DVD Reviews: It's a rare vidgame that makes you want to stop shooting and appreciate the scenery. "Bioshock," one of the most anticipated non-sequel videogames of the year, takes place in Rapture, a dystopian undersea city so intricately detailed and well thought out that players will find themselves truly and completely immersed.
DVD Reviews: What do you get when you cross the Nintendo's Wii unique motion sensing controls with successful music and rhythm games like "Dance Dance Revolution," "Guitar Hero," and "SingStar?" Unfortunately, the answer is "Boogie," a disappointing entry from Electronic Arts that manages to miss the point of what makes a good music game and a good dancing game.
DVD Reviews: Hollywood is a very small town in "Surviving Hollywood," the new vidgame that squeezes the entire experience of making it in showbiz onto a cell phone screen. Though it makes the process of arriving in town and landing an agent seem absurdly simplistic, "Surviving Hollywood" is sophisticated and involving compared to most mobile games and should succeed with young women looking for a fun download for their phones.
DVD Reviews: The Wii's first foray into online play will be amazingly repetitive and dull to anyone who doesn't already have a big collection of the cuddly but dangerous "Pokemon" creatures. But for the millions of fans of this ultra-popular franchise, "Pokemon Battle Revolution" is a bold step forward that makes moving characters from the DS to the Wii and then finding opponents to combat easy and fun.
DVD Reviews: "Transformers" is a reminder that, as far as the genre has come, movie-based videogames are still too often a den of mediocrity. Everything about this game screams "cheap cash in," with Activision apparently eager to just pump out something that can pry open the wallets of the millions of eager fan boys seeing the movie.
DVD Reviews: With "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," Electronic Arts is trying something different. "Order of the Phoenix" is a more sophisticated creation that bring the open world experience of "Grand Theft Auto" to a family friendly title.
DVD Reviews: There is a touching moment in Pixar's new toon "Ratatouille" about the power of inventiveness -- how making something isn't the same as creating it. That's a lesson that the developers of THQ's game adaptation should have taken more to heart.
DVD Reviews: The Fantastic Four may be one of comic-dom's most famous super-teams, but gamers playing the adaptation of their latest film can be excused for thinking they're also the most inept. "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer" manages to capture the look and feel of the movie -- complete with its cardboard acting.
DVD Reviews: Critics of the Wii argue that it's just a souped up version of Nintendo's last console, the GameCube, that substitutes clunky motion sensing capabilities for real innovation. Supporters say that the Wii's popularity proves that an inviting interface and a sense of fun are true innovations in an industry obsessed with making things bigger and better.
DVD Reviews: It's been 10 years since "Tomb Raider" burst onto the gaming scene, ushering in a new era of 3D technology and heroine fetish. Since then, the series has ping-ponged awkwardly among puzzle adventures, action games, two movies and some truly shameless cash-ins.
DVD Reviews: Grommets will be stoked to hang 10 in "Surf's Up." Ubisoft has developed a simple surfing game that maintains enough spills and thrills to justify the purchase price for parents after their children see the bigscreen version. Nevertheless, given the pic's weak opening, low interest may translate into poor game sales.
DVD Reviews: Blending a dystopian cyperpunk cyberpunk future with a fantasy world of elves, trolls and dwarves, and setting the whole thing in Brazil, gives "Shadowrun" the sort of rich backstory that can easily translate into a videogame. But Unfortunately it isn't used well in this one.
DVD Reviews: "Shrek the Third" offers more than just the usual playable events of the hit film, like most tie-ins. With a diverse cast of playable assumable //characters, a simple yet fun multiplayer mode and a great collection of minigames, "Third" is a surprisingly good outing, surely to be embraced by the junior-gamer demo to which it's targeted.
DVD Reviews: Just like an early press screening to build buzz for a film, Microsoft showed its biggest game of the year, "Halo 3," which comes out this fall for the Xbox 360, to a crowd of videogame journalists in San Francisco Friday.
DVD Reviews: In any discussion of massively multiplayer online games, there is one 8-million player, 800-pound gorilla in the room. So the first and most important question any new competitor has to answer is "Why should I play this game instead of 'World of Warcraft?'"
DVD Reviews: "Episodic gaming," in which chapters of a videogame are distributed one-by-one via the 'Net, has long promised to smash the traditional model in which publishers put a complete game on store shelves and hope for the best. Telltale Games' newest incarnation of the "Sam and Max" franchise is the first major attempt to make that model a reality and it's a great start.
