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Video / DVD

Upcoming releases

A look at what's headed for the shelves

By Times Staff
Published August 4, 2005

Alexander

DIRECTOR: Oliver Stone

CAST: Colin Farrell, Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer, Jared Leto, Rosario Dawson

SYNOPSIS: Stone's biography of the Macedonian king (Farrell) who conquered the world is sloppily conceived, acted by hams and never decides if it wants to be a History Channel special or a bland imitation of Troy.

WHAT WE SAID: St. Petersburg Times film critic Steve Persall gave the movie a D. "Where do we begin to explain what's wrong with this picture? Stone is making a movie about one of history's greatest warriors, yet he doesn't show any conflict until an hour has passed," Persall wrote. "Even then, viewers can't tell what's going on because tight closeups, frenetic editing and thick dust raised by horses make everything so unidentifiable. Portraying war as chaos is appropriate. Making the screen chaotic isn't."

MPAA RATING: R; strong violence, sexual situations, nudity

RUNNING TIME: 173 min.

DIRECTOR: Kevin Rodney Sullivan

CAST: Bernie Mac, Ashton Kutcher, Zoe Saldana, Judith Scott, Hal Williams, Kellee Stewart and Robert Curtis Brown

SYNOPSIS: A switcheroo remake of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, with Mac as a black father worried that his daughter wants to marry a white man (Kutcher).

WHAT WE SAID: Times reviewer Philip Booth gave the movie a C+. "Guess Who . . . isn't much of an update," he wrote. "It's far too light, fluffy and prefabricated, with any serious social commentary buried under an avalanche of tasteless jokes and one-note sight gags. It's more Meet the Parents than anything resembling the original."

MPAA RATING: PG-13; crude humor

RUNNING TIME: 97 min.

DIRECTOR: Oliver Hirschbiegel

CAST: Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Corinna Harfouch, Ulrich Matthes, Juliane Kohler, Heino Ferch, Christian Berkel

SYNOPSIS: The final days of Adolf Hitler (Ganz) in a Berlin bunker are the focus of Oliver Hirschbiegel's drama, an Oscar nominee for best foreign language film.

WHAT WE SAID: The Times did not review this film. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote that the movie "has inspired much debate about the nature of the Hitler it presents. Is it a mistake to see him, after all, not as a monster standing outside the human race, but as just another human being? As we regard this broken and pathetic Hitler, we realize that he did not alone create the Third Reich, but was the focus for a spontaneous uprising by many of the German people, fueled by racism, xenophobia, grandiosity and fear. He was skilled in the ways he exploited that feeling, and surrounded himself with gifted strategists and propagandists, but he was not a great man, simply one armed by fate to unleash unimaginable evil."

MPAA RATING: R; strong violence, disturbing images and some nudity

RUNNING TIME: 155 min.

[Last modified August 3, 2005, 10:07:07]