DVD+Digital: Artery, Indy Week

DVD+Digital: Mike Leigh, British food trucks and Life is Sweet

Glenn McDonald — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 15:41:00 -0400

British filmmaker Mike Leigh is known for his very particular way of making films. Rather than start with a script, Leigh works with his actors in a designated improvisation period before filming begins.…

DVD+Digital: Spalding Gray, the theater of war and Swimming to Cambodia

Glenn McDonald — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 16:31:00 -0400

I first saw Swimming to Cambodia — the film version of Spalding Gray's groundbreaking monologue — on VHS my senior year of high school, by way of my first serious girlfriend Courtney. A fellow theater nerd, Courtney was also a dedicated goth girl and introduced me to many new and exotic things, like Bauhaus records and the BBC punk comedy The Young Ones.…

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DVD+Digital: Ex-cons, Viagra jokes and Stand Up Guys

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:42:00 -0400

Slight, shaggy and sentimental, the crime comedy Stand Up Guys has exactly three virtues to recommend it.

Those would be the film's trio of lead actors: Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin.…
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DVD+Digital: Rooney Mara, antidepressants and Side Effects

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 16 May 2013 23:44:00 -0400

The latest and maybe final film from director Steven Soderbergh, Side Effects isn't the movie that it first appears to be. About halfway through, the story pivots and another film emerges.…
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DVD+Digital: Shane Carruth, psychic orchids and Upstream Color

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 09 May 2013 10:06:00 -0400

Filmmaker Shane Carruth made his bones in the indie film world with the 2004 science fiction puzzle Primer. The ultra-low budget film, concerning a group of engineers who accidentally invent time travel, collected the Grand Jury Prize at that year's Sundance Film Festival.…
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DVD+Digital: Cyborgs, Shakespeare and Star Trek: The Next Generation

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 02 May 2013 13:06:00 -0400

If you only pay attention to what cycles around to Redbox, Netflix or your old-school video rental place, you might get the sense that only a handful of new home video titles get released each week.

Not so.…
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DVD+Digital: Guns, Molls and Gangster Squad

Glenn McDonald — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:01:00 -0400

The period L.A. crime drama Gangster Squad — starring Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn and Emma Stone — is best known for its poor timing. Following the movie theater mass shootings in Aurora, Colorado in July 2012, the release date for Gangster Squad was bumped.…
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DVD+Digital: Cold feet, Lizzy Caplan and Save the Date

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 22:22:00 -0400

The indie romantic dramedy Save the Date — new to DVD, Blu-ray and digital this week — starts in awfully familiar territory.

Twenty-something Sarah (Lizzy Caplan) is a bookstore clerk and aspiring artist who's about to have her sketches premiere in a small gallery.…
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DVD+Digital: True love, bat demons and The Sorcerer and the White Snake

Glenn McDonald — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 09:20:00 -0400

And now for something completely different.

A loopy Buddhist fable in the shape of a blockbuster action pic, The Sorcerer and the White Snake features several big-name Hong Kong stars battling snakes, demons and one another in ancient China.…
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DVD+Digital: Baseball lore, Jedi masters and Knuckleball

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 09:41:00 -0400

Behold the mysterious knuckleball.

Unlike baseball's other pitches — the fastball, the curve, the slider — the knuckleball does not rely on spin and velocity to defeat hitters at the plate.…
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DVD+Digital: Crime thrillers, Swedish gangsters and Easy Money

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 20:37:00 -0400

Johan "JW" Westlund, ace student at the Stockholm School of Economics, likes to take risks. A poor kid from the Swedish equivalent of Iowa, JW hobnobs with the capital city rich kids, pretending to a wealth he doesn't have and lying to everyone he knows.…
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DVD+Digital: Terence Malick, deep focus and Badlands

Glenn McDonald — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:48:00 -0400

One of the more auspicious debuts in film history, the 1973 drama Badlands was director Terrence Malick's first project after film school. Loosely based on the real-life killing spree of Charles Starkweather in 1958, it stars Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as Kit and Holly, two young lovers on the lam in the badlands of the American West.…
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DVD+Digital: Sholem Aleichem, Mark Twain and Laughing in the Darkness