DVD Reviews: Who says all good fads must come to an end? When they came to the U.S. from Japan 10 years ago, "Pokemon" videogames and trading cards literally swept the nation.
DVD Reviews: Like a rich, fruity wine, Oliver Stone's "Alexander" just keeps on getting better with age. Two years after his director's cut, Stone has been given an unprecedented third pass at the movie that's obsessed him for two decades. As he himself says, after the breathing space of "World Trade Center," he revisited the material and excavated the picture that was always there.
DVD Reviews: Can a videogame be too good? It may seem like a weird question, particularly in the typically dismal world of games licensed from kids' movies. But "Meet the Robinsons" is challenging, engaging, sharply designed and a terrible fit for its license.
DVD Reviews: Whether the litany of B-list actors in "Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars'" deliver a fun spoof of bad sci-fi or a painfully long series of badly produced scenes is, perhaps, a matter of taste. But there's no denying that the game relies too much on them to prop up what is, essentially, a remake of the popular sci-fi strategy franchise's past incarnations.
DVD Reviews: Tapping into gamer nostalgia for the '80s comic and TV toon as well as WB and the Weinstein Co.'s new feature, Ubisoft's new "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" hits all the right notes, but fails to come together into anything more than an adequate gaming experience.Â
DVD Reviews: "Cooking Mama: Cook Off" is kind of like a bad cable reality show. Poorly made and intellectually deadening, you know it's bad for you, but somehow you find yourself playing over and over and over again.
DVD Reviews: "The Shield" videogame doesn't do the show justice. While the groundbreaking F/X police drama has nabbed numerous kudos and won critical praise for its depiction of a group of corrupt detectives, publisher Aspyr Media's mediocre actioner will appeal to neither fans of the show nor mainstream gamers.
DVD Reviews: With the mega-successful "Halo" franchise and last year's hit "Gears of War," Microsoft has established the paradigm for action vidgames that young men around the world love -- and Capcom follows that formula to the letter in "Lost Planet." Beautifully designed but strikingly unoriginal, "Lost Planet" is only for those who have worn out their copies of "Gears" and are looking for a new thrill on the Xbox 360.
DVD Reviews: "Star Trek" fans have undoubtedly been experiencing some withdrawal recently, what with the low-rated "Enterprise" off the air for more than a year and a new movie not coming until at least 2009. Warping into that void is "Star Trek: Legacy," a thoroughly enjoyable videogame that ties elements of all five "Trek" series into one epic story.
DVD Reviews: A good mash up of the Fox TV juggernaut and the best karaoke game series currently available, "Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol" is a solid simulation of the reality show that confident singers will enjoy and shaky vocalists should fear.
DVD Reviews: The new three-disc "King Kong: Extended Edition" will top many a Christmas list, just as surely as Kong topped the Empire State building. Adding more footage to Peter Jackson's three-hour redo may seem a tad unnecessary, but the extra scenes make this an indispensable trophy for DVD junkies.
DVD Reviews: Criterion Collection's double-disc set honors the film but also mines Louise Brooks' life and legacy and, as a side dish, that of director G.W. Pabst. Viewers will find themselves as transfixed as 1920s auds discovering the flapper queen.
DVD Reviews: The makers of the vidgame tie-in to "300" were faced with a nearly impossible challenge: How does one convert the visually arresting style of the graphic novel and movie into an animated adventure for the pocket-size PSP? Not like this, that's for sure.
DVD Reviews: "Sonic the Hedgehog" hasn't gotten much respect among gamers since the late '90s, but Sega has kept plugging away with the speedy furball and may have finally hit a winning formula in "Sonic and the Secret Rings."
DVD Reviews: Johnny Blaze, a.k.a. "Ghost Rider," is so busy battling a barrage of demons, hell bats and ninjas in his new videogame that it's tough to notice the lack of a fully developed story. That said, publisher 2K Games and developer Climax have created a hell of a ride.
DVD Reviews: Two new collections of casual games intended to be the life of the party, "Wii Play" and "Fuzion Frenzy 2," instead come off as a surefire way to make your friends leave early.
DVD Reviews: "Crackdown" is another in a long line of games that have impressive technology, but a generic storyline, setting and set of challenges that will bore anyone with deeper interests than running around a city mindlessly killing ethnic stereotypes and collecting orbs.
