Alan Moore disowned the big-screen adaptation of his graphic novel V For Vendetta (Warner Bros.) more out of general anti-Hollywood principle than anything else. Chances are he'd consider it a bastardization, but as bastardizations go, it's still pretty radical stuff. Natalie Portman stars as a young woman drawn into a masked radical's one-man revolution against a totalitarian future Britain. No doubt all the echoes of current politics are accidental…
Tim Allen and Kristin Davis surely rank among the weirdest-looking screen couples in movie history, but when he gives her cheek a broad-tongued lick in The Shaggy Dog (Buena Vista), things really get creepy. To be fair, the remake does justice to a long tradition of family-oriented Disney live-action comedies; unfortunately, that tradition is more like a legacy of child abuse…
Richard Pryor: Live In Concert (HBO) is one of the funniest movies ever made and one of the greatest one-man performances ever recorded. It's a joyous, liberating spin through Pryor's frank views on race, death, parenting, sex, boxing, and monkeys. The comedian effortlessly adopts about a dozen different personae throughout, disarming the audience with his quick wit and unflinching honesty. People who want to understand the Pryor legend and legacy need to start here…
It took Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne years to get John Fante's Depression-era novel Ask The Dust (Paramount) off the ground, and perhaps it lay fallow for too long. The third act, especially, suffers from Towne's weakness for romantic languor, as the relationship between a broke writer (Colin Farrell) and an immigrant waitress (Salma Hayek) comes sputtering to a close. Still, few films since Chinatown have evoked L.A.'s past so flavorfully, and even lesser Towne can turn out some pungent dialogue…
Slovenian-born social philosopher Slavoj Zizek is famous for analyzing the way people and societies alike delude themselves into thinking that they act freely and responsibly. Astra Taylor's straightforward, relatively style-free documentary Zizek! (Zeitgeist) treats the professor as a force of nature and a man out of time—an eruptive, eloquent thinker in ill-fitting clothes, co-existing awkwardly with television commercials, fast-food restaurants, and automated teller machines.