5 DVD Picks for the Week (October 13, 2009): October 16th, 2009

Drag Me to Hell (Universal): Still one of the year’s most out-and-out fun flicks. Sharp social commentary and giddy frights involving maggots and squishy eyeballs are two great tastes that taste great together in this exhilarating horror movie, released just in time for a great Halloween gross-out party. Welcome back, Sam Raimi.
Land of the Lost (Universal): From one of the best to one of the worst. Seriously, you need to work hard to botch an adaptation of a TV favorite about dinosaurs, but you can count on Will Ferrell, the filmmakers, and their array of smarmy jokes and crummy special effects to do their damndest to do it. Memo to Jorma Taccone: Stick to “Jizz in My Pants” videos.
Natural Born Killers (Warner Bros.): Supposedly Oliver Stone deviated so much from Quentin Tarantino’s original screenplay about a couple of serial killers who become media sensations that QT asked to have his name removed. I can see why, though there’s no denying that Stone’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink and the all-out performances by Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, and Robert Downey Jr. are fascinating on their own right.
Happy Birthday to Me (Anchor Bay): Clips from this one terrified the hell out of me when it played on TV in the early 1980s. Seen today, it’s just another lame slasher film cashing in on the Friday the 13th craze.
Every Little Step (Sony): Do you really wanna know what goes on behind the scenes of a production of A Chorus Line? Yeah, me neither.
5 DVD Picks for the Week (October 6, 2009): October 7th, 2009

Audition (Shout! Factory): Takashi Miike had already made about 500 movies before this nasty, nasty modern classic catapulted him toward international recognition. Pity the poor folks who venture into this one thinking it’s a slow-paced family drama, only to watch it mutate into a torture show that makes Eli Roth’s movies look like Sesame Street. I’m sure there’s a resonant message in here about the battle of the sexes, though I was too busy crossing my legs and covering my eyes to notice. Why isn’t this being released on Halloween?
Chinatown (Paramount): Oh man, talk about bad timing. Just a week or so after Roman Polanski is put behind bars for a 31-year-old sexual offense, along comes this 1974 masterpiece to remind us why the hell the cinema world gives the little perv leniency. But let’s stick to the movie, shall we? Jack Nicholson is the noir private eye sniffing out corruption in 1940s Los Angeles, and getting his nose sliced for his trouble. Faye Dunaway is the heroine with a disturbingly chummy backstory with the monstrously corrupt villain (John Huston). Magnificent in every way.
Not Quite Hollywood (Magnolia): Who knew Australian cinema, with all its starched period pieces and humanitarian tracts about the plight of the aborigines, had such a vigorous industry of gore, nudity, and car chases? This insanely fun documentary tells you all about it, with great clips and interviews with everybody from George “Mad Max” Miller to Quentin “I love all of cinema, all right” Tarantino. Make sure to track down the grotty beauties the movie celebrates afterwards, too.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney): Still haven’t seen this one. Or does catching parts of it in Gremlins as the theater burns down count?
Year One (Sony): Apparently many of you were able to resist Jack Black and Michael Cera in wigs and pelts doing some Biblical clowning. I couldn’t. Check it out.
5 DVD Picks for the Week (September 8, 2009): September 8th, 2009
Crank 2: High Voltage (Lions Gate): Not much new to add to our earlier review. Let it just be said that Jason Statham is still the go-to guy for authentic badasses, and that David Carradine gave his final screen role a blast of gonzo energy. Oh, and on the sad note, that the filmmakers went on to do the inane, thrill-free Gamer.
Silent Light (Palisades Tartan): A remake of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet set in an isolated community of Mexican Mennonites? Boy, Carlos Reygadas sure doesn’t make it easy for the audiences, does he? Still, anybody with an ounce of sensitivity to beauty will drool buckets over the opening shot of a sunrise that looks anything but from this earth.
Menace II Society (New Line): I vividly remember the early 1990s, when gritty portraits of alienated black kids in harsh neighborhoods seemed to be released on a weekly basis. This one, directed in 1993 by the Hughes Brothers, is tougher and more despairing than the more famous Boyz n the Hood, and it’s worth revisiting even if many of its scenes have since become fodder for the Wayans Brothers.
