Metalocalypse is still funny. In fact, it's funnier in this fourth season than it was in the third. Part of that renewed success may have to do with a return to the shorter 15-minute format of it first and second seasons. The third took on the challenge of 30-minute episodes with mixed results. Metalocalypse had comfortably settled into the shorter length, having mastered certain rhythms that worked well. By doubling the episode length, creators Brendon Small and Tommy Blacha condemned themselves to dealing with a completely new episode structure without losing all the terrific character and plot work they had done in the previous seasons. As one might expect, that season was only a qualified success...Read the entire review

The "town in North Ontario" that Neil Young first sang of on the 1970 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song, "Helpless," is documented in Jonathan Demme's hybrid film, which combines footage of Young visiting Omemee, Ontario, in 2011, with film of a solo performance that Young gave at Toronto's Massey Hall. Demme has made a sideline of Young documentaries. This his third, following Neil Young: Heart of Gold (2005) and Neil Young: Trunk Show (2009). As with the others, the emphasis here is on Young's performance; only about 20 of the film's 88 minutes are spent outside of Massey Hall. What connects the movie's two portions is the past. Both Omemee and Massey Hall are places that loom large in Young's ...Read the entire review

John C. Reilly's Dr. Steve Brule is one of the most likable characters in recent TV history. He first made regular appearances on Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! beginning in 2007. Brule was a special correspondent for Tim and Eric's fictional Channel 5 News, offering commentary and advice on topics like the human body, stomach doubling (adding a second stomach for the consumption of junk food), and how to drink wine. Exhibiting behavior that straddled the narrow territory between man-child and stroke victim, Reilly's appearances as Brule quickly became a highlight of Tim and Eric's abstract non-sequiturs and grotesquerie. Reilly's electro-fried curly hair, lazy stare, garbled delivery, and what appeared to be semi-improvised dialog...Read the entire review

It's no secret that Alfred Hitchcock treated many (not all) of his actors poorly, or at the very least, regularly directed their performances via off-camera manipulation. In Strangers on a Train, one of several films in which the director made use of homoerotic undercurrents, the Master of Suspense cast a gay actor (Farley Granger) as married straight athlete Guy, who is connived into a murder plot by implicitly gay psychopath Bruno, portrayed by a straight actor (Robert Walker). One can't help seeing Hitchcock's perverse mind at work here, creating off-screen tension between carefully chosen actors that would help create their on-screen dynamics.

Whatever the director's methods, the results remain stunningly vivid sixty years late...Read the entire review

I don't know that Gary Cooper has played a character as foreboding or mysterious as Dr. Joseph Frail, who arrives in a new mining settlement (calling it a "town" would be premature in 1873 Montana) at the beginning of The Hanging Tree. All along, we suspect that he's a force for good - this is Cooper, after all - despite demonstrating a capacity for violence and the suspicion with which he is viewed by some of the prospectors and, in particular, the batshit faith healer Grubb (George C. Scott in his first screen role). This suspicion is exacerbated when a stagecoach en route to the settlement is robbed and overturned; the sole survivor, a Swiss immigrant named Elizabeth (Maria Schell), comes under the care of Frail, whose past intrudes wh...Read the entire review

Oliver Stone's Wall Street is a landmark picture for a number of very good reasons. Its subject matter was ripe for motion picture treatment, and it was released at just the right time. Wall Street is a capsule of angst from the 1980s, capturing the morally untenable excess that defined much of that decade, and the years since. Perhaps that is the reason the film has held up so well, and why the sequel seems appropriate instead of just opportunistic.

I have the honor of now being the seventh person to review Wall Street for DVD Talk (I was also the Read the entire review

Comedians are always better live. They tend to be looser, more relaxed, and more likely to improvise and do bits of crowd work when they know they aren't being taped for the judgment of millions. Stand-up comics spend the better part of each year honing a new hour of material; from that hour, they cull five minutes to polish for the late night talk shows, should they receive those highly sought-after calls. When it comes to putting together a stand-up special for Comedy Central (or HBO, or Showtime) the pressure is even higher: we're not talking about five minutes of fine-tuned setups, but a full 60 minutes. The challenge for comedians who find themselves at this watershed moment in their careers is to cram as many jokes into that set as possible, while retaining whatever pers...Read the entire review

Disgusting and hilarious, Stuart Gordon's very loose adaptation of HP Lovecraft's Frankenstein rip-off, "Herbert West - Reanimator" (Lovecraft was ashamed of the story, having written it solely for the money), is a low-budget favorite of horror aficionados - and understandably so. Gordon and company fashioned a collection of gore effects that are admirable given the film's $900,000 budget. Cleverly shot and anchored by the inimitably creepy performance of Jeffrey Combs as West, Re-Animator is still effective, funny, and entertaining, partly because it doesn't aspire to qualities beyond those.

