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"While the narrative transitions from the dugout to New York's very mean streets are sometimes a little jarring, and the extensive baseball footage may bore viewers who aren't sports fans, The Bronx is Burning is first and foremost a character-driven story."
— Tim Knight
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Knocked Up
"[Judd] Apatow's works spend time with their characters, main and supporting, enough so that we can sincerely laugh with them and understand their decisions."
—Chris Cabin, FilmCritic.com
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Cujo (25th Anniversary Edition)
"[Lewis] Teague's best movie, Cujo, is a nearly perfect exercise in suspense on a par with Spielberg's Duel or the original The Hitcher."
—Jim Hemphill
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Blade: House of Chthon
"Johns and Goyer's script is solid, and they're to be lauded for incorporating new concepts into the Blade universe. Yet it's impossible to avoid the sense that the pilot is just Blade-lite."
—Jim Hemphill
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Death Proof
"Zooming to a sensational close with an 18-minute car chase shot 'old school,' i.e., without CGI, Death Proof is good, trashy fun with a sly sense of humor that manages to honor and affectionately send up the drive-in flicks that shaped Tarantino's cinematic sensibility. "
—Tim Knight
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Deliverance
"What's most apparent watching Deliverance so many years after its initial release is just how seminal the film turned out to be. Of course, John Boorman's backwoods thriller was well-reviewed, a box-office hit, and a Best Picture Oscar-nominee."
—Gary Goldstein
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Flashdance (Collector's Edition)
"As Alex, [Jennifer] Beals is natural and charming; it's easy to see why a nation of young women related to her and made the movie a hit."
—Jim Hemphill
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Saturday Night Fever (30th Anniversary Edition)
"It's easy to forget just how rich and distinctive the movie is; more than just a collection of kitschy outfits and pounding disco music, Saturday Night Fever is every bit the ethnographic study that Mean Streets and Taxi Driver are."
—Jim Hemphill
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American Cannibal: The Documentary
The story (real or false) follows two out-of-work TV writers who wend their way through TV networks and production companies as they try to break into reality TV."
—Christopher Null, FilmCritic.com
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Face/Off (Collector's Edition)
"This is a rich, expansive piece of mainstream entertainment on a level with some of Hitchcock's greatest crowd pleasers, and the sophisticated story construction (which the screenwriters discuss on an insightful DVD commentary track) rewards repeat viewings."
—Jim Hemphill
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A Few Days in September
"The title isn't all that's awful about this film, it's a mess of a story that wants desperately to be an espionage thriller."
—Christopher Null, FilmCritic.com
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The Graduate (40th Anniversary Edition)
"A classic that deserves its iconic status, The Graduate is the cinematic equivalent of the Simon and Garfunkel songs that make up the soundtrack—gently subversive, wistful, not explicitly political but still very much part of the countercultural '60s."
—David Bezanson, FilmCritic.com
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I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life and Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal
"A production of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in L.A. and narrated by Nicole Kidman, I Have Never Forgotten You showcases Wiesenthal's achievements with vintage news clips and recent interviews. "
— Keith Breeze, FilmCritic.com
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The Return of the Living Dead (Collector's Edition)
"As a horror film, it isn't remotely scary, aside from a few 'boo' moments in which O'Bannon skillfully stages the action so that the eye is directed toward a specific part of the frame before being shocked by a zombie that jumps out somewhere else."
—Jim Hemphill
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Two and a Half Men: The Complete First Season
"Of course, a big part of the show's success is the inspired interplay between [Charlie] Sheen and [Jon] Cryer, whose Odd Couple dynamic is usually amusing, even when the overall quality of the first season's 24 episodes is decidedly inconsistent."
—Tim Knight
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Georgia Rule
"It doesn't help that Georgia Rule endured documented production delays due in part to [Lindsay Lohan's] childish on-set antics. And now that we're able to see the finished product, we realize the star plays...well, a coarse version of the pseudo-diva we've grown accustomed to."
—Sean O'Connell, FilmCritic.com
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The Wind That Shakes the Barley
"Stridently political in its telling of the birth of the IRA and its eventual separation into factions, [Ken] Loach has been working towards this for most of his life."
—Chris Cabin, FilmCritic.com
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A Night at the Roxbury
"Stretching a one-joke, three-minute sketch into an interminable, laugh-deprived feature film, John Fortenberry's feeble comedy about those head-bobbing hipster wannabes, Steve and Doug Butabi, has been re-released on DVD in a 'special collector's edition,' presumably to capitalize on Ferrell's box office appeal."
—Tim Knight
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Friday Night Lights: The First Season
"This boxed set is no mere knockoff of the 2004 feature film or the brilliant H.G. Bissinger-penned book upon which it was based, but 16 hours of riveting drama that stands on its own as an enthralling, heartbreaking teen saga—the best since My So-Called Life."
—Jim Hemphill
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Heroes: Season One
"[Tim] Kring and his top-notch team of writers and directors succeed at the daunting task of keeping the story moving like gangbusters without sacrificing character development or tone."
—Tim Knight
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The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros
"Veering from adorable and light to bleak and tragic, The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros is all over the emotional map, but in a realistic way, sort of like life itself."
— Don Willmott, FilmCritic.com
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Offside
"Offside confounds the viewer in its simplicity, but there's so much going on in its contained universe that to call it anything but supremely dense would be an outright lie."
—Chris Cabin, FilmCritic.com
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Red Road
"For all the watching going on in Red Road, there is precious little safety—in fact one of the tropes that writer/director [Andrea] Arnold insistently returns to is the resolute unsafety of these people's worlds, no matter how much technology surrounds them."
—Chris Barsanti, FilmCritic.com
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Blood in the Face
"It's a maddening film, but not in the ways its makers intended; rather than being outraged by the racist vitriol spewed by the Klansmen and American Nazis who are interviewed in the documentary, most viewers will probably just be frustrated by the movie's failure to say anything more complex than "prejudice is bad."
—Jim Hemphill
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House of Games
"The first and still the best of David Mamet's nine feature films to date, House of Games is a brilliant, noir-esque psychological drama that hooks you from the start—just like the film's ace confidence men, who draw a repressed psychiatrist into their Byzantine scam, with surprising results."
—Tim Knight
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The Milky Way
"The Milky Way is almost breathtaking in its scope—it parodies not only Catholicism, Jansenism, and other religious movements but also movies themselves (the large supporting cast seems to be Bunuel's comment on Hollywood's Biblical epics like The Ten Commandments)."
—Jim Hemphill
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September 11 (11'09''01)
"Hailing from four continents, the filmmakers were otherwise given total artistic freedom in depicting their response to the terrorist attacks. The resulting films not only run the gamut from cinema-verite-style narratives to impressionistic pieces, but also veer wildly in terms of quality."
—Tim Knight
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