New Movies on Video DVD - Movies, Videos, DVDs, Films for July 2002

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New Movies on Home Video/DVD - July Releases

Wondering what new videos and DVDs to watch? Here's a selection of video and DVD movie releases for July 2002. Also be sure to take a look at the July recommended releases on video and DVD.

July 2

"Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius" (2001)

This is an animated action-adventure movie aimed at grade school kids, but many adults won't mind watching it. The central character is a nerdy boy named Jimmy Neutron, who lives with his parents and his robot dog Goddard in a town called Retroville. Jimmy, who spends all his free time inventing gadgets, modifies a toaster to become a satellite intended to communicate with extraterrestrials. Unlike many of Jimmy's inventions, this one works, and egg-shaped space aliens abduct all of Retroville's adults and prepare to sacrifice them to a chicken-like deity. Accompanied by other kids, Jimmy sets out to rescue the grownups and has a series of remarkable adventures along the way. Seventy-five percent of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes liked "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius."

"Shallow Hal" (2001)

Gwyneth Paltrow, Jack Black, and Jason Alexander star in this Farrelly brothers comedy. Hal (Black) and his buddy Mauricio (Alexander) are rather unattractive guys who are always on the prowl for hot babes, but they meet with little success. Then one day Hal encounters self-help guru Tony Robbins (who plays himself), and Hal is transformed into a man who sees the inner beauty in women rather than their external appearance. Thus, when Hal meets the obese Rosemary (Paltrow), she looks slender and beautiful to him, and he falls hard for her. Mauricio and others are irked by the change in Hal, particularly since Hal works for Rosemary's father, and Hal's career gets a big boost from his romantic interest in the overweight woman. Hal thinks everything is going great, but what if his transformation wears off?

July 9

"Hart's War" (2002)

Set in Europe during World War II, this military drama stars Bruce Willis and Colin Farrell. Farrell plays Lieutenant Hart, a patrician young American who is captured by Germans and imprisoned in a POW camp. There he joins a group of prisoners whose highest ranking officer is Colonel McNamara (Willis). Then two black Tuskegee airmen whose planes were shot down are placed with white POWs, and racial problems flare up. Soon a white prisoner is found dead, and one of the blacks is accused of killing him. The American POWs conduct a court-martial, and the white Lieutenant Hart, who has some Yale Law School training, acts as attorney for the black defendant. Meanwhile, Colonel McNamara seems to be pursuing an agenda of his own.

"The Royal Tenenbaums" (2001)

Eighty percent of the Rotten Tomatoes critics liked this sophisticated comedy, which was coscripted and directed by Wes Anderson and stars Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, and Gwyneth Paltrow. The film tells the tale of the talented, but dysfunctional, Tenenbaum family. By 2001, the father, Royal Tenenbaum (Hackman), has lived apart from the rest of the family for many years. Over those years, the children (Stiller, Paltrow, and Luke Wilson) grew up as prodigies, but in adulthood their lives fall apart, and all come home to live with the mother, Etheline (Huston). When financial difficulties force the aging Royal to reinvolve himself with his estranged wife and adult children, the results are surprising and amusing. But is it too late for him to achieve a measure of redemption?

"A Walk to Remember" (2002)

Based on Nicholas Sparks' novel, "A Walk to Remember" is a romantic drama about two nice high school seniors in a North Carolina town. Landon (Shane West) is a boy who hangs out with the popular crowd, while Jamie (Mandy Moore) is the loner daughter of a minister. When Landon is involved in a nasty incident where a student is hurt, the school principal forces him to take a role in a play. Jamie is also in the play, and as she and Landon rehearse together, they reluctantly start to fall in love, although pretty much everyone else is unhappy about the match-up. Their love is doomed, but Landon matures a lot because of Jamie. Some viewers like this film's wholesomeness, while others find it bland or pious. Seventy-three percent of the Rotten Tomatoes critics didn't like this movie.

July 16
"Amelie" (2001)

Nominated for five Academy Awards, "Amelie" is a character-driven French-language romantic comedy. Amelie (Audrey Tautou), a shy young woman who works as a waitress in a small café in a romanticized Paris, has no friends and lives alone. But this changes when she stumbles across a long-forgotten box of boyhood mementos left in her apartment by a previous occupant. She tracks down the owner—now an adult—and gives him the box, bringing him happiness. This incident sends Amelie off on a series of imaginative acts of kindness intended to amuse herself and make others happy. Along the way, she is attracted to Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz) and expends a lot of effort in trying to approach him in her quirky, indirect way. Eighty-eight percent of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes liked "Amelie."

