Cynical Cinema

Untraceable (3/10):  Diane Lane is a front-line FBI operative in the war on cyber crime.  Remember Sandra Bullock in The Net?  Yeah, me either.  This one will be forgotten in a week or so, it’s terrible.

Mad Money (3/10):  Queen Latifah, Katie Holmes and Diane Keaton star in an absolutely putrid crmie caper.  Ted Danson and a few others up the suck factor.

Walk All Over Me (3/10):  Leelee Sobieski is a dominatrix caught in a crime ring.  Dominatrix - good.  Crime ring - good.  Leelee Sobieski -good.  Tricia Helfer - also good.  This could be good.  But it isn’t.

The Great Debaters (8/10):  Denzel Washington and Forrest Whitaker and Denzel Whitaker are all terrific in this movie about the Jim Crow south, race relations, and debate teams.  Formulaic, but very good.

Youth Without Youth (4/10):  Francis Ford Coppola directs this movie about Tim Roth, who is struck by a bolt of lightning and begins to age backwards.  Which means he gets pursued by the Nazis.

I’m Not There (9/10):  The best movie released this week.  Bob Dylan is re-imagined as six different people, including a young black kid, a woman, and an aging western outlaw.  For hardcore Dylan fans, mostly.  Check out my review for a guide to watching this.

The Cottage:  Brothers are holed up in a cottage, with their kidnap victim, when horror takes place.  Axe-wielding neighbours and gore.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Special Edition (8/10):  Still amazing after all these years.  Connery and Ford are terrific together.  Also some excellent special features.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom Special Edition (6/10):  The worst of the original trilogy, but still worth purchasing as part of the box set.

Raiders of the Lost Ark Special Edition (10/10):  The all-time classic on DVD again, this time with more great special features.  Worth revisiting, especially if you have kids who have yet to see it.

Numb:  Matthew Perry meets a perfect girl and goes to a therapist to help him work out his anxiety problems.  Sounds…awful.

Backyardigans High Flying Adventures (4/10):  The Backyardigans are a cow, a moose, a hippo, and some other animals that don’t live in my backyard sing some songs and entertain some small children.

Alien Agent:  A lawman from another galaxy must stop an invading force from building a gateway to planet Earth.  Stars Billy Zane.  YES!  Billy Zane…

Drawn Together Season 3 (7/10):  Ignore what you may have seen on the TV trailers.  This series is actually quite intelligent, and hilarious.

The Land Before Time:  Through the Eyes of a Spiketail:  Yet another entry in this interminable series for children.  With a spiketail!

Mission: Impossible Season 4 (6/10):  The terrific original series which is way better than any of those incredibly lousy Tom Cruise movie remakes.

The Ten Commandments (3/10):  A virtually shot-for-shot remake of the Heston 1956 epic, with gigantic parts cut out and cheap animation, dumbed down for kids and starring Christian Slater as the voice of Moses.

Inside (4/10):  A French splatter-horror film with buckets of blood and a hottie who uses scissors to cut a baby out of a pregnant woman.

 Long Day’s Journey Into Night (6/10):  Well-acted, well-staged Canadian filming of the Eugene O’Neill play about family bonds and dysfunction.  But three hours of dialogue in just one room can be…pretty boring.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 1:53 am and is filed under New DVD releases. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.