That Hamilton Woman (Criterion): Winston Churchill’s favorite movie, this lavish costume drama is more fun than most of its ilk thanks to the convincing passion whipped up by Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, lovers both on and off-screen. Andrew Sarris supposedly saw this one dozens of times just for a glimpse of Leigh’s piercing eyes. Ah, cinema…
Valentino: The Last Emperor (Phase 4): A panting tribute to a stinking-rich corporate magnate? In these times? Really?
5 DVD Picks for the Week (August 25, 2009): August 25th, 2009
Duplicity (Universal): Few types of movies can be as grating as the romantic drama that’s not as clever or sophisticated as it thinks it is. Case in point is Tony Gilroy’s belly flop, which teams Julia Roberts with Clive Owen in a long, witless battle-of-the-sexes espionage yarn. The plot has something to do with rival companies battling for industrial secrets, with the two stars playing spies who hook up despite being on opposite sides of the corporate fence. As he has shown in Michael Clayton, Gilroy doesn’t exactly have a light touch, and Roberts tries to play it funny and sexy but comes off as smug. At least Owen has one charming moment when he fakes a Southern accent to get info from a secretary that’s worth, if not Cary Grant, then at least Rock Hudson. But it’s not enough to make up for the rest of this slog.
Adventureland (Miramax): A surprisingly tough and touching coming-of-age dramedy. Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart make a believable romantic couple as a pair of youngsters who meet over a summer spent working at a dinky amusement park during the 1980s. It suffered from bad marketing (since director Greg Mottola also did Superbad, they decided to play up the teen comedy angle), but it’s certainly worth a rental for its sweet and unforced view of adolescent love in bloom.
Sunshine Cleaning (Anchor Bay): I like Amy Adams. I like Emily Blunt. I like Alan Arkin, even though he now just keeps playing the grandpa from Little Miss Sunshine over and over. And I like Steve Zahn. But lord have mercy, this is the kind of straight-from-Sundance quirky flick that makes me go for my gun, Goebbels-style, whenever I hear the word “quirky.”
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Criterion): At 201 minutes, this one is almost as long as its title. It’s supposed to be Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece, with Delphine Seyrig as a Belgian housewife who, uh, peels potatoes. Okay, so I haven’t seen it yet. But as soon as I have a four-hour open window in my rigorous schedule of watching Family Guy clips on YouTube, I’m taking this baby for a spin.
Rudo y Cursi (Sony): Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna pretend to be soccer-playing yokels in Mexico. No, gracias.
5 DVD Picks for the Week (August 4, 2009): August 4th, 2009

The Soloist (Paramount): This one has an interesting back story, a troubled reception, and a disappointing realization. The plot is based on a real-life story, about a Los Angeles journalist named Steve Lopez (played by Robert Downey Jr., who doesn’t really strike me as a “Lopez”) who comes across a homeless man (Jamie Foxx) who babbles incoherently but plays a mean violin. An article is born, and, soon enough, a friendship. Flashbacks show the virtuoso to have been at one point a promising musician blindsided by psychological turmoil, so off the move is to get him a performance at the opera house just in time for the redemptive curtain call. Joe Wright directed it, or, with all the gratuitous camera movements and busy soundtrack, perhaps I should say overdirected it. Restrained for once, Downey Jr. is good, but Foxx is doing full-on Rain Man shtick that doesn’t connect to anybody else. It’s sentimental and pushy, but at least it isn’t boring.
Obsessed (Sony): With some movies, you gotta wonder. Did the filmmakers intent it to be slyly funny or are these bad laughs? This is one of them. It’s a mild student of the Fatal Attraction school of I’m-not-gonna-be-ignored psychos, and it follows the path from flirting to seduction to stalking to brutal harassment that develops between the handsome vice-president of a Los Angeles firm (Idris Elba) and the office temp (Ali Larter). Sure, she’s sexy, but by the time he notices that she’s quite insane, she’s already making threatening phone calls to his wife (played by Beyoncé Knowles). Oh, and “Magic” Johnson is one of the producers. What the!? The giggles are slow to come, but even before we get to the chandelier-swinging catfight between the wife and the home-invading hoochie, the joint has come close to the Wicker Man remake in the realm of unintentional hilarity. Or is it unintentional? Maybe a boiling rabbit might have helped clarify things.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (New Line): Ah, The Turtles. Not as good as the Beatles, perhaps, but to a child of the 1980s who watched the cartoon daily and counted the days until they made their live-action, big-screen debut, they were a big deal. This DVD set from New Line has all four movies, which confuses me because I thought there were only three movies. Ah, they’re including the lame, computer-animated one from a couple of years back, too. But the first one still holds some magic for me. The awesomeness of seeing four genetically mutated reptiles eating pizza and donning Renaissance artists names usually keep my young self from seeing the idiocy of, well, four genetically mutated reptiles eating pizza and donning Renaissance artists names. Will seeing it again with older and (hopefully) wiser eyes break my heart? Well, if so, there’s always the videogame.
