I don’t think I’m unique in saying that when it comes to biopics of music icons I’m wanting two things, really: insight into their lives, and a full complement of music to make me remember and appreciate their talents. I…
A Gothic thriller that wears its humble aspirations proudly, like a grimy but well-tied cravat, “Stonehearst Asylum” has pretty much everything one could expect from a period piece with the word ‘asylum’ in the title. All that, and Ben Kingsley, too. Jim…
Edith Wharton is known for three novels: The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), and The Age of Innocence (1920), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. But she wrote much more than that, including 19 other novels, three collections of poetry, 14 short story…
A documentary that brims with both an old-fashioned spirit of adventure and a self-congratulatory hubris, “James Cameron’s Deepsea Challenge 3D” takes you to the “last frontier on Earth”, the deepest place in our ocean, not seen since its first and only exploration…
This time of year, it’s easy to want to indulge. But perhaps this is the reason that a quiet, subtle film can sometimes sneak up on you without any warning to knock your socks off. Enter “The Good Lie,” landing on Blu-ray…
I left the Marvel Universe when I started college and return there only to check my “stash” in the attic occasionally, so my memory of the Guardians of the Galaxy is hazy. Maybe everyone else’s is, too, because I haven’t heard a…
It seems incredible now that “The Office” was first viewed as a risky proposition in its first season. 9 seasons and 201 episodes later, it stands as one of the great TV comedies, daring and hilarious, a brilliantly funny exploration…
In the excellent DVD box set “Universal Classic Monsters,” Universal Studios puts it all together in a 21-disc, 30-film collection that covers all of their monster features released between “Dracula” (1931) and the last release in the cycle, “The Creature Walks Among…
The romantic comedy seems to be a genre on continual life-support—never healthy enough to ditch the I.V., but never quite bad enough to have the plug pulled. With “What If,” the rom-com rolls sideways on the gurney, playing minor variations on the…
After twenty years of trying I have resigned myself to the fact that I will never truly love any film described as a screwball comedy. My working hypothesis is that I am missing the apparently common-place gene that enables most…