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Wilmington on DVD: Gone With the Wind, The Exiles, Star Trek, My Sister's Keeper
on 11/18/09 at 10:00 am | Like the flawed but spectacular Margaret Mitchell novel from which it derives, the movie Gone With the Wind has never lost its power to enthrall and bewitch. Producer David O. Selznick's phenomenal film, can still, like Mitchell's saucy and unconquerable heroine, Scarlett O'Hara, seduce or bulldoze almost all before it. |
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Wilmington on DVD: Up, Wings of Desire, holiday classics, The Ugly Truth, Mamma Mia!
on 11/11/09 at 10:00 am | Up flies us right up into those magical realms of sky, flight and fantasy that Judy garland's Dorothy traveled, in her Kansas twister ride to Oz, and that little Pascal Lamorisse was whisked off to by his air force of Parisian balloons at the end of The Red Balloon. |
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Wilmington on DVD: North by Northwest, Food, Inc., noir classics, The Taking of Pelham 123
on 11/04/09 at 10:00 am | North by Northwest is Alfred Hitchcock's great romantic/comedy/thriller -- with Cary Grant at his witty, seductive, impeccable best as "wrong man" Roger Thornhill, an overly smug Madison Avenue adman who gets mistaken for an elusive spy. |
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Wilmington on DVD: Il Divo, Z, Sam Fuller, Ice Age 3, Whatever Works, Orphan
on 10/28/09 at 10:00 am | Veteran Italian actor Toni Servillo's craggy wise-hood face -- as impassive and immobile as a dentist staring into your mouth or a panther regarding its prey -- is at the center of a jaw-dropping whirlpool of bloody events and political crime, portrayed or exposed in Il Divo, subtitled The Extraordinary Life of Giulio Andreotti. |
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Wilmington on DVD: Monsoon Wedding, Dusan Makavejev, Transformers 2, Cheri
on 10/21/09 at 10:00 am | Monsoon Wedding, Mira Nair's joyous movie about a wedding in Delhi -- constantly disrupted by family squabbles, sudden crises, covert romantic interludes, cultural clashes among the guests, dark buried secrets erupting to the surface and finally, a full-blown monsoon rainfall, not to mention a musical climax that outdoes Bollywood -- is both her most popular film and her best. |
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Wilmington on DVD: Natural Born Killers, Drag Me to Hell, Gaumont, The Proposal
on 10/14/09 at 10:00 am | Natural Born Killers, Oliver Stone's mad-dog-violent "love on the run" neo-noir, one of the most controversial movies of the '90s, may get better and better every time you see it in a new release. But that doesn't mean it still couldn't use some improvement. |
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Wilmington on DVD: Chinatown, Anvil!, A Hard Day's Night, My Life in Ruins
on 10/07/09 at 10:00 am | No matter what you think of Roman Polanski and his current arrest and extradition problems, the director's 1974 private eye classic Chinatown is still a masterpiece of film neo-noir. |
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Wilmington on DVD: The Wizard of Oz, Monsters vs. Aliens, Away We Go
on 09/30/09 at 10:00 am | Some movies appeal to just about everybody -- like the heart-stoppingly entertaining and wonderful 1939 musical that MGM made out of L. Frank Baum's American fairy tale, The Wizard of Oz, now released in a deluxe 70th anniversary DVD edition by Warner. |
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Wilmington on DVD: That Hamilton Woman, Paul Newman, X-Men Origins: Wolverine
on 09/23/09 at 10:00 am | Few historical period dramas carry a greater romantic charge than Alexander Korda's glossy, flag-waving, deeply tragic and plushly erotic bio film That Hamilton Woman, on England's iconic naval hero Lord Horatio Nelson. |
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Wilmington on DVD: Easy Virtue, Wagon Master, TCM horror, Next Day Air
on 09/16/09 at 10:00 am | Noel Coward's blithe, spirited, sexy '20s play, Easy Virtue, is not new to movies. This country manor comedy of good and bad manners was, in fact, somewhat indifferently adapted in 1927 by the young Alfred Hitchcock. |
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Wilmington on DVD: Disney Nature Earth, M*A*S*H, State of Play, Sugar