The film opens with a scene at a Zurich university, where Herbert West has just revived his dead profes...Read the entire review

My "memories" of Quadrophenia are by association only. I had never seen the movie until this Blu-ray release from The Criterion Collection, but I had been aware of it - perhaps excessively so - thanks to the neo-Mods of my teenage years. This was in the early 1990s, and although it would be easy enough to label these neo-Mods as misguided poseurs (which they most certainly were), it was somewhat surprising to find that the "real" Mods as portrayed in the movie are just as misguided and inauthentic. Quadrophenia is about the emptiness of the crowd, the conformity of non-conformity, and the dead-ends at the furthest reaches of a subculture.

The Who produced Quadrop...Read the entire review

Take two of the mice from Cinderella, a couple of the alligators from the sequence in Fantasia with alligators in it, the evil villainess from 101 Dalmatians, a few other familiar character types, and you've got The Rescuers, one of the Disney company's more forgettable efforts from that dark period of their (and everyone else's) history: the 1970s. Although American film flourished in that decade, Disney's output did not. I have a soft spot for Robin Hood, but The Aristocats and The Rescuers are not among th...Read the entire review

Wes Anderson's films tend to focus on disparate parts of broken families. There's motherless only child Max Fischer in Rushmore, the lone wolf Steve Zissou in The Life Aquatic, and the three brothers unmoored from their parents in The Darjeeling Limited. Of Anderson's growing oeuvre, The Royal Tenenbaums is the only film in which an entire - if not entirely intact - family figures as the focus of the story. Despite the fact that we are dealing with a family of "geniuses," Tenenbaums is probably Anderson's most realistic film. Flights of fancy are relegated to some basic plot elements (...Read the entire review

Sumptuous and moving, writer Abi Morgan (Shame, The Iron Lady) and director Philip Martin (TV's Prime Suspect: The Final Act and Wallander) have crafted a meticulous, deliberately paced film of Sebastian Faulks' best-selling novel. Forget about the fact that it was produced as a two-part television drama broadcast on the BBC in the UK and on PBS here in the States; Birdsong displays exquisite filmcraft. However, it's also driven largely by recycled clichés stolen from All Quiet on the Western Front, The End of the ...Read the entire review

Adventures in Babysitting is one of the liveliest and best teen comedies of the 1980s, and that is largely because it respects its characters, treating them as human beings with inner lives and not simply as hormone-fueled vessels built for sexual slapstick. It's not a perfect film: jokes fall flat and there's a moderate portion of lurching, clanking dialogue. Yet a game cast, an incident-packed plot, and genuinely creative set-pieces keep the movie feeling relatively fresh 25 years after its theatrical release.

Elizabeth Shue plays Chris Parker, and the crush I had on Shue as a teen always comes crashing back every time I see her launch into the fully committed lip-sync number (to "Then He Kissed Me") that opens the film. Parker i...Read the entire review

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The Hatfields and McCoys were two hillbilly clans on the West Virginia-Kentucky border who spent a couple of generations killing each other over real and perceived infractions. The after-effects of thisprivate war have echoed down the ages, having finally subsumed the entire political culture of the United States. (I'm partlykidding about that last bit, although perhaps it doesn't take such aleap to see the parallels -- more on those later.) Kevin Reynolds' well-made miniseries hews close to the factual outlines of the feud, crafting an entertaining, expansive three-episode, five-hour rendition of an oft-referenced historical event whose specifics are largely forgotten.

William Anderson "Anse" Hatfield (Kevin Costner) and Randolph McCoy (Bill Paxton) fought alongside one a...Read the entire review

The Prize is a largely-forgotten dirty martini of a movie - not as crisp or smooth as other, similar films (such as, say, North by Northwest, which it seeks to emulate), but certainly enjoyable in its own right. A slick, amusing thriller with a terrific cast and production values, it is carried forward by a somewhat against-type portrayal by Paul Newman as an antisocial, alcoholic novelist in Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Surrounding him are other laureates and their entourages, and from among them emerges an alarming conspiracy into which Newman's character is drawn.

