Movie:
Although it can probably be considered his most conventional feature, David Lynch's 1980 film The Elephant Man shares the director's distinct authorial voice made famous in such decidedly off-the-wall cult items as Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. The movie's striking black and white photography, like that of his debut Eraserhead, is richly textured and filled with intricate detail. As with all of his works, Lynch evokes a truly palpable sense of atmosphere, with fascinating aural and visual cues layered throughout every scene. His recurring fascination with freaks, lunatics, and the dangers of industrial mechanization are also well in evidence. Yet The Elephant Man marries these themes and signature style to a relatively str...Read the entire review

"If you're a rat, then I'm the biggest fucking mutt in the history of the Mafia."

The Movie:
I'm sure that Johnny Depp would probably not care for the comparison, but I like to think of his 1997 gangster drama Donnie Brasco as 21 Jump Street for adults. The actor first rose to fame playing an undercover cop on the flashy TV show for teens, and here we find him in a serious version of the same role in a high-minded motion picture with Al Pacino for a costar and a respected A-list director. Sure, it's not exactly the same thing, but it's kind of fun to think of it that way. It's that or Goodfellas-lite, which isn't really a very flattering characterization for the movie either.

Donnie Brasco is of course the movie that brought the phrase "Fahgeddabadah" to the pop culture lexicon for a brief moment in time. Based on the true story of FBI Agent Jose...Read the entire review

"This is not mission: difficult, Mr. Hunt. It's mission: impossible. Difficult should be a walk in the park."

The Movie:
For reasons that I'm sure no one else on Earth will ever understand, after the blockbuster success of Brian DePalma's Mission: Impossible in 1996, Tom Cruise hired Hong Kong action maestro John Woo to direct the sequel in 2000. Mission: Impossible II (or M:I-2 as the posters dubbed it) didn't even bother pretending it was in any way connected to the previous movie (much less the old TV series), instead changing the Hunt character from an untested secret agent into an invincible superhero trapped in an indulgent action melodrama. If you were to strip away the franchise name and change the characters around a little bit, I honestly think the production would be more highly regarded as one of Woo's better American films, but in terms of bei...Read the entire review

"This is not mission: difficult, Mr. Hunt. It's mission: impossible. Difficult should be a walk in the park."

The Movie:
For reasons that I'm sure no one else on Earth will ever understand, after the blockbuster success of Brian DePalma's Mission: Impossible in 1996, Tom Cruise hired Hong Kong action maestro John Woo to direct the sequel in 2000. Mission: Impossible II (or M:I-2 as the posters dubbed it) didn't even bother pretending it was in any way connected to the previous movie (much less the old TV series), instead changing the Hunt character from an untested secret agent into an invincible superhero trapped in an indulgent action melodrama. If you were to strip away the franchise name and change the characters around a little bit, I honestly think the production would be more highly regarded as one of Woo's better American films, but in terms of bei...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Unlike its two sequels, Brian DePalma's 1996 Mission: Impossible at least made a token effort at referencing the 1960s TV show from which it was purported based with one character name and the basic premise, but took a great many liberties in its zeal to turn the teamwork emphasis of the original into a Tom Cruise vanity project. That one carry-over character, team leader Jim Phelps (played by Jon Voight here), undergoes a major personality rewrite that certainly displeased fans of the old series. If you can get past that, however, the first Mission makes for some pretty damn good slam-bang summer blockbuster entertainment, and frankly is the only entry in the franchise that could honestly be called a spy movie.

As portrayed in this first film, Cruise's Ethan Hunt is a young and inexperienced secret agent, and even kind of a wuss (he actually gets beaten up ...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Although the genre was once a staple of movie theater screens and continues to dominate Broadway stages, these days it seems that the people who make movies are more in love with the idea of musicals than the people who pay to see them. A-list directors such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, and James Brooks have tried (and failed) to revive the format, but by and large modern audiences rarely connect with films where the characters randomly burst into song, unless the picture is animated and most of the leads are talking animals. There are exceptions, naturally. Generally speaking, the musical bio-pic (Ray, Walk the Line, etc.) is considered immune from modern biases, so long as the characters are meant to be professional singers and all of the songs stem organically from their performances and re...Read the entire review

"We're happy. Aren't we?"

The Movie:
With Closer, Mike Nichols returns to a theme he first explored in his 1966 directorial debut Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and again in later pictures such as The Graduate and Carnal Knowledge, how it is that love can make people desperately miserable. The movie is headlined by Julia Roberts but functions as the antithesis of the actress's usual fuzzy romantic comedies. The film presents love as a messy, usually unsatisfying process whereby needy people exploit each other's insecurities, and where the meet-cute doesn't necessarily lead to a happily-ever-after.

Closer tells the story of four strangers whose paths cross in London and whose love lives grow entangled in all sorts of complicated ways. Jude Law stars as lowly obit writer and failed novelist Dan, a selfish prick with little concern for anyon...Read the entire review

"I think those stories about you being dead were true. You're just too thick-headed to admit it."

The Movie:
How's this for a sad irony? In the process of making a film about a man betrayed by his partners and left for dead, only to resurface out of the blue years later to rebuild his life, Brian Helgeland (screenwriter of L.A. Confidential and Mystic River, as well as later director of A Knight's Tale) found himself betrayed by his business partners, and his film Payback mangled and dumped in theaters where it fizzled commercially. Now, eight years after it had been largely forgotten, the movie returns in a newly resurrected Director's Cut that restores the project to its filmmaker's original intentions. In both cases, the film itself as well as the plot its characters pursue, the ...Read the entire review

"This is what happens when the moral fabric of society breaks down."

The Show:
For the past decade, those potty-mouthed 4th Graders Kyle, Stan, Kenny, and Cartman have terrorized their quiet redneck mountain town, much to the hilarity of the rest of the world. Currently in its 11th season, South Park continues to be one of the crudest, foulest, most politically incorrect, and (most importantly) funniest shows on television. The episode Good Times With Weapons originally aired as the 8th season premiere, but has just now been remastered into High Definition quality as a special promotion for the show's new season and the HD DVD format.

Left to their own devices at the local fair, our gang of misfit boys wander over to a booth selling "Martial Arts Weapons of the F...Read the entire review

The Program:
Let's start with a little bit of history. Joe Kane Productions was formed in 1982 for the purpose of improving the quality of NTSC color television, back at a time when few consumer end-users cared much about such things beyond fiddling with the 'Color' and 'Tint' knobs on their TVs every so often to "dial in" the picture to their liking. Founder Joe Kane has also acted as Chair of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) Working Group and in 1994 helped to form the Imaging Science Foundation. In 1988, during the infancy of what is now known as home theater, Kane released a program titled A Video Standard on laserdisc, then the highest quality home video format of choice for discerning movie watchers. That disc was the first product an average co...Read the entire review

"I'm not a gangster. I'm a businessman whose commodity happens to be cocaine."

The Movie:
Taking the long view, over time Layer Cake will probably be best remembered as the movie that got Daniel Craig his gig as James Bond. Formerly a hardworking but little noticed supporting player in pictures like Road to Perdition and Tomb Raider, Craig's charismatic turn as the unnamed protagonist of this little British crime movie proved that he had genuine star potential, and obviously caught the attention of the folks at EON Productions, who eventually signed him up to take over from Pierce Brosnan in the Bond franchise reboot Casino Royale. Watching the movie now, it's obvious what they saw in him. Debonaire and deadly serious, yet also...Read the entire review