DVD Reviews: "Family Guy" is another example of a game created solely for one purpose: to pry open the wallets of the TV show's large cult following. Miserable from start to finish, even the relatively bargain price of $29.99 is about 29 dollars too high.
DVD Reviews: Though it takes place in the violent world of organized crime, "The Sopranos" is an unlikely candidate for a videogame. After all, Tony Soprano spends more time in therapy than kicking ass. That problem is extremely evident in "The Sopranos: Road to Respect," a game that would be lame with any title, but is particularly disappointing given its connection to one of TV's great series.
DVD Reviews: There's nothing the videogame industry loves more than a hit it can copycat. "Grand Theft Auto" spawned "Saints Row"; "Final Fantasy" led to "Phantasy Star"; and now the successful "X-Men Legends" franchise has resulted in two more action role-playing games with huge casts of superheroes.
DVD Reviews: Gamers might start feeling desperate before they can get into the action on this TV tie-in. "Desperate Housewives" is buggy, failing to work on the first two PCs this reviewer tried. Experienced gamers will probably tire of the action soonest, recognizing this product for the blatant "Sims" copy that it is.
DVD Reviews: Aside from being tie-ins to three of the seemingly endless supply of bigscreen computer-animated family films hitting the bigscreen, "The Ant Bully," "Barnyard" and "Monster House" couldn't be more different -- both in gameplay and quality. "The Ant Bully" shines as a fun outing for younger kids that includes (gasp!) some actual learning.
DVD Reviews: "Adorable" is not a word used very often in an industry dominated by "Grand Theft Auto" and "Halo," but it's undeniably the best way to describe "Lego Star Wars II." LucasArts' follow-up to last year's hit isn't very challenging, but its combination of two beloved brands and a tongue-in-cheek take on the sci-fi mythos offers clean fun for kids and a nostalgic good time for adult gamers. No wonder it sold more than a million copies in its first week on shelves.
DVD Reviews: Fox's "Prison Break" almost demands DVD consumption. The serialized plot -- about an engineer who purposely gets thrown in jail so he can break his brother out -- is so intricate and engaging that it's hard to resist watching several episodes in a row. Fans who binge on first season discs should be pleased by extras that cater to their obsession.
DVD Reviews: Eric Rohmer's films are a subtitle-lover's dream. While Cahiers du Cinema colleagues Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut searched for ways to strip their films of all unnecessary dialogue, Rohmer did just the opposite, embracing conversation and narration as a window into the interior lives of his characters.
DVD Reviews: An attempt to adapt the Cartoon Network show into a fighting game, "Teen Titans" should have been a slam-dunk. Based on characters from the DC comic, the TV show is colorful, action-packed, and, most of all, fun. Many things went wrong, however, in translating that show into this game.
DVD Reviews: Cineastes owe Warners big-time for the two noir sets that preceded this one. This installment offers fewer pleasures, with only "On Dangerous Ground" on par with what's come before. Yet to the studio's credit, all five features, each new to DVD and nicely restored, get full commentary tracks, even when the films don't merit it.
DVD Reviews: Bonus features on "Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll" drive home a single point: Taylor Hackford made a brilliant film from what he had to work with. The celebration of Chuck Berry's 60th birthday remains one of the premiere concert films and there's little in the material from the cutting room floor that would have given added to the examination of Berry's life.
DVD Reviews: Warners' Clark Gable box comes as a relative disappointment. The six MGM pics make welcome DVD bows, but the extras offered are unworthy of an actor called the King when Elvis was still in diapers.
DVD Reviews: Rest easy, Michael Caine. "Jaws: the Revenge" is no longer the worst spin-off of Steven Spielberg's 1975 genre-defining thriller. That dishonor now belongs to "Jaws Unleashed," an almost unplayable adaptation that will have gamers screaming in terror like the residents of Amity Island.
DVD Reviews: While the third season of this hit sketch-based laffer showed inevitable, if light, signs of flagging, it remained a genuine cultural phenom in the U.K. However, the second season, arriving on disc now, undoubtedly reps the show's zenith, where it broke through from a cult to bona-fide mainstream hit.
DVD Reviews: While nowadays documentaries seem like just another genre at the multiplex, screening next door to actioners, slasher pics and romantic comedies, it wasn't so long ago that the popularity of a film like the Oscar-winning "Harlan County U.S.A." was considered an anomaly.