Labor Pains (First Look): After so much tabloid crap swamping her life and career, does anyone still remember that Lindsay Lohan was once a decent actress? And not just in that Robert Altman musical thing she did a while back, but in those Disney movies she did as a kid. Check out The Parent Trap and Love Bug remakes, she’s got (or at least had) real charm. Some of that charm is visible in this quasi-Disney comedy, in which she plays a young office worker who fakes a pregnancy to keep from being fired. And, what do you know, she has to keep up with the pretense for nine months, which is enough time for the usual slapstick and romance of mild family fare. It’s no big deal, but it’s nice to see Lohan back in the game, and Cheryl Hines does an expert Eve Arden number as her best pal.
The Last Starfighter (Universal): Ah, one of my childhood faves. Better than Star Wars, I used to say back then, and I now have the prequels with Jar-Jar and the gang to support my claim. Extras galore in this 25th anniversary edition, and… Wait, what? “The 25th anniversary edition”?! Oh man, thanks for making me feel old.
Prozac Nation: Synecdoche, New York Revisited August 3rd, 2009
Charlie Kaufman is a love-him-or-hate-him filmmaker, so it’s no surprise that his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, was 2008’s big love-it-or-hate-it movie. I wasn’t crazy about it when I first saw it (in fact, there was something deeply unpleasant about the whole thing, which was the point, I know) but I kept thinking about it. So I revisited it again recently, and thought it’s definitely one of those movies that’s gonna continue growing. A lot of stuff that went over my peeved head the first time started coming together, like the main character’s fears being visualized externally, like a fake movie poster plastered on the side of a bus stop. The main character, by the way, is a playwright played by Philip Seymour Hoffman as the sad-sack to end all sad-sacks. He’s morbid, depressed, insecure, and, as it turns out, has a bad handle on the passage of time—he blinks, and he’s already gray and his little daughter has become a tattooed lesbian living in Germany. Oscar or no Oscar, I don’t see the appeal of Hoffman, but the movie has a stellar gallery of actresses, including Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Samantha Morton, Hope Davis, Emily Watson and Dianne Wiest, all of them terrific in complex and thorny parts. (I was also happy to see big, creepy Tom Noonan in the mix.) And a lot of the whimsy that felt forced the first time around, like the house on fire that nobody comments on or the thousands of post-it notes, resonate beautifully if you step back and look at the larger psychological design. I’m still not sure about what the movie is about, though. Art and death and the whole damn thing? Maybe a third viewing will elucidate things.
5 DVD Picks for the Week (July 28, 2009) July 28th, 2009

The 10th Victim (Blue Underground): It’s impossible for me to dislike any movie that has the uber-hot Ursula Andress shooting bullets out of her bra at the hunter who’s chasing her around some futuristic city. Hmm, do you think Mike Myers watched this one before writing Austin Powers? The story follows Andress and Marcello Mastroianni (both with matching golden hair) as they stalk each other in a world where The Most Dangerous Game has become a way of life. It’s a lot of fun, very satirical and trippy and very Sixties in its views of the relationships between the sexes and between society and consumerism. The director, Elio Petri, is known for his more serious political thrillers (like Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion and The Working Class Goes to Heaven), so it’s no accident that you have plenty of food for thought to go along with your sexy, James Bond-type thrills.
