The quirky indie comedy Waitress (Fox) arrived in theaters shadowed by the murder of director and co-star Adrienne Shelly. That's a heavy burden for any film, much less one that winningly, if sometimes overbearingly, celebrates happiness and freedom. It's heartbreaking to see Shelly here, sadder still that her rethink of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore—stuffed with winning performances by Keri Russell, Nathan Fillion, and Andy Griffith—promised even better films to come…
A novel about a Bengali couple's journey to America, and the way that journey reverberates through the years, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake (Fox) makes a mostly graceful transition to the big screen in the hands of director Mira Nair. It's never better than the early sequences of courtship and immigration, as Irfan Khan and Tabu settle in New York, but the latter half, when the spotlight shifts to their son (Kal Penn), isn't bad, and the whole film at least looks gorgeous…
As career-killing star vehicles go, Lindsay Lohan couldn't have asked for a stranger and more sordid send-off than I Know Who Killed Me (Sony), a bizarre piece of torture-porn that's a little like The Parent Trap as remade by the Marquis de Sade, or The Double Life Of Veronique for bloodlusting teenagers…
Barbies for the Paris Hilton era, Bratz dolls wormed their way into the hearts of preteen girls with their empowering message that you're never too young to wear too much makeup and dress like an off-duty stripper. Now the toy-world phenomenon hits DVD with its bone-deep superficiality intact. Perhaps the strong anti-clique sermonizing in Bratz: The Movie (Lions Gate) would have been more convincing if it weren't tethered to a film romanticizing the most awesome clique ever…
Watching movies at home is a bit of a trade-off: For instance, the wildly surreal, ecstatically colorful imagery of the anime film Paprika (Sony) won't be as impressive on the big screen, but having it at home for repeated viewings will give fans a chance at unraveling the dense, reality-warping plot. It centers on a series of McGuffins that let people travel in and out of dreams, which lets writer-director Satoshi Kon (Paranoia Agent, Millennium Actress, Perfect Blue) engage in his usual what-is-real? brain-bending, with results that are visually riveting, but take decoding as much as watching.