Film

1994/2006 “Clean, Shaven” is not a film easily forgotten “? a shattering, immersive experience in which viewers are thrown headlong into the abyss of mental illness, placed in the fractured, confused mind of a schizophrenic (the masterful Peter Greene) as he tries to track down his daughter following his release from an institution.   A […]

  2006 “The Break-Up” is a sour surprise for anyone expecting a fluffy date-night confection. Gleefully peeling back the facade of a typical, blandly predictable Hollywood rom-com and brazenly wading into a splintering couple’s neuroses, director Peyton Reed and stars Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston perform a risky high-wire act to impressive effect.   By […]

Various/2006 You would think that a review of this set would begin with the phrase “just in time for Halloween,” but the truth is that “The Boris Karloff Collection” contains mostly historical melodramas “? a genre Karloff loved “? and one oddball crime story (“Night Key”), so it isn’t particularly Halloween-y at all.   It’s […]

2005 Park Chan Wook concludes his revenge trilogy with “Lady Vengeance,” a terrific black comedy about a young woman who spends 13 years in prison for a crime she confessed to but didn’t commit. When she’s released, she has a plan in place for vengeance against the true perpetrator. The remarkable Yeong-ae Lee stars as […]

2005 Based on a lesser known, but by no means any less pungent David Mamet play, “Edmond” is perhaps as close-to-the-bone as the playwright can get. A deceptively simple tale of a man who decides to embark upon a life-altering odyssey of debauchery, murder and madness, “Edmond” fairly explodes off the screen, featuring William H. […]

  1941/2006 There’s no small irony that Warner Bros. “? whose spectacular DVD re-releases of classic films are nigh unrivaled “? is releasing a film whose signature line deals with “the stuff dreams are made of.” The studio hits one out of the park yet again; spread across a generous three discs and visually resplendent, […]

2005/2006 Sprawling, bloody and compulsively watchable, “Rome” is a lavish, lascivious spectacle which unfurls like a dozen mini-movies, each fraught with political intrigue, sizzling erotic encounters and gruesome combat that puts the glossy epics of Ridley Scott, et al to shame.   Transpiring during the final years of Julius Caesar’s (Ciar

2006 With a premise taken straight from “Dateline NBC” (handsome 32-year-old guy ensnares uncomfortably mature 14-year-old girl via sexually suggestive Internet chats), director David Slade’s ickily effective “Hard Candy” can’t sustain the nerve-fraying tension of its early scenes, falling prey to blustery, breathless monologues as the film’s climax drags on. Despite its collapse in the […]

2001/2006 This lightweight seriocomic crime story from the Pang Brothers was released a year before their international success with “The Eye.” In it, a low-rent drug dealer named Bank (Pawarith Monkolpisit) meets a young hooker named Som (Wanatchada Siwapornchai) on the streets of Bangkok. They fall in love and he recruits her to help with […]

1954/2006 The full-blooded epic “Seven Samurai” ignited the imaginations of a generation of filmmakers, causing Akira Kurosawa’s signature work to be endlessly recycled, riffed upon and revisited in countless movies around the globe. Viewing it again, in this age of bombastic Hollywood action spectacles that teem with CG excess, it stands even taller as a […]