The Movies

Peter Fonda made his mark in low-budget, independent films and, in a way, he never really left the cinematic underground. Although 1969's Easy Rider, Fonda's star-making role, is lauded as a watershed moment in filmmaking, it's worth remembering that the film itself was made for next to nothing (an estimated $400,000 budget with a gross of $60 million), with actors who, at the time, were relative nobodies. It was a minor production at all levels, which only became seminal after the fact, with its tremendous impact on an entire generation of filmgoers. That spontaneity and ability to improvise on the fly, inherent in low- or no-budget filmmaking, seems to suit Fonda, who went on to become something of a counter-cultural icon - the grandfather of independent film, if you will.

What makes his decision to continue pursuing low-budget projects after the smashing succ...Read the entire review

The Movie

If your blood isn't boiling by the time writer-director Charles Ferguson's Inside Job draws to a close, you might want to make sure you're still alive. Much as he did with the deliberate American entanglement in Iraq in 2007's No End in Sight, Ferguson applies a bloodless, almost forensic sensibility to an issue that can polarize people in a heartbeat. Rather than fall back on bluster and rhetoric, Ferguson coolly assembles a devastating case, culled from fact instead of opinion (although it is offered, in the form of third-party interviews). The results are often as maddening as they are insightful, as Ferguson endeavors to round up everyone complicit in the sprawling catastrophe, even reaching back to the '80s and the financial markets' initial deregulation.

At its core, Inside Job endeavors to chronicle the on-going financial crisis and, particul...Read the entire review

The Movie

Everywhere you turn anymore, it seems as though American cities are in a great rush to demolish the old and erect the new. Buildings are expendable, civic leaders seem to think, and residents can simply comfort themselves with memories of an era now vanished from sight. Granted, much of the rush to build can be traced to sports stadiums - it seems every major city has at least one, if not more, stadium being placed on the chopping block for one reason or another - but there are constantly new apartment complexes, shopping centers, highways and what have you being built atop that which came before. It's the price of progress, but not without its drawbacks.

Although director Paul Crowder's The Last Play at Shea never truly wades into such deep, contemplative waters, it does at least dip its toe in. Centered around pop superstar Billy Joel's July 16 and July 18, 200...Read the entire review

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Few would begrudge Woody Allen his status as one of cinema's pre-eminent chroniclers of the follies and foibles of the human heart. Annie Hall, Manhattan, even a more recent work like Vicky Cristina Barcelona -- a great number of Allen's films deftly sketch the tricky terrain of romance. But, as he's aged, the 75-year-old Allen has become equally preoccupied with mortality and darker themes that, heretofore, more or less served as subtext.

Coming on the heels of the so-so Whatever Works, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger tries, unsuccessfully, to merge frothy romantic comedy with a clipped British sensibility and a surprisingly bleak take on growing old and grappling with regret. (Although, perhaps as an indicator of this particular work's weight, Allen alludes to Shakespeare's famous line from "Macbeth" about a "tale told by an idiot...Read the entire review

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Writer-director Alejandro Jodorowsky does not subscribe to the ideologies of conventional cinema. Boy rarely gets girl, there's no such thing as happily ever after, and plot is secondary to mood. His idiosyncratic films chart a course that few other filmmakers would dare navigate; the Chilean-born auteur first made his mark with 1970's El Topo, a spellbinding mash-up of mystic Western, philosophical tract and drug-fueled surrealism. Championed by the likes of John Lennon and his business partner, Allen Klein, Jodorowsky acquired funding to create 1973's The Holy Mountain, an even more outré work primarily concerned with metaphysical matters.

Both films are utterly striking, flirting with the fringes of pure cinema and are adored by a fervent band of acolytes. Each movie is concerned less with linear narrative than with delivering stirring, frequently bizar...Read the entire review

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Although the late Chris Farley only spent five seasons on "Saturday Night Live," he enjoyed an influence that can still be observed today. The Wisconsin native found himself on the show while a slew of comedians -- everyone from David Spade and Adam Sandler to Rob Schneider and Chris Rock -- that would fundamentally shape the tenor and tone of televised and cinematic comedy for a solid decade. The number of indelible characters Farley created -- who could forget motivational speaker Matt Foley, heart attack-prone Chicago Bears fan Todd and the "air-quotes" addicted Bennett Brauer? -- remain just as hysterically funny now as they were when they were first revealed in the early '90s.

