It'll be interesting to see how Iron Man (Paramount) fares in a post-Dark Knight environment—the Marvel movie was a box-office hit, but was that just because it came out at the beginning of the summer, before blockbuster-and-superhero fatigue set in, and Christopher Nolan darkened up the landscape? Probably not, actually. Iron Man is no enduring classic, but it's a slam-bang piece of entertainment, considerably enlivened by Robert Downey Jr.'s joyously sleazy performance as rich, spoiled-rotten industrialist-superhero Tony Stark…
One of the positive side effects of the Apatow comedy machine is that the cast members of his beloved but failed TV shows Freaks And Geeks and Undeclared have gotten a second chance to charm the public. The romantic comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Sony) channels much of the gawky sweetness that made writer-star Jason Segal so winning on Freaks And Geeks (and currently, on How I Met Your Mother). The three-disc DVD is choked with special features, but Segel's performance of "Dracula's Lament" at a table reading should not be missed…
When Neil Young reassembled his old folkmates David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash to tour in support of his leaden anti-Iraq album Living With War, the idea was to provoke audiences into thinking about political issues and sing along to incendiary anthems like "Let's Impeach The President." Directed by Young under the pseudonym Bernard Shakey, the disappointing road documentary CSNY: Déjà Vu (Lionsgate) isn't so much a concert film as an attempt to gauge the conscience of a nation. Unfortunately, it's as cacophonous as the album it's promoting…
From Barry Bonds to Tour De France cyclists to Olympic athletes, the proliferation of performance-enhancing drugs in athletics has led to a lot of tongue-clucking over cheaters with oversized pecs. If nothing else, Christopher Bell's revelatory documentary Bigger, Faster, Stronger* (Magnolia) dials down the hysteria and looks at the issue from a fresh, illuminating, often funny perspective. Bell doesn't believe that society is considering the juicing phenomenon fairly, but at the same time, his well-balanced film questions a culture obsessed with body image and celebrity…
It would be tempting to call the disastrously misconceived Chapter 27 (Peace Arch)—the story of Mark David Chapman, the man who killed John Lennon—a bizarre vanity project for executive producer/star Jared Leto, but it's actually characterized by a surreal lack of vanity. Leto gained nearly 70 pounds to play a bloated, repulsive loser, and he's equally repugnant from a psychological standpoint.