Many of the movie's parallels to the aforementioned Hitchcock masterpiece can probably be attributed to the fact that both films were scripted by Ernest Lehman ...Read the entire review

John Frankenheimer had a knack for swift, tense storytelling, and that knack is visible even here, in one of his lesser-known films. The Fourth War has some minor tonal confusion about it - it's never quite sure if it's a straight thriller or a dark satire. There are some very obvious thriller set-pieces, but there are also sequences played as dark, satirical geopolitical metaphors. Despite the fact that these different elements don't fully mesh, Frankenheimer's direction keeps the film swift, punchy, and involving to the extent that we aren't entirely conscious of the movie's flaws as they play out.

Roy Scheider plays Col. Jack Knowles, new commanding officer of an Army station in West Germany near the Czech border, during the waning days of the Cold War. Knowles is a Vietnam-tested hardass whose lack of professionalism has landed him a string of no-man's-land assignments. The W...Read the entire review

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

The Ambassador is a lot of ridiculous fun with a bizarre combination of elements, including a very 1980s thriller milieu involving middle eastern political strife and terrorism, a 1930s pulp adventure plot, and two major stars of yesteryear - Robert Mitchum and Rock Hudson (his last film) - being directed by the capable and prolific J. Lee Thompson. Throw in good supporting performances by Oscar-winner Ellen Burstyn and former Blofeld Donald Pleasance, and you have an entertaining (and somewhat campy) action picture that's hiding a few interesting surprises.

The film opens with United States ambassador to Isreal Peter Hacker (Mitchum) and his security aide Frank Stevenson (Hudson) traveling out into the Judean desert to secretly meet with representatives of the PLO. The meeting is broken up when the group is attacked simultaneously by the Israeli secret service and members of a radical ...Read the entire review

The Boy Friend is equal parts throwback and time capsule - an homage to the great Warner Brothers musicals of the 1930s choreographed by the legendary Busby Berkeley, and a record of an era in filmmaking (1971 to be precise) that fostered experimentation beyond the traditions of the Golden Age studio system - even at major studios such as Warner Brothers, which financed and distributed Ken Russell's adaptation of Sandy Wilson's smash Broadway musical.

Twiggy, fashion icon of the 1960s, stars as Polly, the assistant stage manager at a second-rate theater in an English seaside town. The troupe is in the midst of its run of "The Boy Friend," except that it is short its leading lady, who has recently been injured. So, Polly is thrown in as a last-minute replacemen...Read the entire review

I'm still processing The Tree of Life - still turning over its many ingredients, layers, and moments. The fact that it's been two weeks since the screening and my brain is still stewing means that the film is special and unusual. Yet I don't think I wholly enjoyed Terrence Malick's Palm d'Or-winning sixth feature.

The Tree of Life is everything and nothing - a moving masterpiece and a magisterial mess, gloppy with pretension yet riddled with some of the most jarring and memorable imagery ever committed to film. Good performances and bad dialogue live side by side in Terrence Malick's sixth and most maddening film, as do profound beauty and incoherent editorial choices. The crux of the movie's soulful confusion is that it is both a visionary cosmic sta...Read the entire review

Steve McQueen was not a good comedian, and I've always thought Jackie Gleason was more threatening than funny. They were co-billed as the stars of 1963's Solider in the Rain, the title of which certainly doesn't evoke smiles. Nonetheless, it is a comedy, with a screenplay by Maurice Richlin and Blake Edwards from an early novel by William Goldman. The movie struggles against low production values and pat TV-friendly material that doesn't invite either actor to inhabit their characters beyond the level of overly-familiar types.