Bad Lieutenant (Lions Gate): How low can a man go? Director Abel Ferrara and his leading man, Harvey Keitel, find out in this brilliant but very uncomfortable 1992 portrait of a New York police detective’s wallow in depravity and search for redemption. The nameless protagonist mauls suspects, snorts cocaine moments after dropping his daughters off at school, loses money on bets with criminals, molests a couple of young women, gets piss-drunk in orgies with other junkies… Anyway, he’s bad dude. But a chance for spiritual salvation comes when he starts investigating the rape of a nun, and all his Catholic guilt rises to the top (and then over the top) during a special cameo by Jesus Christ. NC-17 all the way, from gory crime scenes to lingering shooting-up sequences to the full-frontal view of the lieutenant’s, um, pistol. Keitel gives a depth-plumbing performance matched by Ferrara’s own fearless direction. An unforgettable experience, but you may want to have a hot bath ready for afterwards.
Fast & Furious (Universal): I’m still trying to figure out the appeal of the Fast and the Furious franchise. Can’t just be the fast automobiles, otherwise folks would just stay at home and watch NASCAR. Can it be the campy, quasi-post-modern trashiness of the whole thing, or maybe the muscular knowingness of star Vin Dielsel? Whatever the reason, they keep churning them out. Diesel returns, along with original cast members Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster, for this fourth installment, which sends the gang back to Los Angeles for more bouts of car dueling, CGI stunts, and bad dialogue. The video-game was far livelier.
Repulsion (Criterion): In his first movie away from his native Poland, Roman Polanski creates one of the most disturbing films ever with this 1965 account of a young woman’s disintegrating sanity in London. Catherine Deneuve is remarkable as the protagonist, an almost autistic loner whose troubled mind starts to crumble when she’s left alone in an apartment. Polanski is a master at using cinematic techniques to explore claustrophobic states of mind, and he goes to town on Deneuve’s growing panic, using enormous cracks on the wall, skinned rabbits, putrid potatoes and hallucinatory corridors full of grabbing hands to visualize her increasing madness. Even after all these years, it’s quite a creepy-crawly tour de force.
Torso (Blue Underground): I love those bloody, sleazy ‘70s Italian thrillers (the “giallo”), but this one, directed by Sergio Martino, is too slow and with not enough gore for my taste. But do check out the hilarious theatrical trailer, in which the narrator keeps going on and on about the “psychosexual mind,” and tell me it wasn’t the model for those fake trailers in Grindhouse.
5 DVD Picks for the Week (July 21, 2009): July 21st, 2009

Watchmen (Warner Bros.): When the basis for a movie is as highly respected as Alan Moore’s acclaimed graphic novel, and there are legions of fans looking over your shoulder to make sure every detail is included, you almost want to congratulate a movie for just not cracking under the pressure. But there’s plenty to praise in this long, compressed but visually stimulating action epic. The characters are vividly sketched: there’s the godlike sadness of Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), the sexy sweetness of Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), the ferociousness of Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley, in an exceptional performance). And the film has a vibrant and witty style that’s a big step up from director Zack Snyder’s last movie, the dreadful 300. It may not reach the heights of the graphic novel when it tries to explore the differences between human beings and superheroes, but it’s worth checking out just for the opening credits sequence, which puts Bob Dylan’s classic tune “The Times, They Are A-Changin’” to splendid use.
Coraline (Universal): I usually avoid kids’ movies, but I have a real fondness for kids’ movies that aren’t really for kids. The Wizard of Oz, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, The Witches, Tim Burton’s entire filmography… the list goes on. This one, an adaptation of the Neil Gaiman book directed by Henry (The Nightmare Before Christmas) Selick, surely deserves to be added to that list. Told in old-school stop-motion, it follows the young heroine of the title (voiced by Dakota Fanning), a bored little girl who’s stuck in her new home with busy parents and nothing to do until she finds a secret passageway into an alternate world. Here, everything is phenomenally bright and fun, parents cater to your every need, and cats talk. There’s a catch, however, when her alternate-mom reveals her true, dark reasons for spoiling the visitor. Very Roald Dahl-ish, which means it’s disturbing in the best possible way. It might be too intense for little kids, but I’m all for them watching this instead of, say, Pokemon.
The Great Buck Howard (Magnolia): God bless John Malkovich. His intensity is so recognizable that by now he can no longer just disappear into a role (I’m always watching and thinking, “hey that’s John Malkovich”), but he’s such a fascinating presence that it doesn’t matter. Plus, he picks interesting movies, like this unfairly forgotten comedy-drama that deals fondly with magic and celebrity and popular taste. Naturally, he plays the Great Buck Howard, once a very famous mentalist whose star (if not his pompousness) has faded. Enter a brash young law-school dropout (Colin Hanks), who takes it upon himself to restore Howard to the limelight. It’s not deep as far as satires go, but it’s a sleeper that certainly deserves a second chance on DVD. The supporting cast includes Tom Hanks, Steve Zahn, and the yummy Emily Blunt.