DVD Reviews: With rights issues keeping Elia Kazan's "Boomerang" (1947) from an intended trio release, Fox Noir adds only "House of Strangers" and "I Wake Up Screaming" to its burgeoning, uneven catalog. Though both are welcome, neither offers the caliber of extras likely to make them must-owns, nor are the transfers especially laudable.
DVD Reviews: Positioned as part of a new breed of movie-based vidgames that complement their bigscreen counterparts, Activision's "X-Men" aims to fill in story gaps between "X2" and "X-Men: The Last Stand." But in practice "X-Men" is so unsatisfying that it's likely to remind gamers why licenses have traditionally resulted in the worst vidgames.
DVD Reviews: The gorgeous vistas and wide-open spaces of Monument Valley have never stood in greater contrast to John Ford's dark story of a Confederate veteran on a quest to find his niece, kidnapped by Comanches, in this restored version of "The Searchers," part of a box set devoted to the frequent collaborators.
DVD Reviews: A new bonus disc makes A&E's latest box set devoted to the 1960s kinky spy classic invaluable. Extras cover everything from the skein's first karate-chopping female sidekick to promo skits and an episode from "The New Avengers."
DVD Reviews: This box set offers entertaining proof that MGM made the best musicals during the Golden Age of Hollywood. These five movies, presented with a mixed bag of extras, are so pleasurable that chapter-skipping to the musical numbers isn't even necessary.
DVD Reviews: Nothing illustrates how dogged Michelangelo Antonioni fans can be than how they have been willing to shell out more than $100 to purchase the only available DVD edition of his 1975 masterpiece, "The Passenger," from Japan. Saying that no Antonioni film has been in greater demand for re-release is an extreme understatement.
DVD Reviews: Fox has not forgotten Irwin Allen's mantra of "give me more, and make it bigger" in the special editions of the Master of Disaster's two greatest productions, "The Poseidon Adventure" and "The Towering Inferno." Extras in both sets feature documentaries on everything from fire special effects to the religious undertones of "Poseidon."
DVD Reviews: Both Tennessee Williams and the films based on his most famous plays have become so iconic that it can be easy to take their genius for granted. To remedy that, Warner Home Video offers "The Tennessee Williams Film Collection," a stellar package that demonstrates just how deserving that status is.
DVD Reviews: With her career in critical condition after 2003 flops "Cradle of Life" on the bigscreen and "Angel of Darkness" for videogame consoles, Lara Croft is in desperate need of a reboot, and that's exactly what she gets in "Legend."
DVD Reviews: Before -- and after -- there was Jessica Fletcher and "Murder, She Wrote," there was Agatha Christie's Jane Marple, who in a dozen murder mysteries published between 1930 and 1976 outwitted even the most clever killers. Inevitably, this spinster detective leapt from page to screen, both big and small.
DVD Reviews: It's a shame the anniversary edition of "9 to 5" doesn't take the movie seriously. When it was released in 1980, the film was a subversive statement on the oppression of women in the workplace. This Fox re-release gives lip service to that legacy, but the package's primary focus is on giggling self-congratulation.
DVD Reviews: "The Bad Sleep Well" brings the number of Kurosawa films in Criterion's catalog to 14, about half the helmer's oeuvre. But unlike the lavish double-disc spreads accorded "Ikiru" and most recently "Ran," this title gets just a single DVD, albeit with a pristine transfer.
DVD Reviews: If Disney's adaptation of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" felt inevitably overshadowed by another CG-heavy, Kiwi-helmed fantasy franchise, so this dual-disc collector's set suggests a "Lord of the Rings" extended extended edition.
DVD Reviews: Rock 'n' roll pic "DIG!," which chronicles the simultaneous blossoming of the Dandy Warhols and the drug-induced destruction of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, is so fully realized that the add-ons merely reinforce the conceit at the heart of Ondi Timoner's film.
DVD Reviews: The Lion revisits the original "Amityville Horror," a 1979 zeitgeist hit, in a DVD boxed set that hit shelves shortly before its remake arrived on the bigscreen. Also along for the fright: a pair of lesser sequels and a bonus disc of History Channel docs on the infamous Long Island, N.Y., haunting.
DVD Reviews: The sentiments are noble, but the extras less than entertaining on this disc. Helmer Terry George flatly interviews former hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina about the historical accuracy of individual scenes in the commentary, which grows tiresome quickly. Nor is there much energy in Don Cheadle's selected-scenes commentary.