John Q." (2002)

Denzel Washington, Robert Duvall, James Woods, Anne Heche, and Ray Liotta star in this heavy-handed movie dramatizing the need for healthcare reform in the U.S. John Q. Archibald (Washington) is a factory worker whose son Mike collapses while playing Little League baseball. John rushes his son to the hospital, where a cardiologist (Woods) tells him Mike needs a heart transplant. John's health insurance won't cover the operation, and a hospital administrator (Heche) tells John he must put up a $75,000 deposit. Unable to come up with the money, John takes several people hostage at gun point and demands a transplant for Mike. A hostage negotiator (Duvall) and the police chief (Liotta) arrive to try to deal with the tense situation. Eighty-one percent of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes didn't like "John Q."

"Storytelling" (2001)

Written and directed by Todd Solondz, this unconventional movie is an unsettling exploration of certain aspects of storytelling. The film is made up of two separate parts of unequal length. "Fiction," the shorter part, revolves around a college creative writing class, where a female student (Selma Blair) has an unpleasant sexual experience with the male teacher (Robert Wisdom). "Nonfiction," the longer part, involves a struggling filmmaker named Toby (Paul Giamatti) making a documentary about a suburban family consisting of a father (John Goodman), a mother (Julie Hagerty), and their three sons. Toby chooses to focus his documentary on the oldest son Scooby (Mark Webber), who is a slacker. "Storytelling" addresses a number of sensitive subjects that many people would rather not contemplate.

July 23

"Crossroads" (2002)

Britney Spears makes her film debut in "Crossroads," an uneasy mix of star vehicle and downbeat drama. This is basically a female road movie where three young Georgia women travel by car to California. Mimi (Taryn Manning) goes to audition for a singing job; Kit (Zoe Saldana) goes to see her fiance; and Lucy (Spears) goes to look up her mother, who left her and her father years earlier. The three young women get a ride from Ben (Anson Mount), a handsome musician. His car breaks down at one point, but the travelers get money to fix it by singing at a karaoke (!) bar. The trip doesn't come out as the young women had hoped, but there are some pretty good musical numbers along the way. Eighty-eight percent of Rotten Tomatoes critics didn't like "Crossroads," but Britney's fans probably won't care.

"The Time Machine" (2002)

This is the 2002 science-fiction movie based on the 1895 H.G. Wells story, as was the 1960 film of the same name. This time around the movie stars Guy Pearce, who portrays Alexander Hartdegen, an eccentric inventor in 1890s New York City. When his fiancee is killed, Hartdegen is driven to build a machine that will permit him to travel back in time and change the course of history. He is successful in building a time machine, but it will only take him forward in time. After a couple of trips to the 21st century, Hartdegen travels over 800,000 years into the future, where he finds himself among peaceful humanoids called Eloi. There are also savage creatures called Morlocks, who hunt the Eloi for food. When the Morlocks abduct an Eloi female, Hartdegen sets out to rescue her.

July 30

"Collateral Damage" (2002)

This is an Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie. Schwarzenegger plays Gordy Brewer, a Los Angeles fireman whose wife and son are killed during a terrorist bombing. At first Brewer believes that U.S. government agent Brandt (Elias Koteas) will bring the perpetrators to justice, but when he realizes his case isn't being vigorously pursued, he travels to Colombia to try to track down the terrorist leader Claudio (Cliff Curtis). On his revenge odyssey, Brewer meets various characters, such as those played by John Turturro, John Leguizamo, and Francesca Neri. But the plot hardly matters: The movie is really about action sequences where Schwarzenegger narrowly escapes with his life, even as he kills a bunch of people and blows a lot of stuff up.

"Dragonfly" (2002)

Kevin Costner stars in this supernatural thriller. Kostner plays Joe Darrow, an emergency room physician in a Chicago hospital. Joe is stricken with grief when his beloved wife Emily, who is also a medical doctor, is accidentally killed in Venezuela while on a Red Cross volunteer mission. Emily had a birthmark that looked like a dragonfly, and she also left behind a dragonfly paperweight. Joe starts to visit some of Emily's pediatric oncology patients, some of whom have had near-death experiences and draw a squiggly cross. Eventually Joe has to figure out whether he's going crazy or his late wife is trying to communicate with him from beyond the grave. A whopping ninety-five percent of the Rotten Tomatoes critics didn't like "Dragonfly."

"Resident Evil" (2002)

Based on a video game, this cross between a technothriller and a zombie movie stars Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez. The humongous Umbrella Corporation conducts military research in an underground facility known as the Hive, which is controlled by a talking supercomputer called the Red Queen. When an accident releases the T-virus, the Red Queen puts the Hive in an automatic lockdown sequence, and many of the researchers end up in a zombie-like state. A special commando team, which includes the characters played by Jovovich and Rodriguez, is tasked with containing the T-virus. But the team is faced with many obstacles, including the Red Queen's defenses, the zombie-like creatures, and attacks by creepy entities created by the diabolical Umbrella Corporation.

Related Home Video/DVD Features of Interest:

2002 Recommended Movie Releases on Video and DVD

Recommended July 2002 Releases on Home Video/DVD