It won't look nearly as good on a small screen, but Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (Warner) is a sweetly morbid little romp worth visiting and revisiting. The story of a hapless groom dragged off to the land of the dead when he accidentally "marries" a lovelorn cadaver, Corpse Bride feels like a return to the earliest and most enjoyable light morbidities of Burton's career. And hey, the DVD comes with a slew of featurettes explaining the inner workings of his cunning little silicon puppets, whose craft outweighs all other factors in the film…
Director Curtis Hanson makes a valiant attempt at transforming the artificiality of chick-lit into something more like life with In Her Shoes (Fox), which follows the scattered love interests of two mismatched sisters, played by Toni Collette and Cameron Diaz. Hanson arguably gets more out of location shoots than any other contemporary mainstream director, and here he contrasts Philly's lived-in spaces with a Florida retirement community, while framing them both in off-center compositions that emphasize how people talk past each other, not to each other. He takes the episodic, melodramatic material seriously, and films it like shambling '70s-style Cinema Americana, more Five Easy Pieces than Bridget Jones's Diary…
The grim realism hinted at by street-savvy '70s cop shows like Police Story finally got a more appropriate vehicle when Hill Street Blues hit the airwaves in 1981. The 17 episodes in the box set Hill Street Blues: The Complete First Season (Fox) deal with the day-to-day drudgery of police work—including the urban politics—as well as the heart-stopping danger. This, after all, is the show that started off with a bang by gunning down its two most likeable characters at the end of the first episode…
The War Within (Magnolia) drew plenty of controversy for its mostly smart, sensitive handling of the inner life of a Palestinian suicide bomber on American soil, and for daring to imply that people who do unconscionable things are still people, even if they attempt to cast their human connections aside. But surely if director/co-writer Joseph Castelo was actually trying to justify terrorism, as some accusers inevitably claimed, he would have put more effort into trying to connect the dots between his protagonist's past and his fatal choices, instead of leaving that central plot point awkwardly hanging.