Farley exploded off the screen and wasted little time making the transition to Hollywood, where he made a series of cameos in "SNL"-affiliated films (like Coneheads and Wayne's World...Read the entire review

The Movie

Is it possible the Beatles are beginning to feel a little picked over? It seems as though there's no end to the various angles of re-telling the same mythic rise to global superstardom, whether it's a re-release of the band's albums themselves, or tell-all books, or documentaries clinging to a bit of newly found and never released footage. That's to say nothing of the steady stream of fictional films that take a stab at crawling inside one of the most significant musical acts of the 20th century -- last year alone, thanks to what would've been John Lennon's 70th birthday, the public was washed anew in Beatlephilia, with freshly remastered collections, new books and documentaries about the man, his life and his role in the Beatles.

Add to that ever-growing heap of nostalgic product director Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy, a fictionalized look back at Lennon's turbu...Read the entire review

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"Tell me what you don't like about yourself?" -- Plastic surgeons Sean McNamara and Christian Troy to prospective patients

Looking back, it's almost quaint to think how scandalous Nip/Tuck was when it premiered nearly a decade ago. The series took its first bow in July 2003 and, almost immediately, invited controversy for its unflinching depictions of plastic surgery and some of the excesses of its fast-living characters. Created by Ryan Murphy (best known these days for breathing life into the perpetually perky teens of "Glee"), Nip/Tuck follows the lives of plastic surgeons Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) and Christian Troy (Julian McMahon), whose initially Miami-based practice plays host to all manner of, shall we say, vivid clients.

A lurid soap opera with surprising intelligence, not to mention a startling empathy for its deeply flawed character...Read the entire review

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The agony and the ecstasy of womanhood -- more specifically, motherhood -- pulses beneath every scene of Mother and Child. If the premise (a trio of women whose suddenly interlocked lives are explored via a fragmented narrative) feels familiar, it's because writer-director Rodrigo Garcia has plowed this field before. His screenplays for 2005's Nine Lives and 1999's Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her also toyed with time, the fairer sex and the messy, complicated lives all of us lead.

Although his gyno-centric films are frequently less than the sum of their parts, there's no denying that Garcia is one of the precious few filmmakers who can effortlessly tap into the female psyche, writing rich, complex parts, larded with pathos. Mother and Child is, on its surface, a drama about adoption and how it can affect families for generations. T...Read the entire review

The Movie

Initially, there's little that distinguishes Restrepo from every other recent documentary about the United States' ongoing, overseas wars. The footage, recorded by a pair of freshman directors (author Sebastian Junger and photographer Tim Hetherington), borders on mundane -- until the Humvee carrying the young soldiers and the camerman rolls over an improvised explosive device (IED). There's the dull thud of a muffled explosion, a burst of shrapnel and dust and viewers' pulses will accelerate. It's a sharp shock, a ragged spike of adrenaline which occurs frequently throughout Restrepo, one of the year's finest documentaries and a gut-wrenching travelogue that pulls back the curtain on the sacrifices made by our men and women in uniform.

Restrepo chronicles a little more than a year in the life of Battle Company's Second Platoon. The young soldiers w...Read the entire review

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Like the chaos on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps isn't quite clear what it wants to be. A emotionally charged domestic drama? A high-minded thriller about skating along the edge of the financial precipice? A worthy follow-up to a wildly popular film that's still widely quoted (and, even more sadly, more relevant than ever)? Twenty-three years after introducing the oily financier Gordon Gekko to the world, director Oliver Stone returns to the world of backroom dealings and high-stakes risk-taking with a sequel that should hit harder than it does. In the aftermath of 2008's global economic near-meltdown, a film like Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps should feel like a sledgehammer between the eyes, a work that channels the public rage at government bailouts of greedy corporations. Instead, it becomes sidetracked and bogged do...Read the entire review

The Movie

For its first half-hour, The Disappearance of Alice Creed is one of the year's best films. Gripping, hypnotic and grimly methodical, the mundane details of two men preparing for a kidnapping draws viewers in, setting the stage for a tension-filled rollercoaster ride that hurtles along towards an unsettling finale. But as good as that first 30 minutes is, writer-director J Blakeson can't quite sustain the suspense for the film's entire 96-minute run time, as pesky things like plot and dramatic structure necessitate the introduction of events that dilute, somewhat, the sinister set-up.

