The Science of Sleep
March 1, 2007
After three feature films, music video visionary Michel Gondry has finally originated his own project, entitled The Science of Sleep (2006), applying his own unique brand of magic realism without filtering his sensibilities through the screenplays of...
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe: Extended Edition
December 21, 2006
Taking a page out of Peter Jackson’s book, the filmmakers behind the hugely successful Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005) have revisited their film with an extended edition that beefs up the film’s running time to 150...
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
December 5, 2006
While no one predicted the phenomenonal success of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, the success of the sequel was pretty much a slam dunk provided that the filmmakers didn’t mess around with the formula too much. They didn’t. In fact, they...
The Green Mile: Special Edition
December 1, 2006
Magic realism is a tricky thing to pull off in a movie. It’s a deft balancing act that if you go too far in one direction you run the risk of losing the audience. In literature, it is much easier to pull off because a lot of it is left up to the reader’s...
King Kong: Deluxe Extended Edition
November 29, 2006
King Kong (2005) is Peter Jackson’s epic, mega-budget, fanboy love letter to the film that inspired him to become a movie director in the first place. Clocking in at double the running time of the original, Jackson’s film is an ambitious juggernaut...
Nightmares and Dreamscapes
October 31, 2006
Stephen King adaptations are traditionally hit or miss affairs. For every superior one like Salem’s Lot (1979) there are many more lackluster ones like Maximum Overdrive (1986). And so each new King adaptation is approached with a certain amount of...
Gojira: Deluxe Collector’s Edition
August 30, 2006
As Steve Ryfle’s excellent liner notes point out, Godzilla is more than just some guy in a cheesy rubber suit terrorizing badly dubbed Japanese actors and stomping miniatures, but the original film, made in 1954, is actually a tragedy of epic proportions,...
Amazing Stories: The Complete First Season
August 1, 2006
At the height of his mid-1980s fame, Steven Spielberg parlayed his clout to convince Universal Studios to back a weekly anthology show on network television that would be called Amazing Stories (named from the pulp fiction magazine of the same name) and...
Night Watch
July 11, 2006
Leave it up to filmmakers from another country, in this case Russia, to offer a fresh perspective on an established genre. The story may be as old as time but the way it is presented is not. Night Watch (2004) chronicles an epic, centuries-old struggle...
Howl’s Moving Castle
April 20, 2006
Each new film from world-renowned Japanimator Hayao Miyazaki has become an event and Howl’s Moving Castle, a tale of magic, curses and lost identity doesn’t disappoint. Miyazaki was first brought to mainstream western attention in 2003 when...
