Gleason scores, Anthropoid kills, Bad Moms just bad
Home Entertainment: November 1, 2016
Justin Lin puts Star Trek franchise into hyperdrive but fails to engage mental engines but there's plenty of other stars to check out on home platforms this week
By Katherine Monk
Star Trek Beyond (Directed by: Justin Lin, Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg) 2.5/5:
I wanted to love Star Trek Beyond as much as I enjoyed the other two reboots from mastermind J.J. Abrams, and yet, despite my ample enthusiasm for a franchise that puts friendship and humanity first, this third film starring Chris Pine as James T. Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Mr. Spock failed to make it out of the transporter room in one piece. There are many reasons why Beyond falls from a high orbit, but the most noticeable is the name on the director’s chair. Abrams was busy helming that other sci-fi juggernaut, leaving the Fast and the Furious’s Justin Lin to assemble the pieces and play the cosmic strings. Lin is good at car crashes and man ...
Anthropoid ignores war movie expectations
Movie review: Anthropoid
Sean Ellis's Second World War thriller about the real-life assassination attempt on Nazi henchman Reinhard Heydrich adopts a slightly random, and disarmingly intimate approach to both heroism and history
Star Trek Beyond falls Below the Bar
Movie review: Star Trek Beyond
Justin Lin revs the Enterprise's perpetually over-heated engines but Star Trek Beyond orbits a familiar universe without reflection
Honest emotion makes Gleason a must-see
Movie review: Gleason
Sports movies demand a whole lot of heart, but this documentary about a former NFL'er diagnosed with ALS captures the whole body of the human experience
Wintour is Coming… to home entertainment
What's Streaming: August
The nights are getting shorter, but there's more to sink your eyeballs into when the sun goes down as Tom Hanks, the Met Gala, a High-Rise horror and The Lobster hit home
By Katherine Monk
The First Monday in May (3/5)
Who doesn’t want to go behind the scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? I know I do, even if I’m just getting access to the costume gallery – that small square of space accessible by freight elevator and remote staircases in the bowels of the storied institution on Fifth Ave. Ever since its inception in 1946, the costume institute (now named after Vogue editor and chief fundraiser Anna Wintour) hosts the museum’s annual fundraising ball, which makes or breaks the annual operating budget on the first Monday in May. With so much riding on the Met Gala, you can feel the stress in curator Andrew Bolton’s fashionable fibers from the moment the movie opens. And it ramps up from there as we watch him prepare for the opening of ...
Slicing Life: A Tale of Two Cities
Blu-ray blast from the past: A Tale of Two Cities
Reflections on the Revolution in France - from the man who brought you Shanghai Surprise: Jim Goddard's adaptation of the Dickens classic still holds its edge, even in a 1980 Hallmark production starring Chris Sarandon and Peter Cushing
Michael Joplin remembers a happy Janis
Interview: Michael Joplin
Though Janis Joplin's surviving siblings don't occupy huge amounts of screen time, Michael and Laura Joplin's presence brings a new dimension to Amy Berg's new documentary, Janis: Little Girl Blue, premiering tonight on PBS
The Spoils of Babylon burns oil economy
@Home entertainment: The Spoils of Babylon on DVD
SNL alumnus Matt Piedmont creates a strange homage to the era of early '80s miniseries with The Spoils of Babylon, an elaborate, six-episode spoof starring Will Ferrell as a washed up auteur and Kristen Wiig as an oil heiress with the hots for her bastard brother
Peanuts, Macbeth, a big whale and an evil car hit home entertainment
Entertainment: @home releases for March 8
Embrace the joy of Snoopy or explore the many faces of man-made evil as Michael Fassbender cuts to the bone in Macbeth, James McAvoy breathes life into Frankenstein and James Brolin tries to stop a killer car
By Katherine Monk
We love you, Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie (4/5)
The hand-drawn essence of Charles Schulz’s iconic comic strip comes through with flying colors in this gentle transition to digital from Ice Age director Steve Martino. Martino and the animators realized they didn’t need to reinvent the characters for a modern audience by making Charlie Brown look like a human kid, or turn Snoopy into a drooling lump of pixelated fur.
They went for the feel of the source material: ever roving between pre-teen daydream, birthday party bliss and existential angst – with an emphasis on the latter, because it’s that quiet ache of looming adulthood that makes Peanuts the pop culture monolith it is.
Charlie ...
Mississippi Grind percolates
Movie review: Mississippi Grind
The team behind Half Nelson and Sugar return with a film about chronic gambling that isn't as depressing as it probably should be, thanks to a pair of pocket kings in Ryan Reynolds and Ben Mendelsohn