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Criterion): Two lesser known 1966 movies from Jean-Luc Godard, arguably the greatest living director, are coming out this week from Criterion. I still have to check out Made in U.S.A. (which hasn’t been available in this country for more than forty years!), but this one is a multi-leveled masterpiece. Based on a report about the high number of middle-class prostitutes in Paris (who need money not for basic needs but for their bourgeois amenities), it charts the adventures of a housewife (Marina Vlady) who starts bringing in men into her apartment in the afternoon for some extra cash. I’ve seen it a few times, and I’m still finding new things about it. Don’t miss the ménage a trois involving airplane baggage carriers, and, of course, the legendary cup-of-expresso-as-universe shot.
Midnight Express (Sony): On Blu-Ray. Brad Davis gets caught and sent to a brutal Turkish prison, and director Alan Parker lingers promiscuously over every nasty detail. Not exactly a movie that makes the world a better place.
5 DVD Picks for the Week (July 14, 2009) July 14th, 2009

For All Mankind (Criterion): I remember seeing this Oscar-nominated documentary back in myfirst year of college, as part of my astronomy class. It was projected onto the dome of the planetarium, and I remember dozing off. To be fair, it was very early in the morning, but the truth is that watching spaceships bobbing slowly amid the stars in deep space invariably puts me to sleep. (I’m looking at you, 2001.) So now, ten years later, Criterion re-releases this 1989 film (what, they didn’t have any new ones to send out), and I can appreciate it a little better. The footage, taken from nine Apollo missions to the moon between 1968 and 1971, is in its slow way very beautiful, though I have issues with director Al Reinert’s smooshing of all missions together, so that great astronauts like Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong aren’t even identified onscreen. At least Criterion is generous with extras, loading up the disc with documentaries, soundbites and even a look at astronaut Alan Bean’s paintings.
The Human Condition (Criterion): Jeez, what is it with lofty movie titles this week? First there was For All Mankind, now there’s The Human Condition. Are you sure L’Humanité didn’t get reissued as well? In this three-part epic, Masaki Kobayashi illustrates why he’s not as highly regarded today as fellow Japanese directors like Kurosawa or Ozu. His stuff is heavy, literal and without much rhythm. The sprawling narrative (almost ten hours of it) encompasses military oppression during the Manchurian War, beheadings, the dehumanization process encountering socialism, Chinese peasants caught in barbed wire, and composition after composition full of finicky cloud formations. A lot of people rank this one up there with the works of Satyajit Ray and Visconti, but I believe they’re just being intimidated by the sheer volume of these movies, which pound the impression of greatness into your mind. And in a way it is impressive, but it is also oppressive. Even Erich Von Stroheim would have demanded less grimness.
Grey Gardens (HBO): A lot of great cinematic work these days is being done not in theaters but on cable, and this HBO production nicely illustrates it. The story is one of those cases which seem almost too weird to be true. In the 1970s, a crumbling old mansion in East Hampton was discovered with two peculiar inhabitants, elderly Edith Bouvier Bale and her fiftysomething daughter “Little Edie”; the snippy affection the real-life American Gothic figures felt for each other was captured by the Maysles Brothers in a 1975 documentary, which I’m sure Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore studied closely when preparing for their roles in this film. Knowing that looking at the two actresses buried under crazy-old-lady makeup would be a bit taxing for any audience, director Michael Sucsy includes flashbacks to their youth in the 1960s, so that their decline from comely debutantes (with connections to the Kennedy family, no less) to two kooks lost in a house full of cats has more resonance. Vivid and well-acted.
The Edge of Love (Image): I groused when Keira Knightley appeared with nunchucks and a bleached punk hairdo in Domino, but at least that movie had some energy. Just look at the alternatives: Tedious costume dramas like Pride and Prejudice, Atonement and The Duchess, or decorative blockbusters like the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks. This one falls in the first category, with Knightley again parading WWII-era clothes as one of the girls involved with British poet Dylan Thomas (Matthew Rhys). Sienna Miller plays Thomas’s wife, and Cillian Murphy, who once was an interestingly angular performer but is becoming more pallid with each new role, appears as a troubled soldier. Not much more than a well-upholstered soap opera, done up in fancy duds but with nowhere to go.
