Video: 5
Audio: 5
Extras: 2 House of Flying Daggers is, in many ways, similar to many other martial-arts movies you've seen (most notably, the crazily popular Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). It has all of the action and incredible fight sequences we've come to expect from the best Hong Kong exports. From a visual standpoint, though, it has more in common with the stylized color works of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. And what visuals they are. In Hero, director Yimou Zhang used massive amounts of color. Sometimes entire shots would be one color. Here, that is rarely the case, but color is no smaller a tool—just a more finely honed one. The story is of a love affair between an assassin and a policeman as a war builds around them.
Video: 4
Audio: 3
Extras: 2
I don't know if I hearted Huckabees, but I liked it an awful lot. It's an odd film (I expect nothing less from David O. Russell, the writer/director of Three Kings and Flirting with Disaster) about an environmental activist (Jason Schwartzman) who hires a pair of existential detectives to help him find meaning in a coincidence that he's experienced. With an incredibly strong cast at his disposal, Russell manages to explore weighty philosophical, political, and social subjects in a way that's both thoroughly relentless and charmingly playful.
Video: 2
Audio: 2
Extras: 1
The world is full of idiots, and we’re only getting dumber. That’s the premise behind Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, a sly satire on the state of our collective intelligence. Luke Wilson plays an average soldier who’s frozen in an experiment and wakes up in the year 2505. There, he is the smartest man on the planet. This is the launching pad for jabs at corporate culture and the dumbing down of America, most of it spot on, all very funny.
Video: 3
Audio: 3
Extras: 2
As she walks down the aisle at her own wedding, Rachel locks eyes for the first time with the female florist, and it’s love at first sight (literally, as she says) in the BBC production Imagine Me & You, an amiable, innocuous, and no-surprises film that leads you exactly where you think it will. Coyote Ugly star Piper Perabo is the newly married and now torn Brit who just can’t ignore the feelings she has no matter how hard she tries, and Lena Headey is Luce, the gay florist who also happens to feel the same.
Video: 2
Audio: 4
Extras: 3
James Brown, a.k.a. the Godfather of Soul, is a force of nature. If you’ve never seen his live show back in the day or think that Prince and OutKast are hot stuff, do yourself a big favor and spin the James Brown Live at Montreux 1981 DVD. If the fierce grooves don’t get your mojo working, the sheer spectacle of a sweat-soaked Brown and his 14-piece funk band will. You get a healthy dose of his greatest tunes—“It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” “I Got the Feelin’,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” and “Sex Machine”—packed within the disc’s all-too-short 71-minute running time. The jazz/funk workouts never let up, and, while Brown’s vocal prowess may not match the primal rhythm-and-blues sound he had in the 1960s, in 1981, he was still untouchable.
Video: 3
Audio: 3
Extras: 3
Viewing audiences and critics generally dismissed Jarhead when it rolled into theaters last year. That was a mistake—it’s one of the better unconventional war films ever made. This subgenre is championed by masterpieces such as Full Metal Jacket, Dr. Strangelove, and Apocalypse Now. These flicks actually explore the essence of war and its inevitable impact on the core of humanity. Jarhead measures up to the best of them specifically because the purported negatives critics hurled at it (cold, distant) is exactly the reason why it is great.
Video: 2
Audio: 2
Extras: 3
Ah, the joys of high school: acne, proms, SATs, vengeance. At least that’s what John Tucker Must Die leads me to believe. See, John Tucker is the BMOC, the basketball captain, and a playa with the ladies. Unfortunately, three of John’s ladies (all WB girls, I think) have found out about one another and enlist the help of the new girl, Katie, to enact revenge. Hijinks and female empowerment ensue.
Video: 4
Audio: 4
Extras: 4
Peter Jackson not only creates elaborate special editions of his movies, he lets audiences know that bigger, better versions are in the works when the initial theatrical cuts first hit the store shelves so we can choose wisely. He did it with his Lord of the Rings trilogy and now with his King Kong remake, offering a subsequent director’s cut with new extras that complement the original release.
Video: 2
Audio: 2
Extras: 0
What's funny about a group of staid suburban Texans who take life much too seriously? Pretty much everything, as their Emmy Award–winning third season proves, from the all-time-great "And They Call It Bobby Love," with guest voice Sarah Michelle Gellar (the episode culminates in a cheer-out-loud eating contest), to the darkly comic skydiving mishap in the season finale.
Video: 4
Audio: 5
Extras: 5
The search for salvation, fortune, and a new world are all familiar things that many continue to fight for today; during the Crusades, it was no different. Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven is yet another masterpiece created by the father of the director's cut, who is best known for his unique vision. Orlando Bloom is Balian, a Frenchman who becomes a knight and travels to the Holy City to find redemption. As the words "I am Jerusalem" are uttered from both sides, Balian must defend his people in this historical clash between Europe and the Middle East.
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