Nine Lives (review)

It’s almost like theater, these nine short, interconnected one-act plays that unfold in real time in long, uncut single takes: writer-director Rodrigo Garcia, who’s mostly directed for TV, adopts the urgency and the immediacy of the stage by eschewing the tricks of film and setting his extraordinary cast free in front of the camera. Nine … more…

Thunderstruck (review)

You know how, in My Best Friend’s Wedding, the pals promised to marry each other if they were both still single at 30? Well, this is just like that, except it’s five heavy-metal fans who vowed, as teenagers, that if any of them died before he turned forty, the others would bury him next to … more…

Thundercats: Season One: Volume One: Discs 1 & 2 (review)

Thundercats! Are! Go! No, wait: that was Thunderbirds. Still, Thundercats are indeed go, in their first DVD collection, which is sure to draw as much cash from the pockets of retro-hungry Generation Xers as the cartoon originally drew from the pockets of our parents, to buy all those damn Thunderbird toys that were the inspiration … more…

Ned and Stacey: The Complete First Season (review)

There was a time, though it is little remembered now, when Debra Messing (The Wedding Date) wasn’t quite the desperately annoying woman-child of Will & Grace and was, instead, merely the mildly irritating stereotypical New York neurotic Stacey, who marries pompous ass Ned (Thomas Haden Church: Sideways) merely to live in his fabulous, rent-controlled apartment … more…

Margaret Cho: Assassin (review)

I suppose there’s a time and a place for Margaret Cho. Unfortunately, that time and place is your dorm room during the brief moment of your first semester at college when jokes about Viagra and how the pope is like a drag queen are surprising and terms like “pussy cyclone” are shocking. I mean, look, … more…

Five Mile Creek: Season One (review)

This charming Disney Channel series, about an American woman abroad in Australia during that nation’s gold rush, is a delight for family viewing, reliably inoffensive without avoiding tough issues from racism and sexism to the awkwardness of creating an ad hoc family out of new friends. Maggie Scott (Louise Caire Clark) and her daughter, young … more…

El Crimen Perfecto (review)

What if they gave a black comedy and nobody laughed? See, it’s ironic, this “perfect crime” nonsense, cuz nothing goes right and the characters are all perfect losers whom, it is hoped, we will laugh at cuz they’re such dorks. There’s Rafael (Guillermo Toledo), see, a salesman at a Spanish department store. Except we don’t … more…

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (review)

This Radcliffe kid, you have to wonder: does he have any idea? Does he look around every day at work and say to himself, ‘Holy crap, there’s Maggie Smith. That’s Michael Gambon. And they’re calling me to the set with Alan Rickman!’ Or are they all just a few more annoying and clueless adults who make his teenage life a living hell?