DVDs, 5/29.

"[W]e're on the verge, like it or not, of a new sub-subgenre of techno-movie, and if you've seen Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Sin City or 300, you've done time on Planet Greenscreen, where absolutely everything but the actors is a make-believe, crazed-art-department blitz of pixels and bits," writes Michael Atkinson, noting at IFC News that, while there's some disagreement as to which film was the very first of this kind, "most agree it was Graham Robertson's Able Edwards, a modest, LA-shot indie filmed with a mini-DV camera on 12-square-foot patch of studio floor, in front of an optical effects screen.... it's a thoughtful, thematically adventurous piece of work, a virtual remake of Citizen Kane that scrambles in Walt Disney's bio... and then launches into a claustrophobic future of cryogenics, orbital colonies, cloning and environmental devastation."

"As a movie, Fletch is all but unwatchably bad," writes Reihan Salam at Slate. "But as a cultural artifact, it is invaluable."

"It's a mixed bag of Hepburn vehicles, but even bad Hepburn is worth watching," writes Susan King in the Los Angeles Times of the Katharine Hepburn Collection. "If it's the androgynous Hepburn you're looking for, look no further than Sylvia Scarlett, the curious romantic fantasy she made with her favorite director, George Cukor, for RKO in 1935," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. "Hepburn is the title character, the daughter of a sweet, weak-willed Englishman (Edmund Gwenn) and a French mother. When Sylvia's widowed father gets in trouble for gambling with office funds, the two decide to leave Marseille for England. On the ship Sylvia will disguise herself as Sylvester, a boy, to put the police off the track. But the disguise seems strangely natural, as Sylvia-Sylvester grows into her male role, smoking and swaggering and looking for all the world like a particularly precious denizen of the New York nightclub scene of the 1970s."

At Stop Smiling, Nathan Kosub and Nick Pinkerton review Army of Shadows and Scarface, respectively.

"At its heart The Untouchables is a simple morality tale," writes Vincent Cosgrove in the New York Times. "But when the writing and direction coalesce, the results are gripping. That's true of the pilot and several episodes, notably one titled The Noise of Death."

"New Line's 'Platinum Series' editions have frequently been among the best 'special editions' in the market, with great care taken, even on films of questionable value," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "Pan's Labyrinth's two-disc package is absolutely first-rate; I'm sure there will be a Plutonium-238 (or some such) edition some day, but it's hard to imagine what could be added to the current product."

Posted by dwhudson at May 29, 2007 3:37 PM