Prisoner: Cell Block H: 25th Anniversary Collector’s Edition

This women-behind-bars serial drama, a cult favorite around the world, arrives finally on DVD, but the package is more constrained than the show’s characters. The series, which originally ran in Australia from 1979 to 1986, was shot on video and has held up remarkably well… from a technical standpoint, at least. While the picture remains … more…

The O.C.: The Complete First Season (review)

So far, no gorgeous amnesiac who just blew back into town has turned out to be someone’s long-lost spouse/child/evil twin, but there’s little else that could make this hit Fox series any sudsier than it already is. Mere months after the final episode of its debut season was broadcast, it arrives on DVD, a hedonistic, … more…

That 70s Show: Season One (review)

If there’s one thing That 70s Show proves, it’s that idiocy knows no temporal bounds. This inexplicably popular sitcom would be indistinguishable from just about every other sitcom on the air today were it not for the bell bottoms and shag ‘dos. Herewith all 25 episodes from the debut 1998-9 season, in which the gang … more…

Sister Princess: Volume 1 — Oh, Brother! (review)

It should hardly come as a surprise that the Japanese continue to find new ways to use animation to be both creepy and sexist. Here, a teenaged boy, Wataru, gets shanghaied to a mysterious, remote island, where thirteen obsequious girls who claim to be his sisters dote on him night and day. The four half-hour … more…

Noel (review)

Unfortunately, the most remarkable thing about Noel is its near-simultaneous triple-headed distribution: a limited theatrical release starting today, a debut on cable network TNT on November 28, and a disposable-DVD release on November 17, in a new format called Flexplay, which costs about the same as a rental but gives you only 48 hours of … more…

Bright Leaves (review)

Who’d have thunk that a freeform meditation on tobacco, family, and filmmaking would be so compelling? Documentarian Ross McElwee, whose great grandfather helped launch the tobacco industry, returns to his childhood home of North Carolina to meander through an exploration of his heritage, but “documentary” isn’t quite the word to describe the result — it’s … more…

The Polar Express (review)

If we’re honest about it, there’s something kinda creepy about the jolly man who lives at the North Pole, isn’t there? He sees you when you’re sleeping? Ewww. Slave armies of happy elves mass-producing Bratz and Dancing Elmos? Weird. Christmas stories tend to gloss over these rather vile underpinnings, and rightly so — the little ‘uns should go to bed on Christmas Eve with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads, not paranoid nightmares about a big fat dude breaking and entering and helping himself to milk and cookies.

The Incredibles (review)

That teaser trailer — you know the one I’m talking about — with the fat old ex-superhero struggling to get into his spandex costume? It left such a bad taste in my mouth whenever I contemplated the film that must go with it. I imagined a gang of former masked crusaders called out of happy retirement, reluctantly huffing and puffing their way back into action, replete with very unfunny cracks about getting fat and old, and probably with an even more unfunny getting-into-shape-a-la-*Rocky* sequence thrown in for good measure.

Near Dark, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Once Bitten, Blacula, Love at First Bite, and Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter (review)

Of course, most respected anthropologists and biologists recognize that the New World Vampire, or *vampirus americanus*, differs greatly from the European species, or *vampirus continentalus*, but few films have recognized that the wide-open spaces of the U.S. produce a vastly altered creature than Europe’s dense urban spaces or intimate, if remote, medieval villages. But years before John Carpenter and the team of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez documented the vampires that dwell in the lonely stretches of the Americas, the criminally underappreciated ethnographer Kathryn Bigelow did it — spookily, grimly, hilariously, gloriously — with 1987’s *Near Dark,* in which a coven of nasty bloodsuckers roam the deserted American Southwest.