With the Final Destination and Saw movies thriving in theaters and on home video, death-by-gimmicky- Rube-Goldberg-contraption has replaced death-by-ginzu as the snuff of choice for American horror audiences. Mere months after swiping more than 20 times its budget at the box office, the spring-loaded killing machine that is Saw II (Lions Gate) passes the collection plate for another round on DVD. Tobin Bell's spookily unflappable puppetmaster earns a few chills, but the human rat maze his character constructs gets tiresome fast…
What happens to prestige pictures when they don't quite live up to expectations? In the case of Proof (Miramax), the highly anticipated screen version of David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, they're treated with roughly the same respect given to that film by Mel Gibson's hairdresser. Though shelved for a year and released as part of the Miramax fire sale, the film turns out to be a deeply flawed but affecting meditation on trust and mental illness, supported by an uncommonly fine Gwyneth Paltrow performance…
Based on the children's book by Jumanji author Chris Van Allsburg, Zathura (Sony) attaches itself to another board game as deus ex machina, this time shipping two bickering brothers off into space until they can appreciate each other. Interstellar elements aside, it's a pretty crappy game: Since the players exert zero control over their own destiny, it feels more like some sort of misbegotten child-discipline experiment from the '50s…
Writer-director Rodrigo García solidified his reputation as an unusually sensitive, perceptive chronicler of the female mind with Nine Lives (Sony), an uneven but intermittently brilliant collection of cinematic short stories graced by a veritable who's who of contemporary actresses. Robin Wright-Penn picked up a much-deserved Independent Spirit Award nomination for her virtuoso turn in the film's best segment, which documents a heartbreaking grocery-store reunion between her character and an ex-boyfriend…
Essentially a high-end coffee-table art-book come to dazzling life, Mirrormask (Sony) is one of those films that feels too dense and expansive for a TV screen, but will still get a lot of home-video play from viewers eager to repeatedly relive and explore the amazing visuals. Longtime writer/artist team Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean move from comics to cinema with this feature, made in conjunction with Henson Studios, and in the pattern of Jim Henson's family classics The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth; Gaiman's labored script sends a girl through a fantasyland where she symbolically tries to rescue her stricken mother, but McKean's endlessly inventive imagery makes it easy to forget the story and get lost in his glorious dreamscape.