The Haunting in Connecticut (Lions Gate): The week wouldn’t be complete without a crummy PG-13 horror movie waiting in the wings. “Based on a true story,” naturally. But so was The Amityville Horror, and that movie didn’t turn out so good. This time around a family has to relocate for health reasons, so they move into a demonically possessed house, which really eases their stress. The scariest thing about it is seeing the talented and still luminous Virginia Madsen running around and screaming. She should instead be screaming about better roles.
5 DVD Picks for the Week (July 7, 2009): July 7th, 2009

Knowing (Summit): What is it with Nicolas Cage and fire? First, there was the classic unintentionally hilarious “How did it burn?” bit from The Wicker Man. Then there was the flaming skull getup in Ghost Rider. And now, this mostly ridiculous sci-fi thriller, in which it’s the planet itself going up in flames. But in order to get there, we have to swamp through a collection of absurdities, such as Cage playing an existential astrophysics professor, a piece of paper that carries clues about humanity’s upcoming tragedies, and special-effects that actually attempt to evoke 9/11 imagery. Just when it can’t get any more ludicrous, along come alien spaceships, and an ending that should be scored to the sound of world audiences simultaneously slapping their foreheads. It takes hard work indeed to make M. Night Shyamalan look lucid by comparison, and the usually excellent Alex Proyas (director of Dark City) is here a very hard worker.
Push (Summit): Another mishmash, though this one is more enjoyable. Like the little psycho in Knowing, Dakota Fanning here draws visions of the future, while token slab-of-beef Chris Evans tries out his telekinetic powers on dice games and gets his ass kicked. They’re both being chased by a sinister government agency (led by a too-cool-for-this-movie Djimon Hounsou) and also by a family of evil “screamers,” whose shrieks can kill. It sounds like some especially lame Marvel Comics adaptation, though at least director Paul McGuigan (Lucky Number Slevin) keeps it moving. He makes good use of the Hong Kong setting (he’s no Wong Kar Wai, but he does okay), Cliff Young has a dapper bit as one of the would-be superheroes, and Fanning has a funny drunk scene. There’s plenty of potential, but little payoff. Still much better than any X-Men movie, though.
Near Dark (Lions Gate): Now that Kathryn Bigelow is getting the acclaim she deserves for The Hurt Locker, it might be a good time to check out her earlier stuff, like this ferocious 1987 thriller. Adrian Pasdar is the cowboy who falls for cute Jenny Wright, and then has to decide whether to join her clan of marauding vampires. No, it’s not a prequel to Twilight, but the most kick-ass vampire movie of the 1980s (yes, even better than The Lost Boys). Bigelow is fascinated with masculinity expressed through violence, and there’s plenty of testosterone here as the bloodsuckers chomp their way through hicks, plow through cities with their bikes, and overall offer a devastating spoof of family values under the Reagan Era. The cast includes Bill Paxton, Jeanette Goldstein, and Lance Henriksen (all Aliens alumni, all awesome). And make sure to track down Bigelow’s feature debut The Loveless (1982) while you’re at it.
The John Barrymore Collection (Kino): Long before becoming remembered only as Drew’s granddaddy, John Barrymore was the Most Promising Actor of His Time, a thespian whose Shakespearean acting skills were as legendary as his behind-the-scenes pranks and womanizing. Sherlock Holmes (1922), The Beloved Rogue (1927) and Tempest (1928) all showcase his grand romantic gestures and handsome (no, more than that… beautiful) looks, but to me the revelation of this box-set from Kino is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), in which Barrymore dons grotesque disguises and delivers a physical performance as impressive as Lon Chaney’s.
The Unborn (Universal): I guess for every really good horror movie like Drag Me to Hell, we have to make do with a dozen mediocre ones like The Unborn. I expected more from David S. Goyer, who directed the pretty good Blade Trinity and co-wrote the screenplay for The Dark Knight, but he does get to coin a word: “jumby.” What does it mean? Watch… and see. Or just look it up, jeez.