McQueen is supply Sergeant Eustis Clay, a happy-go-lucky schemer in league with Master Sergeant Maxwell Slaughter (Gleason). Slaughter lives the good life in his well-appointed peacetime office, thanks in part to the machinations of...Read the entire review

Deep Red might the most beautifully shot horror film ever made. The whole movie floats amid an array of rich color, sweeping camera movements, and lovingly designed sets that recall scenes from the devil's version of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Deep Red is hardly the only film by Dario Argento to share these qualities, but it might be the most confident and seamlessly executed. For all his visual gifts, Argento's films often suffer from uncomfortable editorial quirks and overly-jarring musical stings - things that take us out of an otherwise hermetic environment that only a visual perfectionist could have created. But Deep Red captivates from frame one, and I was never jostled out of the film's world by technical imperfections. The mood is consistently ...Read the entire review

The clingy heat of a New York summer hovers over the characters in Cop Hater with the same oppressive quality as the paranoia that grips their Manhattan precinct as a killer stalks its officers. Adapted by producer-director William Berke - an extraordinarily prolific and largely forgotten specialist in low-budget quickies - this B-grade adaptation of Ed McBain's first novel of the 87^th Precinct (a series that would span dozens of volumes over nearly half a century) succeeds thanks to good performances and the authenticity of its setting.

Robert Loggia plays Steve Carelli, a detective investigating a series of cop murders with his partner Mike Maguire (Gerald S. O'Loughlin). With few leads, the pressure mounts as the killings continue. Carelli an...Read the entire review

The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday is an Only in the 1970s kind of experience, from the elongated title down to the crappy film stock on which it was shot. A ribald, anarchic comedy that wants to be more edge and politically savvy than it actually is, the movie is ultimately let down by a lack of imagination at the conceptual level and the blind eye that director Don Taylor casts over matters visual.

The "great scout" of the title is Sam Longwood (Lee Marvin), a former Army scout and now a has-been frontiersman. He and his half-breed partner Joe Knox (Oliver Reed), are out to recover money stolen from them by former mining colleague (and current rail magnate and gubernatorial candidate) Jack Colby (Robert Culp). A chance encounter between the ol...Read the entire review

As an actor, producer, and director, Robert Redford's contribution to film is marked by close, thoughtful preparation, detailed pre-production, and polished execution. Although no one's filmography is flop-free, Redford's best films are marked by tight scripts, excellent casting, and a shot-by-shot flow that suggests precise storyboarding and pre-visualization. On The Conspirator, Redford serves as director and one of eight credited producers, and the surprise of the film is its sloppiness and the feeling that the entire project was rushed through production. The Conspirator suffers from an underdeveloped script, miscasting, and a perfunctory visual style. Nothing about the film suggests the involvement of Robert Redford - or any director with decent narrative ...Read the entire review

Dario Argento is a filmmaker whose work is easy to appreciate but difficult to love. He is easy to appreciate because his movies are the product of a specific vision and a unique, influential aesthetic. Argento's neon-lit sets and moody, Lovecraft-infused plots have atmosphere to spare. Yet he is difficult to love because his brand of horror, although suspenseful and engaging, is devoid of emotional content. His characters are often types - innocent virginal women and naïve, confused men - cast merely as the vulnerable targets of evil predators. There is little psychology or personality driving Argento's films - other than the director's own.

Inferno starts out strongly, with a voice intoning the mythological premise of an ancient book known as "The Thre...Read the entire review

The Tourist is beautifully shot by the accomplished Oscar-winner John Seale. It captures classically romantic locations like Paris and Venice with a visual caress lacking in Hollywood productions for some time. The look of the film reminds us not so much of the gritty Bourne series as much as David Lean's Summertime and Stanley Donen's Charade. Unfortunately, the comparisons end there. As much as The Tourist attempts to capture not just the look but the tone of those and other jet-setting comic thrillers of the past, it fails to generate tension or laughs. In fact, the picture is just another big-budget dud of the type we have come to expect from studio tent pole projects these days.

The freakish Angelina Jolie - who I'm certa...Read the entire review

Kings of Pastry is a truly thrilling and informative look at the somewhat secretive and incestuous world of French patisserie - specifically, the pastry- and candy-making portion of the quadrennial Meilleur Ouvrier de France (MOF) competition among craftsmen in various disciplines. Acclaimed filmmakers D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus (Don't Look Back, The War Room) follow three competitors as they prepare and compete in this high-pressure contest whose winners will forever hold the highest distinction in their field.

The film highlights Jacquy Pfeiffer, a French-born but Chicago-based pastry chef, who has a great emotional and professional investment in the competition (although this could easily be said of every other c...Read the entire review

Who's the Caboose? is a small film from the late 1990s that would seem to prove the argument that true talent will find a way. Dating from 1997, Who's the Caboose? was co-written and directed by Sam Seder, who has gone on to success as an actor and radio and television host. It stars Sarah Silverman, and features appearances by Andy Dick, David Cross, H. Jon Benjamin, Kathy Griffin, Laura Kightlinger, and Marc Maron. It is a funny, improv-driven film that also serves as a portrait of the comedy scenes in both New York and Los Angeles at the time of its production.