DVD Reviews: Even creepier viewing at home, this intimate story of a child molester (Kevin Bacon) struggling to cope with his freedom -- and demons -- upon release from prison is complemented by minimal, yet potent, extras on disc.
DVD Reviews: With the future of Dave Chappelle's Comedy Central series up in the air, fans will have to make due with "Chappelle's Show Season 2 Uncensored." The remarkable success of the skein's first season -- it sold more than 2.8 million copies and is considered the top TV title yet on disc -- prompted a salary renegotiation for Chappelle.
DVD Reviews: Warner's "Controversial Classics" set is an enticing yet ultimately confounding collection. The seven films selected are indeed provocative -- most pass the test of time with flying colors in their disc debuts -- but the extras are all over the map, and quality of packaging is sorely lacking.
DVD Reviews: It's always easy to blame the big bad network when a good TV show fails to find its audience, but in the case of creator Bill Lawrence's criminally underwatched NBC laffer "Scrubs," there really is no other plausible suspect.
DVD Reviews: The four-disc set's commentaries and minidocs give a healthy dose of theories on the significance of perhaps the best season of perhaps the best sitcom in history, or at least the season when the skein hit its stride.
DVD Reviews: "I hope I don't regret this, because on the DVD we have a pretty long documentary about how the film was made," Alejandro Amenabar says early on in the commentary track for his foreign-language film Oscar winner. He's right; the doc is long. But the Spanish helmer/co-writer is also a serious, self-deprecating analyst of his own work.
DVD Reviews: Edgar G. Ulmer helmed the classic horror film "The Black Cat" (1934) and the low-budget film noir favorite "Detour" (1945) but also toiled in the field of indie ethnic films, now largely forgotten. This four-disc set from Brandeis U.'s National Center for Jewish Film provides digitally remastered copies of all four of Ulmer's Yiddish-language films.
DVD Reviews: Named after the West London studio where they were produced, Britain's post-WWII Ealing comedies have been traditionally regarded as classics: witty laffers with wry social commentary. The march of time, however, has not been kind, eroding the charm of the once beloved genre leaving little more than quaint, sentimental and only vaguely amusing pictures.
DVD Reviews: Life's a bitch, and so are most of the memorable characters in any successful primetime sudser. It's no surprise, then, that the absence of Joan Collins from the first season of the otherwise iconic "Dynasty" makes Fox's four-disc collection of the show's early episodes entirely skippable, save for rabid fans or series completists.
DVD Reviews: Warner's "Hallelujah" is absolutely a film that deserves to be on DVD, though it can be heartbreaking to watch. The first release from a major studio to feature an all-black cast, this 1929 melodrama simultaneously offers a glimpse of unjustly forgotten performers and the deep-seated racism that kept them in obscurity.
DVD Reviews: These five releases are timed to capitalize on their Oscar buzz, but anyone who followed the awards campaigns closely will have a strong sense of deja vu while viewing the extras.
DVD Reviews: Laurel & Hardy were one of the few great silent movie acts to have even greater success in sound. This set contradicts itself by proving what any Laurel & Hardy fan knows: Their strong suit was short-form comedies rather than features, and the features they were in were often padded by extraneous music and fraying plotlines.
DVD Reviews: A rare example of a package where the making-of documentary is more interesting than the movie itself, this project feels like it was done on autopilot. Even series creators Glen Morgan and James Wong seem a bit bored, leaving long periods of silence on their commentary track.
DVD Reviews: Jayne Mansfield was a top-notch example of Hollywood construction. Everything in this collection, from the films to the features, suggests the blonde bombshell got her name by knowing exactly how to make people say it. Three-disc set offers a study of how celebrity functioned in 1950s America.
DVD Reviews: Although modest in scope, this collection showcases key early work by Oskar Fischinger, one of the most popular pioneers in abstract animation. First-rate transfers and special features supplement the 10 titles -- four of them masterworks of pure non-figurative, cinematic expression -- but there is little background material for those unfamiliar with the German filmmaker.
DVD Reviews: In an industry full of franchises, Mario may be the iconic videogame character. The mustachioed plumber and his wacky posse not only defined the platforming genre, but have had succesful runs at everything from racing to sports to role playing-games to minigames.
DVD Reviews: Most successful videogames focus on controls that let players kill, shoot or score in new and exciting ways. Plot and characters are typically an after-thought or non-existent. 2K Games' new shooter "The Darkness" takes the opposite approach.