Action movies in the Die Hard mold traditionally ask viewers to suspend disbelief as, say, an unarmed cop with no shoes dodges bullets and explosions while outwitting a heavily armed cadre of Eurotrash criminals. The joy of Crank: High Voltage (Lionsgate) is that it divorces itself from reality with the opening scene and pushes the videogame plasticity of the first Crank into one jaw-droppingly surreal setpiece after another, as Jason Statham winds up with a battery-powered heart and spends the whole movie running around, looking for a charge…
TV wasn’t exactly suffering from a shortage of shows dealing with the supernatural when the writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci and producer J.J. Abrams—collectively also responsible for the 2009 Star Trek reboot—introduced Fringe. But audiences were apparently ready for another one anyway, and they turned the show into last year’s only bona fide hit. Fringe: The Complete First Season (Fox) features Anna Torv, Joshua Jackson, and John Noble as a three-pronged team—think Mulder, Scully, and a mad scientist—investigating supernatural goings-on, some tied to a shady corporation. Stick around long enough, and Leonard Nimoy even makes an appearance…
When two key characters resolve their long-simmering romantic tension and finally become a couple, that’s supposed to signal the death knell for a TV series, but the deft handling of the Jim and Pam hook-up on The Office: The Complete Fifth Season (Universal) is just one of the reasons why it might be the show’s best season to date. Of course, it helps to have Steve Carell’s shenanigans as Michael Scott at center stage, but as PB&J (that’s Pam Beasley and Jim), Jenna Fischer and John Krasinski have a sweet, low-key chemistry that makes the show warmer without sacrificing the laughs. And the decision to bring The Wire’s Idris Elba on as a corporate enforcer was a brilliant one, if only because it gave birth to the Michael Scott Paper Company…
The past decade-plus has seen Project Runway, The Devil Wears Prada, Unzipped, and countless other TV shows, documentaries, feature films, and novels about nearly every aspect of the fashion industry. That leaves the latest, Valentino: The Last Emperor (Vitagraph), a profile of another great, temperamental icon of the field, struggling to stake out fresh territory.