If you like your humor broadside up, hold the subtlety, you’ll want to nurse this Hangover with your best buds. The ensemble cast meshes perfectly–it’s like a super-R-rated episode of Friends: silly, slapstick, and completely in the viewer’s face. When four pals go to Vegas to celebrate the imminent nuptials of one of them, they partake in a rooftop toast to “a night we’ll never forget.” But they’re in for a big surprise: their celebration drinks were laced with date-rape drugs Read more…

Katherine Heigl is delightful as Jane, a self-effacing Gal Friday so addicted to organizing weddings in her off time, that 27 Dresses opens with her character juggling two nuptials on the same night. A perpetual bridesmaid, Jane’s hobby is discovered by a matrimony reporter named Kevin (James Marsden), who hides a romantic side behind his wall of cynicism. While Kevin gradually develops feelings for Jane, the latter’s superficial sister, Tess (Malin Akerman), pursues George (E Read more…

Los Angeles Daily News, October 20, 2000

“The computer maestros at Pixar Studios are working at the top of their game, but just as importantly, so are the screenwriters.”

Andy heads off to cowboy camp leaving his toys to their own devices. Things shift into high gear when an obsessive toy collector named Al McWhiggin (owner of Al’s Toy Barn) kidnaps Woody. At Al’s apartment, Woody discovers that he is a highly valued collectible from a 1950s TV show called Read more…

The redneck wits of Blue Collar Comedy Tour: One for the Road have gone a little more posh in this, their final appearance together. Performing in the gorgeous, historic Warner Theater in Washington, D.C., there’s an air of class about the proceedings quickly and good-naturedly undone by the quartet’s material. Bill Engvall discusses what it was like to assemble a trampoline for his kid and make a couple of discoveries while trying it out: “One, the dog doesn’t like to jump. Two Read more…

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Mel Brooks scored his first commercial hit with this raucous Western spoof starring the late Cleavon Little as the newly hired (and conspicuously black) sheriff of Rock Ridge. Sheriff Bart teams up with deputy Jim (Gene Wilder) to foil the railroad-building scheme of the nefarious Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman). The simple plot is just an excuse for a steady stream of gags, many of them unabashedly tasteless, that Brooks and his wacky cast pull off with side-split Read more…

Katherine Heigl further cements her reputation as one of film’s most dazzling, and go-to, romantic comedy heroines. In The Ugly Truth she brings her deft comic timing and true vulnerability to a film that avoids clichés, successfully, all the way until the surprising, quiet end. Heigl’s partner in crime–and at first, in pure hatred–is the rakishly charming Gerard Butler. Heigl plays Abby, a career-bound TV producer, and Butler is Mike, an outrageous dude’s dude whose public a Read more…

The movie that made Humphrey Bogart Humphrey Bogart anchors this second DVD box devoted to the mighty star. The Maltese Falcon gets–and merits–the deluxe three-disc treatment, and the other Bogie movies collected here are solid vehicles from his early 1940s Warner Bros. heyday. The essence of Bogart’s world-weary yet mysteriously romantic aura is on luscious display, even if most of these films fall just short of classic status. Bogart’s letter-perfect incarnation as Sam Spad Read more…

Academy Award®-winner Kathy Bates (Lead Actress, Misery, 1990) and Academy Award®-nominee Alfre Woodard (Supporting Actress, Cross Creek, 1983) star as the matriarchs of two very different families being torn apart by greed and scandal in the contemporary drama Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys. The sixth feature film by Perry chronicles the inner workings of two families—one upper-crust and the other working class—that become inextricably linked by scandal. Wealthy Read more…

The People Speak is a beautiful and moving film inspired by Howard Zinn’s books A People’s History of the United States–first published in 1980 and one of the bestselling history books in the United States–and Voices of a People’s History of the United States, the primary-source companion to A People’s History of the United States, edited with Anthony Arnove. The film features the actual words (in letters, songs, poems, speeches, and manifestoes) of rebels, dissenters, and vis Read more…