DVD

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War and Peace (1967)

Epic adaptation of Tolstoy's novel centers around the lives of two families during Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia.

Genres: Art/Foreign and War

Running Time: 5 hrs. 57 min.

MPAA Rating: PG

Cast and Credits

Starring: Ludmilla Savelyeva, Sergei Bondarchuk, Vyacheslav Tikhonov, Anastasia Vertinskaya, Vasili Lanovoi
Directed by: Sergei Bondarchuk

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Labyrinth (1986)

Fifteen-year-old Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) is so resentful of her baby brother Toby that she hopes he will just disappear. Her dream becomes reality when goblins kidnap the boy--but Sarah unexpectedly finds herself horrified by the loss. So she sets forth to retrieve him, and finds herself on the adventure of a lifetime. To accomplish her task, she will somehow have to reach the center of the fantastical...

Genres: Action/Adventure and Science Fiction/Fantasy

Running Time: 1 hr. 41 min.

MPAA Rating: PG

Cast and Credits

Starring: David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly, Toby Froud, Shelley Thompson, Christopher Malcolm (II)
Directed by: Jim Henson, Peter MacDonald, Jimmy Devis
Produced by: George Lucas, David Lazer, Eric Rattray

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Brown Sugar (2002)

Dre and Sidney can attribute their friendship and the launch of their careers to a single childhood moment--the day they discovered hip-hop on a New York street corner. Now some 15 years later, she is a revered music critic and he is a successful, though unfulfilled music executive. As they lay down the tracks toward their futures, hip-hop isn't the only thing that keeps them coming back to that moment...

Genres: Comedy and Romance

Running Time: 1 hr. 49 min.

Release Date: October 11th, 2002 (1,400 theaters)

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content and language.

Cast and Credits

Starring: Taye Diggs, Sanaa Lathan, Queen Latifah, Dante 'Mos Def' Smith, Nicole Parker Kodjoe
Directed by: Rick Famuyiwa
Produced by: Earvin Johnson, Peter Heller, Trish Hofmann

[Rasputin]

Let's Go To Prison

Let’s Go To Prison has the pedigree to be a goofy yuk-fest comedy that, after being all but completely ignored during its theatrical release, may find a larger, stonier audience on DVD (see Mike Judge’s Idiocracy for another example of this). But it’s a mixed bag. The premise of the film is simple, straightforward, and ripe with potential. John Lyshitski (Dax Shepard), a down-and-out repeat offender, and Nelson Biederman IV (Will Arnett), a preppie-******* wimp, both end up at a...

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Blume in Love

Director Paul Mazursky is well into his 70s now and, with the notable exception of Clint Eastwood, Hollywood generally isn’t a fan of directors in their 70s, especially ones who make the types of films he makes. One of the unsung heroes of the nakedly personal, auteur films of the 1970s, Mazursky’s movies are quietly observed character pieces, sometimes funny, sometimes serious, sometimes both. He always gives his characters room to maneuver within the confines of the script, leading...

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Rocky Balboa - BD

When I first read that Sylvester Stallone was returning to the character that catapulted him to stardom, I was dumbfounded. He’d previously returned to Rocky with four sequels, the last of which was a critical and box office disappointment sixteen years before, pulling in only $41 million domestically. The concept of Rocky Balboa returning to the ring thirty years after his rise to fame and a sixty-year old Stallone trying to recapture the Rocky magic one more time seemed...

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When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

It’s part of the reason this writer is as big a Criterion Collection devotee as he is (and has been for quite some time now): Every once in a while a film you’ve never heard of gets the Criterion treatment and when you watch it, your brain all but explodes. It’s akin to finding a moviephile’s equivalent of catnip where you weren’t expecting it. Not that Criterion’s isn’t known for their special gems (though I didn’t much care for late 2006’s...

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America’s Funniest Home Videos: Motherhood Madness

You can hear it echoing through the house when Restaino sits in front of an AFV episode. I’m a big laugher to begin with – anything from Jacques Tati to Chris Farley is likely to get me guffawing. But there’s a certain brand of belly laugh that bursts forth when America’s Funniest Home Videos comes on. I’ve waxed eloquent about the show in the last two reviews I’ve written of Shout Factory’s exemplary collections of AFV material. The advent of camcorder...

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Twin Peaks: The Second Season

Twin Peaks was without a doubt the richest, boldest, darkest, most innovative, most engrossing, and most wonderfully strange show to ever air on network television. It was the prototype for numerous series to follow it, from substantive efforts like Northern Exposure, Picket Fences and The X- Files to such faux-quirky banalities as Ally McBeal. Even the moments-of-greatness-blurred-by-season-long-stretches-of- dullness of Lost are not untouched by its influence. Each of these shows may have...

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The Paul Newman Collection

Ah, Paul. Arguably the handsomest and most effortlessly charismatic movie star Hollywood ever gave us, Paul Newman is the embodiment of the American archetype of the '60s and '70s (my only cinematic regret is that no one made a film version of On The Road with Newman as Neal Cassady). And although there isn’t a true “classic” in this seven-disc Paul Newman Collection, there’s enough of Paul to make it worth checking out.Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) is an obvious...

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Payback: Straight Up: The Director’s Cut

Payback is based on the novel The Hunter By Richard Stark and is a tough, grim, and flashy movie that offers easy repeated viewing. Though well received by critics, this brutal film is not for everyone (especially those who don't like violence). In 1999, Dean Winkelspecht reviewed this film and revealed a bit more of Payback’s complexities and seemed to enjoy the film as much as I did:“1999 can be remembered as a year when Hollywood took a few chances and produced some original...

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Layer Cake - BD

Matthew Vaughn, who produced Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, is intimately familiar with the British crime melodrama genre. He makes his directorial debut with Layer Cake (gone is the perhaps slightly confusing original spelling of L4yer Cake), a wonderfully circuitous, beautifully complex tale of the layered echelons of the drug trade. It’s the tale of a mid-level distributor caught in the middle of conflicting agendas among a brash, loose cannon of a thief...

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March Of The Penguins - HD DVD

Arguably the finest documentary of 2005, March Of The Penguins is a fascinating, beautiful, and poignant look at the life cycle of the Emperor Penguin as it returns to its Antarctic birthplace to breed. Documentarian Luc Jacquet and cinematographers Laurent Chalet and Jerome Maison spent thirteen months in the most inhospitable place on Earth to film this amazing story. With temperatures that plunged deeper than 50 degrees below zero, and storms that pummeled the crew with winds that...

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Tideland

Man, this picture got a lot of bad press.After struggling with the suits at most of the major film studios in Hollywood, Terry Gilliam was supposed to be aesthetically liberated with Tideland, a movie that gave the master director a chance to do exactly what he wanted and how he wanted it. The Brothers Grimm was a compromised, botched studio effort – and his first film since the ridiculously underrated Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – so Tideland was to bring the guy back into the...

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The Good Shepherd

Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) believes in America and will sacrifice everything he loves to protect it. But as one of the covert founders of the CIA, Edward’s youthful idealism is slowly eroded by his growing suspicion of the people around him. Everybody has secrets… but will Edward’s destroy him? With an all-star cast including Alec Baldwin, Billy Crudup, William Hurt, Angelina Jolie, Timothy Hutton and John Turturro, it’s a fascinating story about one man’s survival...