A respectful-but-unblinking treatment of a messy life, the lively, stylish Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line (Fox) only lapses into formula in the home stretch, when it starts to ignore Cash's artistry in favor of a traditional crawling-out-of-addiction story arc. Until then, it's an immersive look at Cash's formative years, when stars wandered Southern back roads and found immortality—and sometimes redemption—almost by accident. Director James Mangold keeps it compelling, but stars Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon (as June Carter) keep it alive, getting beneath the skin to make their bigger-than-life characters human again…
Another multiple-Oscar-nominee hitting DVD just in time to get viewers caught up before the March 5 ceremony, Pride & Prejudice (Universal) more than earns its nods for art direction, costume design, and music—it's a lavish, beautiful production that delivers spectacle as well as drama. Keira Knightley isn't the odds-on favorite for Best Actress, which is too bad, since her winning performance brings Jane Austen's fractious-family story down to earth…
One of 2005's most underappreciated gems, The Ice Harvest (Universal) is the sort of low-key, character-driven film that's apparently impossible to sell these days, a noir comedy that recalls Fargo in its flavorful depiction of crime in the heartland. The plot centers on a Christmas Eve mob-money swindle, but Richard Russo and Robert Benton's script is more concerned with the gin-soaked ambience of a small town after dark…
Rarely has a bum piece of casting sabotaged a movie as deeply as Alison Lohman's placement in Atom Egoyan's Where The Truth Lies (Sony), an otherwise-intriguing adaptation of Rupert "The Piña Colada Song" Holmes' book about a Lewis and Martin team that splits under mysterious circumstances. As a celebrity journalist who pokes into the decades-old case, Lohman appears completely out of her depth, though Egoyan's usual puzzle structure and Kevin Bacon's lively turn as the Lewis surrogate offer some thin compensation…
It took only a few months for Yours, Mine And Ours (Paramount), a remake of a 1968 Lucille Ball picture about two big families that get bigger through marriage, to crawl down to #79 on the Internet Movie Database's fan-voted "worst films of all time" list. But, honestly, it's several clicks above either of Steve Martin's Cheaper By The Dozen remakes, neither of which have made the list. Admittedly, that's like saying a piercing headache is better than stomach flu, but it's still a distinction worth making.