Danny (Martin Compston) and Vic (Eddie Marsan) are shown preparing an apartment and a van for their victim, Alice Creed (Gemma Arterton). There's scant context beyond her abduction and the men's apparent skill at creating isolated, sound-proof spaces. Alice is swiftly snatched up ou...Read the entire review

The Movie

I'll admit it up front: somehow, in all my movie-watching, I missed the cinematic glory that is 2008's Space Chimps. It might have something to do with the fact that I'm neither five years old or starved for entertainment that actively insults my intelligence, but even when I happen to stumble upon the film on HBO, I can't change the channel fast enough. Fortunately for me, the straight-to-DVD sequel Space Chimps 2: Zartog Strikes Back recaps almost every major development from the previous film before the plot of this second installment gets going. Lucky, lucky me -- and how thoughtful of director John H. Williams.

What amazes me even more than the fact that there's a sequel to Space Chimps is that the filmmakers somehow managed to get three of the main actors from the first film -- Stanley Tucci, Cheryl Hines and Patrick Warburton -- to re...Read the entire review

The Movie

Even nearly two decades after his untimely death, Sam Kinison's punchlines still scald. First rising to prominence in the early '80s, his brand of humor -- dark, cerebral and raunchy -- still has no peer in modern comedy. Blending scabrous insights, politically incorrect observations, rock music and an ex-preacher's sense of drama, he set the world of stand-up ablaze in a period when buttoned-down, brick-wall, bland humor reigned supreme. Yet there are stars from the era -- Eddie Murphy or Robin Williams, pre Patch Adams-suckage, for instance -- that transcended precisely because they took one look at the rule book and tossed it aside before blazing their own trail. Although there are elements of Kinison's material -- notably the misogynistic and homophobic rants -- that have not aged particularly well, much of what he was screaming about when Reagan was president is jus...Read the entire review

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During a particularly emotionally charged scene in writer/director Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right, the character of Jules, played by Julianne Moore, equates marriage to a marathon, that it's an endeavor resulting in ups and downs, but one worth undertaking. It's a blunt insight, albeit one that isn't particularly revelatory, yet it also underscores exactly how much of the banal domesticity Cholodenko, who co-wrote the film with Stuart Blumberg, gets right. This is an adult film, about adult situations -- and in the literal, not prurient, sense of that phrase.

That Jules and her long-time partner Nic Allgood (Annette Bening) are lesbians who used a sperm donor to have their children, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson) is, incredibly, almost beside the point. While it is the narrative's hook, the unconventional family structure is treated ...Read the entire review

The Movie

As I Knew It Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale opens, director Richard Shepard buttonholes New Yorkers with a photo from The Godfather. In it, John Cazale portrays Fredo, but Shepard can't find a soul who knows the actor's real name; to those he asks, Cazale is simply Fredo. It speaks volumes about the level of Cazale's craft, his dedication to disappearing completely inside the indelible characters he brought to life over the course of five films in the 1970s.

It's as remarkable as it is heartbreaking that Cazale, who died at the too-young age of 42 in 1978, made such an impact and had a hand in so many of the "Film School Generation"'s iconic works. Just listing them conjures visions of cinematic immortality: The Godfather; The Godfather Part II; The Conversation; Dog Day Afternoon and The Deer Hunter. Cazale was inte...Read the entire review

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As someone who instinctively flinches when the Christmas decorations start appearing in stores before the Halloween candy has scarcely been cleared from the shelves, I knew I'd (probably) really enjoy Lewis Black's Surviving the Holidays before I'd even cracked the DVD case open. It helps if you're already a fan of Black's brand of always-simmering, barely contained, comical rage, as it pulses beneath every scene of this television special, which first aired in Nov. 2009 on the History Channel.

Starting with Thanksgiving, Black points out, there are 36 days of grueling social expectations until New Year's Eve arrives and puts everyone out of their collective misery for another year. With his own acerbic observations and help from a few experts (authors, religious figures and medical personnel) and a small army of well-known and lesser-known comics (everyone from ...Read the entire review

The Movie

Journeys of self-discovery have been fodder for cinematic dramas long before Julia Roberts ate, prayed and loved her way around the world. Like love or death, finding out who you are is a universal experience, one shared by every culture on the planet. It's rich material for a filmmaker to mine and indeed, many rewarding films -- Into the Wild or The Darjeeling Limited, say -- have sprung from writers and directors in search of something about themselves or others. More often than not, such films slip over the line from earnest to maudlin, squandering whatever goodwill has been earned. Fortunately, the Bahamian-set Rain, writer-director Maria Govan's feature film debut, a few false notes notwithstanding, falls more into the well-executed than the missed opportunity camp.