Susan (Silverman) is a comedian who decides to leave New York and travel to Los Angeles for pilot season. Pilot season (approximately April - June) is when studios cast for the new shows schedule...Read the entire review

That William S. Burroughs was one of the twentieth century's most influential writers is not in much doubt. His nature - strictly as a man - is a trickier question, and is the one that Yony Leyser attempts to tackle in his ambitious yet focused documentary film.

Resisting strict chronology, Leyser breaks up the film thematically, examining several facets of Burroughs' life in context. This approach has certain advantages, particularly the fact that it affords the viewers an opportunity to see how different sides of Burroughs that might seem to conflict actually mesh in unexpected ways (i.e., his "gentlemanly" appearance and his love of guns). On the other hand, it deprives us of the kind of simple but useful context allowed by chron...Read the entire review

As an interviewer, Bill Moyers is probing, informed, and just a touch provocative. He is not looking for teary confessions like Barbara Walters, nor is he as presumptive or obsequious as Charlie Rose. He is dignified, tactful, and restrained. He lets the subject speak freely, interjecting only occasional and thoughtful prompts. He never makes a show of being interested in the people he interviews, because he is interested, absorbing their points of view with the attentiveness afforded by a genuine curiosity about the world, the people in it, and their varied ideas and opinions.

This set from Acorn Media collects sixteen half-hour episodes of Moyers' 1980s interview series "A World of Ideas," comprising conversations with thirteen prom...Read the entire review

127 Hours has a true-life plot that would have appealed to Antonioni, but the film is shot through with hyperkinetic visuals that recall Oliver Stone in the 1990s and director Danny Boyle's own hit, Trainspotting. Although the content and the form don't always interact happily, James Franco gives an energetic and layered performance as Aron Ralston, an amateur outdoorsman and rock climber who, in 2003, became trapped in a Utah canyon when a boulder came loose and pinned his right arm to the rock wall.

Boyle and co-writer Simon Beaufoy had a number of challenges before them in selecting Ralston's story as a film project - in fact, it almost looks as though they specifically chose the story for its seeming plethora of anti-ci...Read the entire review

Robert Duvall has been playing spirited old men for more than twenty years, and now pushing eighty, Duvall has found what might be the best of these roles in Felix Bush, the protagonist of Aaron Schneider's directorial debut, Get Low. Throughout his varied career as an actor and filmmaker, Duvall has established himself as a prolific, professional, committed, and always compelling presence, performing in a strong mixture of big-budget Hollywood movies and tiny independent films - although his contributions to smaller films usually guarantee an automatic enlargement of sorts. Whatever the project's scale, Duvall can be depended upon to provide some combination of down-to-earth sincerity, genuine heart, and, occasionally, an unpredictable ferocity. Get Low is a...Read the entire review

No Boundaries is melodramatic, amateurish, and cheaply made. It furtively addresses contemporary issues with all the subtlety of the very worst daytime soap opera. The characters are one-dimensional, the situations pat, and the visuals slapdash. In deference to an ancient maxim, I'll say nothing at all about the performances. Writer and co-director Violet Mendoza does not manage to find a compelling or original point of view with regard to one of the charged and dominant social and political topics of our time - illegal immigration.

Isabel (Dani Garza) leaves her home (an unspecified country south of the border) and winds up in Philadelphia, where she intends to earn money to send home to her sick mother. She finds a job and moral support in the form of her cousin and his friends. Shortly thereafter she begins a romance with Christopher (Mark McGraw), a boyish American who turns...Read the entire review

I walked out of Biutiful, so take this review with an appropriate measure of skepticism. I haven't walked out of a movie in years, but Biutiful seemed to be daring me to leave within its first twenty minutes. Despite an arresting pair of opening moments, Biutiful devolves into a sluggish, meandering, dour assemblage of scenes that are utterly - shockingly - without momentum. At two-and-a-half hours, Biutiful is not the longest of movies, but after nearly half of that length, I felt like I'd spent a whole day in the theater without getting anywhere. I could not stand to spend another minute in the presence of co-writer and director Alejandro González Iñárritu's dire worldview and Javier Bardem's tragic, self-hating face (a good performance t...Read the entire review