ENTERTAINMENT
September 1, 2012 | By Noel Murray
Ballplayer: Pelotero Strand, $24.99 The rare sports documentary that's clear-eyed about the business side of athletics, "Ballplayer: Pelotero" looks into the way Major League Baseball and its system of scouts conspire to exploit the phenomenal pool of talent in the Dominican Republic. Directors Ross Finkel, Trevor Martin and Jon Paley follow two teenage prodigies, Miguel Angel Sanó and Jean Carlos Batista, as they deal with trainers and agents - and rumors that seem designed to scare away competition and drive their price down.
ENTERTAINMENT
August 30, 2012 | By Amy Kaufman and Rebecca Keegan
Audiences typically avoid the multiplex around Labor Day , devoting their time instead to last-chance summer pursuits like barbecues and back-to-school shopping. But Walt Disney Studios will attempt to lure people back to theaters this weekend by expanding its Marvel superhero blockbuster, "The Avengers," and Pixar princess tale, "Brave," to roughly 1,700 theaters apiece. An end-of-summer push has been attempted before by the studio -- last year, “Cars 2," which first hit theaters in June, expanded from around 200 theaters to more than 2,000 during the Labor Day holiday and grossed $1.8 million.
ENTERTAINMENT
August 25, 2012 | By Dennis Lim
It's hard to imagine now, but the Palme d'Or awarded at Cannes to the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne for their 1999 movie "Rosetta" stirred considerable controversy. Bewildered that the festival's top prize could go to a rough-hewn indie about the mundane struggles of a sullen trailer-park teenager, some pundits faulted the jury, led by David Cronenberg, for willful obscurantism. In a matter of years, the "Rosetta" win would seem so obvious as to be a no-brainer. The Dardennes have become Cannes fixtures: they took home a second Palme d'Or for 2005's "L'Enfant" and received a runner-up prize last year for "The Kid With a Bike.
ENTERTAINMENT
August 25, 2012 | By Noel Murray
The Pirates! Band of Misfits Sony, $30.99; Blu-ray, $40.99/$45.99 Available on VOD beginning Tuesday Aardman Animations' stop-motion adaptation of Gideon Defoe's cult novel is fast-paced and full of dry British wit and sly visual gags - almost like a kid-friendly cartoon version of a Monty Python film. Hugh Grant voices a kindly but inept pirate captain, who seizes Charles Darwin's expedition ship and then finds himself dodging the Queen's army while trying to leverage a rare dodo into a trophy for Pirate of the Year.
ENTERTAINMENT
August 22, 2012 | By Randy Lewis
A newly restored version of The Beatles' experimental 1967 film “Magical Mystery Tour” is coming to a home video on Oct. 8 with a DVD and Blu-ray release that offers a number of bonus features. “Magical Mystery Tour” was the third film to feature the Fab Four, but it parted from the comedic tone of “A Hard Day's Night” and “Help!” by embracing the psychedelic mindset that was in vogue at the time. The film's narrative was unconventional -- it followed a colorful set of characters on a freewheeling trip to the country -- causing many at the time to question the band's artistic motives.
ENTERTAINMENT
August 21, 2012 | By Ben Fritz
"The Hunger Games" put life into the stagnant home entertainment market this weekend, as fans snatched up 3.8 million DVDs and Blu-ray discs in the title's first two days on sale in the U.S. and Canada. That's more than either of the last two "Twilight" films, whose launch pattern" The Hunger Games" mimicked. In February of this year, "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1" sold 3.2 million DVDs and Blu-rays on its first weekend, while "Eclipse" debuted to 2.7 million units in December 2010.
ENTERTAINMENT
August 18, 2012 | By Noel Murray
Bernie Millennium, $28.99;Blu-ray, $29.99 Available on VOD beginning Tuesday Based on a true story, the wry docudrama "Bernie" stars Jack Black as a charismatic, dandyish small-town mortician who murders a cantankerous local millionaire played by Shirley MacLaine, and then tries to hide the crime from the authorities, including Matthew McConaughey's dogged district attorney. Writer-director Richard Linklater and his co-writer Skip Hollandsworth (who also wrote the magazine article on which the movie is based)
ENTERTAINMENT
August 11, 2012 | By Noel Murray
Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory Docurama, $29.95 Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's documentary was completed before the men known as the "West Memphis Three" were freed from prison after 17 years, and while the filmmakers have added an epilogue about the hasty, unsatisfying resolution to the frustrating murder case, the third installment of this ongoing story still feels out of date for most of its two-hour running time. The case, though, remains fascinating, especially given the new evidence that Berlinger and Sinofsky have unearthed about another possible suspect in the killing and mutilation of three 8-year-old boys.
ENTERTAINMENT
August 5, 2012 | By Dennis Lim
Aesthetics and politics were inseparable for the British filmmaker Derek Jarman, whose life fed his art and vice versa. It is perhaps no surprise that "The Last of England" (1987), one of his most deeply personal films, is also one of his most fiercely political. No one did protest cinema quite like Jarman, an outspoken activist with no discernible interest in issue movies. Especially in the final stretch of his career, during which his imminent death became an inevitable focus of his work (he died of complications from AIDS in 1994 at 52)
ENTERTAINMENT
August 3, 2012 | By Noel Murray, Special to the Los Angeles Times
Bachelorette Available on VOD beginning Friday Writer-director Leslye Headland's debut feature "Bachelorette" will undoubtedly be compared to "Bridesmaids,"since both films are raunchy, female-fronted comedies about the awkwardness and envy that bubbles up when a friend gets married. But the cast of "Bachelorette" is younger, which makes the tone different - less one of exhaustion and disappointment, more seething anger and recklessness. Kirsten Dunst, Lizzy Caplan and Isla Fisher play three catty friends who are asked to be in the wedding party of an oddball acquaintance (played by Rebel Wilson)