"People run for all kinds of reasons," says track coach Ms. Adams (CCH Pounder...Read the entire review

The Show

TV spin-offs are a tricky breed. For every "Frasier," there's a "Joey" waiting in the wings. The alchemy that makes some series great doesn't always translate when beloved characters wander away and start fresh. Some of it is timing; in the afterglow of immensely popular series or even while the original show is still on the air, executives feel the best way to capitalize on audience sentiment is to quickly provide a facsimile of that which was adored. More often, it's simply greed: if the viewers ate up Show A, bought all the merchandise and helped keep it on the air for years, then they'll treat Show B the same way, right?

At first blush, Seth MacFarlane's viciously satiric, often unseemly "Family Guy," with its expansive cast of characters, wouldn't necessarily seem ripe for expansion (indeed, many initially assumed the MacFarlane-co-created "American Dad" might be a...Read the entire review

The Movie

A peculiar hybrid of elegant character study, domestic drama, drug comedy and gritty action thriller, writer-director Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass is one strange high. Leave it to Nelson, whose filmography is riddled with fascinating projects of his own creation (if you've never seen Eye of God or The Grey Zone, seek them out immediately) and of others' (most likely know Nelson from his sharp work in Syriana, The Incredible Hulk, O Brother, Where Art Thou? or Minority Report). He's a smart, audacious filmmaker who infuses his own work with a high-minded literary streak belying his education at Brown.

Leaves of Grass is no different. Its premise -- twin brothers, one a scholar, one a pot-addled layabout, must mend their strained relationship in order to fend off a vicious drug lord -- is the stuff of innumera...Read the entire review

The Movie

Speaking as someone who recently went through an engagement and wedding that bridged two very different cultures, I can only say that, for all director/co-screenwriter Rick Famuyiwa overplays, there is a lot he gets right in Our Family Wedding. A well-worn set-up -- Marcus, a young black man (Lance Gross) and Lucia, a young Hispanic woman (America Ferrera) intend to get married, despite initial parental hesitation -- gives way to some insight into 21st century America, the re-making of the idea of the nuclear family and the younger generation's embrace of interracial romance.

The film enjoyed a blink-and-miss-it theatrical run earlier this year, but will likely find an audience on DVD. Perhaps part of the frustration at the box office was due to the trailer, which sells Our Family Wedding as a zany, over-the-top catalog of calamity, sweetened with dollops o...Read the entire review

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When does honoring one's country become blind allegiance to evil? That's just one of many provocative questions raised by Good, a cinematic adaptation of the late British playwright C.P. Taylor's 1981 play. Effectively a character study of professor John Halder (Viggo Mortensen), who finds himself slowly assimilated into the ranks of the Nazis, Good traces the ascent of the Nazi Party in Germany in the late 1930s, as an otherwise astute intellectual is steadily seduced by the power and prestige of the nascent National Socialist movement and his shocking lack of moral outrage.

It must've been sorely tempting for screenwriter John Wrathall and director Vicente Amorim to draw parallels to contemporary society, particularly America in the wake of 9/11, and its tendency to drift toward us-vs.-them mentalities. Yet, the film shies away from overplaying its hand ...Read the entire review

The Episode

It's no secret, certainly not at this point, that Seth MacFarlane's "Family Guy" relishes little more than shattering the boundaries of good (hell, even questionable) taste. Name a taboo or prickly subject and odds are better than good that MacFarlane and his warped band of collaborators have probably poked vicious fun at it in the last decade. Animation certainly gives some leeway in creating satire, but there are few other series currently on the air that so consistently bait the FCC and the temperament of the audience.

Given "Family Guy"'s penchant for inflammatory subject matter, it's surprising that, in the series' considerable run, it's only had to bench two episodes (one of which later aired anyway). One of those, "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein," came earlier on the "Family Guy" timeline, was released uncut on DVD and eventually aired on Fox. The other contro...Read the entire review

The Movie

From its opening moments, it is clear that Temple Grandin is not a standard cinematic biography. Shattering the fourth wall, employing ingenious visual flourishes and centered on a woman whose very existence is the definition of unconventional, Temple Grandin is also a deftly composed, gorgeously understated look at autism, a complicated neural disorder few understand. Starring Claire Danes as Grandin, director Mick Jackson takes a triumphant, poignant tale and makes it eminently relatable.

