When Al Pacino connects with a role, he soars, he sings, he's at the top of the acting world — and he connects with Lt. Col. Frank Slade in "Scent of a Woman" like a wet finger connects with a socket. It's a glowing, incandescent performance, unlike anything Pacino did before or since—and yet it’s become his emblematic performance, along with “Dog Day Afternoon” and “The Godfather” trilogy. Using an odd delivery that sounds like John Huston doing an impression of W.C. Fields, Pacino also adopts a different speaking rhythm than he used before, and a faint Southern accent. Slade is an exasperating, aggravating guy, a now-retired career soldier who loves to refer to being on Lyndon Johnson’s staff, but who also made a stupid blunder (juggling live hand grenades) that blinded him. Now he's sitting in a little house behind the New Hampshire home of his niece, snarling at her, annoying ...

  1984 was one of most culturally important years in popular culture. Musically, bands like Van Halen, Genesis and Michael Jackson were at the top of their game. On television, Miami Vice was raising the style benchmark for most of America, and on film, musical all-time classics, such as This Is Spinal Tap were making waves in theaters and eliciting some of the best reviews to grace a feature film. Yet, no one film/album may have been more important than Prince’s Purple Rain. Released in 2007 on HD DVD, complete with 1080p video and Dolby True HD 5.1 audio, Purple Rain is the semi-autobiographical story of Prince and his rise to musical fame in Minneapolis. Set around the now famous First Avenue night club, (note: in 1984 – people actually went to night clubs to hear music - not buy a $450 bottle of Absolute Vodka in order to get the right to ...

  You either get Julia Roberts or you don’t. Her dazzling smile either charms you or you react to it like fingernails on a blackboard. Fortunately, I’m in the former group—I get her. And I like her, a lot. When she’s cast well, as in “Notting Hill,” she’s a working demonstration of the term “movie star.” She owns the camera every moment she’s in view, and yet she’s generous to her costars. She’s a better actress than her detractors are likely ever to admit, and demonstrates it several times in this film—her last scene in the bookshop is a treasure: she’s in the moment, she delivers the lines like she’s thinking them up at the moment, and you can’t take your eyes off her. Not that most of us want to, so where the heck has she been lately? (I suspect off being a content wife and mother; more power to her.) In the ...

  Zombies have become the coolest monster in current horror entertainment. They’re the subject of several novels, from horror novelist Brian Keene’s novel, “Dead Sea”, to one of Stephen King’s latest novels, “Cell”, to Robert Kirkman’s three-plus years of comics, “The Walking Dead”, to Brit zombie horror film “28 Days Later”. There’s something so simple about zombies that horror fans just eat them up. Of course, on the big screen, the zombies eat up everybody. George A. Romero and John Russo together created “Night of the Living Dead” and launched a whole new type of horror movie on an unsuspecting public. After the two had a falling out, Romero and Russo each went on to keep zombie franchises on track. All of Romero’s films have “Dead” in the title, and all of Russo’s have “Living Dead”. Both franchises have zombies looking for human buffets. The two had differences of opinion from the start. Russo wanted ...

  "Darkman" is a flamboyant, richly romantic and very colorful story, laced with humor and horror, but the baroque style turned some off. When it was released, there were those who stubbornly insisted that the kind of wit displayed in the film can only be accidental. There were those who felt themselves above the film—possibly because of its comic book-like story—and so laughed at what they thought of as the film's stupidities. But you tell me: at one point, a character who expects to be murdered realizes that that isn't going to happen right now. "If you're not going to kill me," she snaps, "I have some things to do." The audience howled—but that's obviously a deliberately funny line. It was conceived and directed by Sam Raimi, who at the time had made only three commercial features: "Evil Dead," "Evil Dead 2" and "Crimewave" (which he pretty much disowns). Raimi was unlike ...