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:28:00 -0400

The well-made 90-minute film documentary may be mankind's most efficient mode of communication. When put together by skilled filmmakers, the feature-length documentary can convey quite massive amounts of information while providing wit and heart and functioning as, you know, a movie.…
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DVD+Digital: Eco horror, crustaceous isopods and The Bay

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 11:06:00 -0500

It's Fourth of July in the seaside tourist town of Claridge, Md., on the Chesapeake Bay. All is well.…
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DVD+Digital: Brando, Kazan and On The Waterfront

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 11:45:00 -0500

Director Elia Kazan's classic 1954 drama On The Waterfront tells the story of dockworker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), a once-promising boxer whose life is derailed when he gets mixed up with mobbed-up labor union honchos on the NYC waterfront. As you may have heard, Terry coulda been a contender.…
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Save the Date, The Heartbreak Kid and more anti-romantic movies for a singles' Valentine's Day home on your couch

Zack Smith — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 17:06:46 -0500

Today, millions will celebrate Valentine’s Day with their spouses, significant others and loved ones. Millions more will celebrate it alone, and some will wonder why their lives aren’t like those of Audrey Hepburn, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, or (in my case) John Cusack, at least the characters they play on screen.…
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DVD+Digital: Game of Thrones, 30 Rock and TV binge watching

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 12:28:59 -0500

In the days before DVD/VHS, Netflix and endless online options — back when we had a little sanity left — TV binge watching was confined to weekend basic cable marathons. If you wanted to see all the episodes of a particular show in sequence, this was your sole option.…
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DVD+Digital: Denzel Washington, DVD extras and Flight

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 11:12:00 -0500

After nearly a decade of experimentation with motion-capture animation, director Robert Zemeckis returned to live action filmmaking last fall with Flight, starring Denzel Washington. The film tells the story of commercial airline pilot Whip Whitaker, who must confront his demons after crash landing a airliner while drunk on vodka and high on cocaine.…
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DVD+Digital: Colors, shadows and Tales of the Night

Glenn McDonald — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 16:18:00 -0500

In recent years, I've become fascinated with animated foreign films for kids. There's so much good stuff out there — some recent examples include The Secret of Kells (Ireland), Chico & Rita (Spain), A Cat in Paris (France) and Ponyo (Japan).…
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DVD+Digital: South Central, found footage and End of Watch

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:01:00 -0500

End of Watch — the intense police drama new to DVD, Blu-ray and digital this week — truly is a different kind of cop movie.

I know, I know.…
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DVD+Digital: Distance, despair and Detropia

Glenn McDonald — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 13:01:00 -0500

Family lore holds that my mom and dad met as teenagers during Detroit's heyday in the 1950s, when the Motor City was an enviable American metropolis. Mom worked at a diner downtown.…
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DVD+Digital: Sand mandalas, sex dolls and Samsara

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 13:46:00 -0500

"Samsara" is a Sanskrit term that suggests the endless flow of life and death in the material world. It's a core concept in Indian spiritual traditions, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism.…
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UNC School of the Arts graduate Craig Zobel gets under your skin with Compliance, now out on DVD

Zack Smith — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 11:42:00 -0500

It’s not every Hollywood résumé that includes multiple Southern art films, a flash animation about a tiny Luchador and an award-winning feature about an interrogation in the back room of a fast-food restaurant, but UNC School of the Arts graduate Craig Zobel is not your typical filmmaker—and his latest film Compliance, which hit DVD this week, is anything but your typical film.

In its premiere at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Compliance proved one of the most controversial films there, prompting multiple walkouts in its initial screening.…
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DVD+Digital: Cerebral sci-fi, the future of corpse disposal and Looper

Glenn McDonald — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 17:35:00 -0500

It's the year 2044 and America is in shambles. Economic collapse has led to social breakdown.…
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DVD+Digital: Epic Westerns, box office bombs and Heaven's Gate

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 12:46:00 -0500

Heaven's Gate is one of the most famous pictures in the history of Hollywood, for all the wrong reasons. Released to theaters in 1980 (kind of; see below), the epic Western stars Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert and Christoper Walken in the true story of Wyoming's Johnson County War.…
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