Tracing Grandin's life through the '60s and '70s, as she comes of age in an era where autism is treated with life-long institutionalization, the film, which won a staggering seven Emmy awards at this year's ceremony, including honors for Danes' work, Jackson's direction and the prize for outstanding made for television movie, excels at placing viewers inside Grandin's u...Read the entire review

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Filmmakers could do worse than emulating Stanley Kubrick or Gus Van Sant right out of the gate. Both directors (and a dash of provocateur Larry Clark) are a clear influence upon writer/director Antonio Campos, whose unsettling debut Afterschool relies heavily upon a chilly, dispassionate tone, glacial pacing and a clinical style. This approach befits a story about a teenaged boarding school student, Robert (Ezra Miller), who's something of a social outcast. He spends his days wallowing in some of the roughest stuff the Internet has to offer -- graphic porn, grim clips of violence -- and generally avoiding his Bryton Academy classmates.

He drifts along, until he witnesses a horrifying tragedy that casts a pall over his school, sending the adults in charge -- personified by Mr. Burke (Michael Stuhlbarg, late of A Serious Man) -- into lockdown and counseling ...Read the entire review

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Alone, the names David Lynch and Werner Herzog are enough to get cinephiles' tongues wagging. Together? It portends epic oddities, a fantastical collaboration promising to bend the very boundaries of filmmaking -- right? Sadly, not exactly. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done is, it should be noted right up front, is an appropriately off-kilter project for the pair to have joined forces on, but nowhere near the blast of peculiarity most would expect from either director on his own. Herzog does most of the heavy lifting -- he's credited as co-writer and director -- while Lynch is one of the executive producers (perhaps he's responsible for the left-field inclusion of a little person about halfway through?).

My Son, My Son has its roots in reality. The screenplay, authored by Herzog and Herbert Golder, is based upon a true crime tale, in which a young thespian...Read the entire review

The Movie

Making a film that genuinely conveys a sense of danger grows harder with each passing year. Not only are modern audiences inured to the shock of violence, thanks to the evening news and proliferation of viral video clips easily viewed online, but filmmakers are hard-pressed to conjure tales that are as original as they are daring.

Rare is the film that can sustain its shocks and present identifiable characters, in Hollywood or elsewhere. Harry Brown is merely the latest attempt at a grim, hyper-violent character study that, despite a marvelous performance from its lead actor, completely falls apart well before the credits roll.

Oscar winner Michael Caine stars as Harry Brown, a retired ex-Royal Marine whose days are darkened by sadness. As the film opens, he's just lost his wife Kath (Liz Daniels) to a prolonged illness. Shuffling between his simple flat a...Read the entire review

The Movie

Long before Al Gore toured the world with his slick slideshow detailing just how perilously close the planet was to irrevocable destruction, a determined band of eco-activists was attempting to effect change upon a country unwilling to give up its comforts for a cleaner, healthier Earth. It's these pioneers upon whom director Robert Stone (Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst) focuses in his PBS documentary, Earth Days. Chronicling the first two decades of the environmental activism movement, Stone illustrates how the recent rush to reduce, reuse and recycle has struggled to find its footing since the days of President John F. Kennedy.

Originally broadcast on PBS as part of its invaluable "American Experience" series, Stone's film relies upon archival footage and interviews with many of the key players in the nascent environmental movement, including Stewa...Read the entire review

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Relentless, grim and reminiscent of screw-tightening thrillers from the likes of Alfred Hitchcock or the Coen brothers, director Nash Edgerton's The Square is an elegantly nasty bit of business. In the vein of modern "daylight" noirs like Separate Lies, Lantana or The Deep End, Edgerton's film takes relatively normal people, allows for a few bad choices and sits back as the stakes rise ever higher.

The Square earned quite a bit of critical acclaim earlier this year during its brief Stateside theatrical run (it was first released in Australia two years ago). Although it can't quite pack the wallop it wants to, Edgerton, working from a screenplay he co-wrote with Matthew Dabner and based upon an original story by his brother Joel (who has a bit role in the film), nevertheless manages a few knuckle-whitening moments of tension that sugges...Read the entire review

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Small Town Saturday Night is not the longest movie ever made and neither is it the worst movie ever made, but it certainly feels like both of those things throughout nearly all of its 90-minute run time. Written and directed by Ryan Smith (who gives himself a bit part as a doofy sidekick), Small Town Saturday Night is a thoroughly hackneyed and deadly dull slice of life in a sleepy Southern burg. Although the hook -- Watch Chris Pine, late of Star Trek fame, croon a country tune! -- smacks a little of the recent, Oscar-winning Crazy Heart, there's more heart, imagination and genuine art in that film's trailer than in the whole of Small Town Saturday Night.