on 09/02/09 at 10:00 am | The original Planet Earth is one of the greatest, most beautifully photographed documentaries ever made. But this rapid-read edition is a still-stunning substitute if you're time-challenged. |
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Wilmington on DVD: Duplicity, Trouble the Water, Tyson, and Icons of Sci-Fi
on 08/26/09 at 10:00 am | Here's a quartet of actors who should get your motor running even if they were showing up for another movie about championship poker or for a bio-drama on Calvin Coolidge -- and Duplicity is high-grade, silky-smooth stuff, near the top of its class. |
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Wilmington on DVD: The Class, Kagemusha, Hannah Montana, The Last House on the Left
on 08/19/09 at 10:00 am | This riveting film -- Palme d'Or winner at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival -- becomes a microcosm of current French society, its volatile divisions and surprising common grounds. |
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Wilmington on DVD: Katyn, Bye-Bye Braverman, I Love you Man, and 17 Again
on 08/12/09 at 10:00 am | War is hell, or at least purgatory. Few filmmakers have shown that as clearly as the 83-year-old Polish master Andrzej Wajda. Wajda, a sometime cinematic genius, is one of the last members left of the great international cinema generation that included Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni and Satyajit Ray, and he's also perhaps the very best of all Polish filmmakers, living or dead. |
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Wilmington on DVD: The Soloist, Elvis on Ed, screwball comedy, Race to Witch Mountain
on 08/05/09 at 10:00 am | The Soloist may sound somewhat pretentious and condescending. But the writer, Susannah Grant, director Joe Wright, and especially the two superb leading actors -- Jamie Foxx, who plays Nathaniel, and Robert Downey Jr., who plays Steve -- elevate the film. |
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Wilmington on DVD: Repulsion, Anita O'Day, Powell and Keeler, and Fast and Furious
on 07/29/09 at 10:00 am | Repulsion, Roman Polanski's first English-language movie, and also the first of his many collaborations with the reclusive, brilliant French screenwriter Gerard Brach, is one of the scariest films ever and also one of the great '60s black-and-white film noirs. |
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Wilmington on DVD: Coraline, Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29, Watchmen, The Great Buck Howard
on 07/22/09 at 10:00 am | Other big-budget studio movie genres may often seem overblown and underthought, but feature animation still seems to be in a kind of modern Golden Age. That certainly goes for Henry Selick's Coraline: a delightful, sharp, whimsical, wittily imagined and wondrously executed feature cartoon for adults and the smarter or more sophisticated kids. |
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Wilmington on DVD: 12, For All Mankind, John Gilbert, and The Haunting in Connecticut
on 07/15/09 at 10:00 am | 12 is a modern Russian version of one of the great virtuoso American melodramas: writer Reginald Rose’s teleplay-turned-movie-turned-stage play 12 Angry Men. |
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Wilmington on DVD: Lonely Are the Brave, The John Barrymore Collection, Knowing
on 07/08/09 at 10:00 am | Dalton Trumbo's favorite of all his screenplays, Lonely Are the Brave, is a stirring adaptation of Edward Abbey’s Brave Cowboy -- a moving and exciting modern chase western, with Kirk Douglas as Jack Burns, an individualist modern cowboy on the run from a posse that includes helicopters, high-powered rifles and police radio. |
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Wilmington on DVD: Two Lovers, My Dinner With Andre, Barfly and Taxi Blues
on 07/01/09 at 9:00 am | Joaquin Phoenix, in various weird ways, has suggested that James Gray's Brooklyn romance Two Lovers may be his last movie as an actor. I hope he reconsiders and comes back. |
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Wilmington on DVD: Woodstock, Jack Lemmon, and Confessions of a Shopaholic
