By now, every fan of likeable, sometimes painfully real American comedy should've seen Judd Apatow's Knocked Up (Universal), which stars Seth Rogen as an L.A. stoner who accidentally impregnates E! News on-air talent Katherine Heigl, then falls in love with her as the two of them try to make a go of it as potential parents. The next phase of appreciation: the DVD, which in its two-disc version, contains all manner of deleted scenes that promise to be as funny as the feature…
The box-office failure of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse has prompted its distributor to perform surgery for DVD, releasing their two feature-length entries separately and lopping off the fake trailers altogether. This sounds like a rip-off, but on the plus side, Tarantino's superior Death Proof (Weinstein) has ballooned by 20 minutes to the version released in Europe under the title Boulevard De La Mort. That means American viewers get to see Butterfly's sultry lapdance, in addition to the spectacular car stunts that made the film so compelling in the first place…
Working again with longtime screenwriting collaborator Gerard Soeteman, Paul Verhoeven makes Black Book (Sony) into a rollicking wartime movie-movie, replacing awards-bait clichés with a strong dose of two-fisted action, frank sexuality, and coal-black cynicism. Carice van Houten plays a Jew in hiding who survives a double-cross and winds up in the seemingly safe arms of the Dutch resistance, where she immediately draws a dangerous assignment, working as a secretary for the Nazis. Black Book establishes its tone the first time van Houten cracks a joke in the face of impossible terror, and Verhoeven continues to let the character's wit, sensitivity, and resolve define the movie, even as he's sadistically heaping on humiliation after humiliation…
Loosely based on a Philip K. Dick short story, the baffling thriller Next (Paramount) stars Nicolas Cage as a magician who can see two minutes into the future, enough time to know whether the bread he just put into the toaster will pop up a golden brown. Rogue terrorists with nuclear weapons are after him, but even if they were about to detonate a bomb 100 feet away, it's never clear what Cage or anybody could do to stop them.