Awesome special-feature alert: Facing their toxic reviews head-on, the producers of Date Movie (Fox) have included an "anti-commentary track" by L.A.-based film critics Bob Strauss and Scott Foundas. As one of the few reviewers who tolerated this dreadful spoof, Strauss spends most of the time playing devil's advocate, but Foundas constantly recoils, especially when the comedy devolves into gross-out gags. Variations on the line "I don't see how anybody could think that was funny" frequently recur…
Written in response to Susan Smith's made-up story about a black carjacker who abducted her children, Richard Price's powerful novel Freedomland recast a similar tale in an urban setting. Though tailor-made for Martin Scorsese or Spike Lee, both of whom have worked with Price in the past, the book somehow wound up with Joe Roth, the former studio boss whose directorial efforts include Coupe De Ville and Revenge Of The Nerds II. Needless to say, the movie version of Freedomland (Sony) doesn't reach its full potential…
Too much weight was put on the first season of the Friends spin-off Joey, which was supposed to revitalize NBC's Thursday-night programming and save the sitcom form. The show just wasn't that good—especially once a sense of panic began to take hold and the producers started tinkering with the format. But as the DVD set Joey: The Complete First Season (Warner) proves, the show wasn't that bad either. It was just another amiable laugher about people with too much money and too few problems…
In his documentary Touch The Sound: A Sound Journey With Evelyn Glennie (New Video Group), director Thomas Riedelsheimer gets inside the world of the partially deaf avant-garde percussionist, leaning on impressionistic sequences that convey the percussive qualities of her everyday life. Riedelsheimer finds visuals to match the white noise we're all submerged in, filming animated billboards in a city square and the blur of Glennie's drumsticks in rapid motion. Touch The Sound may be too heady to take in one sitting, but like superior tracks on an exhausting double album, the movie's individual moments are too powerful to dismiss…
The shadow of the current never-ending war on terror looms large over Winter Soldier (New Yorker), a harrowing documentary that chronicles testimony given by returning Vietnam War veterans about war crimes committed by Americans during the conflict. The result is excruciatingly painful to watch, but it'd be hard to think of another American documentary that so powerfully illustrates the costs of war on everyone it touches.