New on DVD / Bluray
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Only Lovers Left Alive (R)
Only Lovers Left Alive is a my-favorite-things picture from independent film director Jim Jarmusch. It is a Dutch still life painting, though the fruit has been substituted with the prized possessions of the artist. It is a film filled with cool and dark things, like dirty rock and roll, night drives, death, Nikola Tesla, sunglasses, […]
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Divergent (PG-13)
Why do we eat candy canes at Christmas? Why are they red and white? Why do we fold our hands to pray? If you ask a child these questions, they often offer an acrobatic answer. By the time they enter middle school, at least in this day and age, the answers become less and less […]
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Enemy (R)
Encountering a double, or doppelganger, is an ancient fear with long literary credentials. There’s something primeval about it, the pagan myths are replete with twins, both evil and otherwise, and the Bible has some very famous twins of its own (Jacob and Esau being the primary example), but perhaps the one that connects most readily […]
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Stalingrad (R)
When we were discussing Stalingrad, a friend referred to it as “Saving Comrade Katya.” To an extent, his comparison to Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan works. Both are violent films set in turning points of World War II, both focus on a small group of soldiers, and both attempt to depict the war’s brutality while maintaining […]
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Inside Llewyn Davis (R)
“Hang me, oh, hang me,” sings Llewyn Davis mournfully in the opening scene of Joel and Ethan Coen’s newest film, Inside Llewyn Davis. It’s an appropriately melancholy choice, slyly setting up the film’s abundant use of gallows humor and the travails a hapless protagonist will face. Inside Llewyn Davis follows a week in the life of its struggling […]
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Hours (PG-13)
Low-budget, independent films require a few important things to engross an audience. Since they do not have the budget of a blockbuster, they rely heavily on the script and the actors. In theory, Hours should have had both. In practice, it had neither. Our story opens on a soon-to-be father and mother entering a hospital […]
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American Hustle (R)
It is possible to walk away from David O. Russell’s American Hustle with an unchallenged, unalloyed understanding of the word “American”— the quantity of leisure suits and Jersey accents alone put to rest any doubts about which America we’re dealing with. The same can’t be said of that other word, “hustle.” There is too much […]
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How I Live Now (R)
When I was still quite young, no more than ten or eleven, little excited my soul more than the sound of a fire alarm going off at school. We would exit the building quickly and stand in the parking lot, surveying the school. Someone would claim they saw smoke, and we would all say we […]
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Nebraska (R)
Alexander Payne, who is perhaps best known for moving the wine industry with his 2004 film Sideways, is well practiced in the Midwestern art of stoic disappointment. A son of the cornhusker state, Payne uses their quiet turmoil even when his films are set California and Hawaii as was Sideways and The Descendants, respectively.
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Much Ado About Nothing (2012) (PG-13)
“Shakespeare” is a word which likely conjures up an endless string of irrevocably poignant images, though the writer himself was directly responsible for none of them. I think of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and the battle on the beach, wherein Harold Perrineau’s tragically underestimated interpretation of Mercutio claims “A scratch!” after being mortally stabbed. […]
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All Is Lost (PG-13)
The majority of the dialogue in J.C. Chandor’s All is Lost comes in the first thirty seconds. The only human character, Our Man (Robert Redford) narrates a letter that he doesn’t send until the final act. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to […]
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Dallas Buyers Club (R)
And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Dylan Thomas, who is known as much for his poetry as his alcoholism, wrote these words for his dying father. […]
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Blue Jasmine (PG-13)
There’s something rote about Woody Allen films. In his sixth decade of filmmaking, both writing and directing, he has crafted and refined his own genre: neurosis plus jazz, adultery and A-listers; sometimes there’s murder, often there’s humor, but it is always with a deep sense of mortality. “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my […]
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Philomena (PG-13)
Stephen Frears is no Oliver Stone or Aaron Sorkin. His latest film, Philomena, like The Queen before it, is blissfully absent of soap box preaching. Given the material Frears is working with, that’s a extraordinary feat, exuding a generosity worthy of the film’s main character, Philomena Lee. Based loosely on the book The Lost Child […]
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Last Vegas (PG-13)
In Last Vegas, journeyman director Jon Turteltaub has demonstrated once again his ineffable knack for tapping into the middlebrow sensibility. Here, as in his unadventurous adventure films with Nicolas Cage, his safe combination of A list actors with B list material lulls the audience into the blissfully false impression that the picture they are watching […]
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The Counselor (R)
Ridley Scott doesn’t do feel-good movies. Ridley Scott does movies scored with the sounds of desperate women warbling in Middle Eastern tones. Even when Ridley Scott decides to make a feel-good movie, he still uses Russell Crowe, as if to say, “Not so fast.” Early on in his career, Scott tapped into something profoundly mythic […]
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Gravity (PG-13)
The life of St Christopher unfolds “a hell of a story” for the reader of the 13th century hagiography anthology, the Golden Legend. Also maintained as a significant feast day in the Eastern Orthodox Church calendar, the story of St Christopher was especially near to the hearts of those on pilgrimage to venerate relics or […]