Changing Rooms: Trust Me… I’m a Designer (review)

The Brits invented reality decorating and guerrilla design, and here it is in all its (dubious) glory. This compilation disc, which collects high- and lowlights from the BBC TV series (which has inspired numerous imitations on American cable), features a slew of designers with over-the-top, made-for-TV personalities who deploy garish colors and outlandish do-it-yourself projects … more…

Carnage (review)

In her compelling debut feature, Delphine Gleize achieves a mastery of the visual, the metaphoric, and the dramatic that few other veteran filmmakers could pull off. This is an expansive story about the whole shebang: life and death and sex and babies and food and dogs, all the really important things. A toreador is wounded … more…

Cardcaptor Sakura: The Movie 2: The Sealed Card (review)

“Sakura Kinomoto has finally captured and converted all the Clow Cards into Sakura Cards and now… someone or something is stealing them away and is erasing vast parts of town including the people she cares about!” If this makes any sense to you, can you explain it to me? I’m not sure I could tell … more…

Yeah Right! (review)

Mind-bending director Spike Jonze — of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation fame — returns to his skate roots with this feature-length montage of exciting street skateboarding, shot in music video-size chunks with codirectors Cory Weincheque and Ty Evans. None but the most devoted fans of the sport will be able to sit through the entire … more…

Will & Grace: Season One (review)

It’s the show that made Middle America comfortable with gay stereotypes, and watching them pile up episode after episode is nauseating. It’s the flip side of the power of TV-on-DVD: The good stuff gets more intense and more fun when consumed in whole-season chunks, but the bad stuff gets worse, its sins magnified and amplified. … more…

The West Wing: The Complete First Season (review)

It may just be the finest prime-time drama ever to grace the airwaves. The smart, snappy zingers of office politics meet the Gordian knots of global politics behind the scenes at the White House of the Bartlet administration, full of intelligent, compassion people you can’t help but wish were more than the stuff of civic … more…

Wedding Peach (review)

It’s not quite the feminist nightmare it seems to be, but almost. As in most anime, it’s a Japanese schoolgirl causing all the to-do — here, it’s Momoko, who turns out to be the “legendary love angel Wedding Peach” in her “beautiful, magical wedding dress” destined to rescue humanity from “devils” who want to take … more…

To Serve Them All My Days (review)

When David Powlett-Jones returned from the Great War, a teaching position at posh Bamfylde, a boys’ boarding school, seemed an unlikely choice for a shell-shocked veteran. But as fans of this adored miniseries know, he couldn’t have made a better choice. Finally on DVD and video for the first time since its original airing on … more…

The Sonny & Cher Ultimate Collection (review)

It’s 1970s pop culture in a bottle. The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, one of the most popular shows of the decade, parades guest stars like a who’s who of the time: Burt Reynolds, Farrah Fawcett, Tina Turner, Harvey Korman, Howard Cosell, Glen Campbell, and The Jackson 5. This best-of set collects nine original, unedited … more…

The Solid Gold Cadillac (review)

Nearly half a century on, Richard Quine’s satirical romantic comedy still has all the bite it must have had in 1956, when it was adapted from the Broadway play by George S. Kaufman and Howard Teichman. Judy Holliday, in what was her standard not-so-ditzy, not-so-dumb blonde role, crashes the annual stockholders’ meeting of International Project, … more…