on 06/24/09 at 10:00 am | Both a great rock concert movie and a superb documentary on youth culture in the Vietnam War Years, Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock -- shot at the legendary 1969 Aquarian gathering at Max Yasgur's farm at Bethel, N.Y. (not the nearby Woodstock) -- brings back the era and all its pot-fumed tenderness, horror, humor, beauty, ugliness, and glorious absurdities, as few other movies can. |
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Wilmington on DVD: The Seventh Seal, At the Death House Door, and Gary Cooper
on 06/17/09 at 10:00 am | The Seventh Seal is the quintessential Ingmar Bergman film, which -- along with his other major 1956-57 festival prize-winners, Smiles of a Summer Night and Wild Strawberries -- made his huge initial international reputation while also creating a new audience in the U.S. for art house cinema. |
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Wilmington on DVD: Gran Torino, Revolution Revisited, The International, Crossing Over
on 06/10/09 at 10:30 am | Clint Eastwood plays a Dirty Harry guy grown old in his latest movie Gran Torino. And, as we watch C.E.'s latest screen character in action -- a widower/misanthrope named Walt Kowalski battling a local street gang -- he makes us feel lucky. |
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Wilmington on DVD: Revolutionary Road, Defiance, He's Just Not That Into You, Taken
on 06/03/09 at 10:00 am | Revolutionary Road, which I've seen twice (for Oscar reasons), is a sometimes too distant, but often cuttingly ironic and despairing look at people trapped in the immaculately humdrum life of middle-class suburbia in the '50s. |
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Wilmington on DVD: John Wayne, Zabriskie Point, Of Time and the City, New in Town
on 05/27/09 at 11:00 am | In El Dorado (in that '50s-'60s movie Western dreamland we know so well), aging sure-shot hero John Wayne, recovering drunk Robert Mitchum, cocky kid James Caan and colorful old coot Arthur Hunnicutt are besieged in the town jail by a corrupt rancher's hired guns, just as Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson and Walter Brennan once were in Howard Hawks' pop classic Rio Bravo. |
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Wilmington on DVD: Valkyrie, Andrei Tarkovsky, Paul Blart, Outlander, and Fanboys
on 05/20/09 at 11:00 am | The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, John Ford's last great Western, is a visually spare, deceptive masterpiece, and it boasts the Casablanca of all movie Western ensemble casts -- a remarkable gallery, topped by friendly legends James Stewart and John Wayne, with Lee Marvin as Liberty Valance, the cattlemen's demonic enforcer, gunslinger and murderer. |
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Wilmington on DVD: Tell No One, A Grin Without a Cat, Czech Chillers, and Alexander Korda
on 05/13/09 at 11:00 am | In Tell No One, a somber provincial French pediatrician named Beck (Francois Cluzet) -- still tormented by the shocking murder on an idyllic lake, eight years earlier, of his lovely wife (Marie-Josee Croze) -- suddenly begins receiving emails that seem to be coming from the dead woman. |
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Star Trek: Rescue mission
on 05/08/09 at 9:00 am | Many of you will be happy to learn that Star Trek -- the 11th movie in the science fiction TV-and-film series -- definitively breaks the notorious odd-numbered curse. That's the supposed continuing jinx in which even-numbered Star Trek sequels turn out to be good, while odd-numbered ones are crummy or disappointing. |
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Wilmington on DVD: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Wendy and Lucy, Science Is Fiction, and Last Chance Harvey
on 05/06/09 at 1:00 pm | I liked Benjamin Button. It has a humanistic/historical sweep reminiscent of Forrest Gump (Eric Roth wrote both movies), and it has near-instant likeability, thanks to Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. |
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Wilmington on DVD: Nothing But the Truth, Alain Resnais, Bride Wars, and Notorious
on 04/29/09 at 11:00 am | The most effective of writer-director (and ex-movie critic) Rod Lurie's political melodramas is this absorbing legal thriller, obviously inspired by the case of the New York Times' Judith Miller (but widely departing from it). |
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