Most maddeningly, Small Town Saturday Night throws the viewer into the midst of characters that are ill-conceived, poorly drawn and given paper-thin back stories. The film fol...Read the entire review

The Movie

Over the last five years, British comic genius Ricky Gervais has built quite the cinematic resume. (We'll, uh, overlook the Night at the Museum series.) As if cementing his pop cultural legacy with The Office and Extras was not enough, Gervais and, to a lesser extent, his creative partner Stephen Merchant, have seized their opportunity to make a handful of idiosyncratic, startlingly thoughtful comedies. Last year's The Invention of Lying, for example, was perhaps the boldest examination of the role religion and belief plays in human lives Hollywood has ever mustered.

Given the pair's track record, together and apart, leading up to Gervais and Merchant's first, official feature film, Cemetery Junction, expectations were understandably high. So, when the film came and went with relatively little fanfare earlier this year, an unsettled f...Read the entire review

The Movie

What a strange, strange film This is Not a Test turned out to be. Hats off to writer/director Christopher Angel for having the chutzpah to fuse a tart romantic comedy with political satire, dosing it with a bit of self-referential, neurotic surrealism. The plot's sheer daffiness -- nebbishy L.A. graphic designer Carl (Harper Hill) becomes consumed by the possibility of biochemical attack, putting a strain on his marriage to the spunky Viv (Robinne Lee), while Tom Arnold, playing himself, offers advice -- is a big help in getting Angel's film over some of its rougher spots.

There's no denying the timeliness of Angel's film -- in some ways, this plays like the goofy antecedent of the gripping what-if Right at Your Door -- but there's also the matter of Angel swerving between banal, cutesy rom-com situations (blind dates, a couple trying to have children) ...Read the entire review

The Movie

An admission up front: Films like Songs in Ordinary Time bore me right out of my skull. Made-for-TV adaptations of generic novels like the one penned by Mary McGarry Morris that bear the Oprah seal of approval guarantee one of two things -- redemption and cliche. Sometimes you even get both. I'm forever mystified by what attracts top-shelf talent like Sissy Spacek, Beau Bridges or Keir Dullea to mushy glop like this.

Adapted by Malcolm MacRury (who's penned everything from episodes of "Deadwood" to "Earth: Final Conflict") by the Morris novel of the same name, Songs in Ordinary Time focuses on Marie Fermoyle (Spacek), a resident of a small town in 1960 Vermont fighting to keep food on the table for her three children -- Alice (Careena Melia), Benjy (Jordan Warkol) and Norm (Tom Guiry) -- while dealing with the fallout from her divorce from the erratic, ...Read the entire review

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For the last decade, anti-heroes have been de rigeur in television series up and down the dial. From Tony Soprano, Sean McNamara, Christian Troy and Vic Mackey to Dexter Morgan, Dr. Gregory House, Kenny Powers and Andy Millman, the post-modern TV landscape is littered with men thwarted by whatever circumstance and determined to change that. Add to the list a most unlikely candidate: Mild-mannered chemistry teacher Walter White, the protagonist of the gleefully twisted, fleetingly sophisticated and altogether addictive Breaking Bad. As played by Bryan Cranston (who won an Emmy for his work here), Walter is a surprising anti-hero, in that he evokes far more sympathy than he does antipathy.

Created by Vince Gilligan ("The X-Files," Hancock), Breaking Bad owes as much to the oeuvre of David Lynch as it does to grungy, law-skirting antecedents l...Read the entire review

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For a sign of just how much times have changed since MGM: When the Lion Roars was made, back in 1992, look no further than the spine of the DVD case: MGM (and Turner Entertainment) ostensibly first oversaw the project, but Warner Brothers now distributes this particular homage to a radically changed studio and a permanently altered studio system. (That Warner Brothers is issuing this DVD is a little strange, since Fox handles home video distribution for MGM these days; perhaps it's because this is a Turner production, which would now be owned by WB.) Written by Frank Martin and Michael Henry Wilson and directed by Martin, MGM: When the Lion Roars is a sprawling, detailed look at one of Hollywood's formative studios. Hosted by Patrick Stewart, this three-part documentary, originally broadcast on TBS (and later, Turner Classic Movies), attempts to pay tribute to t...Read the entire review