DVD Reviews - K-N

This is a faithful adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's acclaimed dystopian novel.

Komodo dragons kill a water buffalo in Indonesia. Greater bulldog bats catch minnows in Belize. In Papua New Guinea, male Vogelkop bowerbirds decorate nests with eye-catching objects to try to attract a mate. In the Pacific Ocean off Tonga, half a dozen male humpback whales battle one another to win the right to copulate with a female.

Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959), starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason, has been available on DVD for years, but now Warner Home Video has released a 50th Anniversary Edition two-disc DVD set containing a version of the feature film that is restored from original VistaVision film elements. The picture quality is superior to that of previous DVD editions, there are two new documentaries, and bonus materials from previous DVD releases are brought over to the new edition

Ken Burns' documentary The National Parks: America's Best Idea is designed to run on PBS television in six episodes of about two hours each.

Famous for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and A Room With a View, Dame Maggie Smith is one of the greatest actresses of her generation. She also gave an outstanding performance in Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing.

Jacques Demy will probably always be best remembered as the French New Wave director who did the pop opera 'The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,' but in the late 1960s he came to the United States and made the English-language drama Model Shop.

Last Year at Marienbad is an experimental 1961 French New Wave film that deliberately eschews conventional notions of narrative and character motivation.

If you have even a passing interest in American politics, you'll want to see the lively, emotionally engaging Milk (2008), which was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The film won Oscars for Best Actor (Sean Penn) and Best Original Screenplay (Dustin Lance Black).

Man on Wire is an absorbing film about a daredevil who walked on a cable suspended between quarter-mile-high skyscrapers.

If you like Alfred Hitchcock, you'll certainly want to see the delightful, witty suspense film The Lady Vanishes.

Mamma Mia! is a jukebox musical constructed around the songs of the Scandinavian pop group ABBA, whose heyday was 1976 to 1981.

Read a review of the quirky film Mister Lonely on DVD.

This a frothy concoction that offers contrived comic complications leading to a happy ending, while giving us eye-catching costumes and sets to look at and enjoyable swing music to listen to.

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, No Country for Old Men also won three additional Oscars: Best Director (Ethan and Joel Coen), Best Adapted Screenplay (the Coen brothers again) and Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem).

King Kong (2005), a remake of the 1933 classic, was directed by Peter Jackson. Read a review of this movie on DVD.

In King of California, first-time filmmaker Mike Cahill has created a tender father-daughter story that is both poignant and darkly humorous.

If you like the paintings and drawings of Gustav Klimt, or if you have an interest in fin-de-siècle Vienna, then you will probably want to see this imaginative film that mixes fact with fantasy while chronicling the famed artist's final 18 years.

L'Enfant (2005) is a French-language drama that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Find out more about the movie in this review of L'Enfant on DVD.

La Bête humaine is sometimes described as being a precursor to Hollywood film noir, and that description is helpful as a shorthand for the movie's generally dark tone. However, Jean Renoir made a film that is not unrelentingly downbeat, and several scenes are lyrical.

Read a review of Fellini's masterpiece on DVD.

Between his masterpieces Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir made another outstanding film, La Marseillaise, which is about the part of the French Revolution taking place when the title song first became popular.

While La Strada lacks the complexity and audaciousness of some of Fellini’s later movies, it is nonetheless a charming, accessible, and poetic film that no cineaste should miss, and I’m delighted that Criterion Collection has released it on DVD.

To my mind, Franco Zeffirelli's dazzlingly cinematic 1982 Italian-language movie version of Giuseppe Verdi's 1853 opera La Traviata is one of cinema's greatest combinations of filmmaking and musical performance. Read more...

Actress Marion Cotillard gives a powerful performance in this French-language biopic about iconic singer Edith Piaf.

This is one of the great classic Hollywood movies. It's a stylish film noir with an exceptional cast that includes Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price, and Judith Anderson. Read a full-length review of "Laura" on DVD.

"Well, of all the seven deadly sins, jealousy is the most deadly," says one of the characters in Leave Her to Heaven, summing up the theme of this 1945 film noir.

Directed by Clint Eastwood, Letters From Iwo Jima was nominated for four Academy Awards.It is one of a pair of films Eastwood directed that center around the World War II Battle of Iwo Jima, the other being Flags of Our Fathers. Read a review of Letters From Iwo Jima on DVD.

Kate Winslet and Jackie Earle Haley received Academy Award nominations for their performances in Little Children (2006), which also got an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay (Todd Field and Tom Perrotta).

Although well-received on the festival circuit and winner of a Special Jury Prize at Sundance, this movie got only a limited release in American theaters.

Outside the hotel room in the corporate-looking Park Hyatt Tokyo lies a teeming, sprawling, neon-lit, high-rise metropolis. Inside, two discontented Americans—a middle-aged man and a woman three decades his junior—watch "La Dolce vita" on television. This is one of several images that stick in my mind from the movie "Lost in Translation" (2003).

Robert Altman's landmark film chronicles the zany antics of American medical personnel who treat the wounded during a war in Asia, but the movie is darker and edgier than the TV series.

While I don't actively dislike nature documentaries, I invariably find something else to do rather than watch the ones that air on TV. Thus, it came as something of a surprise to me that I so enjoyed March of the Penguins (2005), the hit documentary about the breeding cycle of emperor penguins in Antarctica. I highly recommend this movie to adults and children alike.

In Marie Antoinette, writer-director Sofia Coppola invites us to join her in an attempt to get inside the head of the iconic title character.

This action-adventure movie received an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. Read a review of "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" on DVD.

A review of this movie on DVD.

When I watched this movie on DVD, I found it to be humanistic and accessible, as well as a work of beguiling originality. Read a review of Everyone We Know on DVD.

Years ago, I saw "Mean Streets" in a theater and loved it. As the years went by, Scorsese became famous for his great films "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," and "Goodfellas," but I consider "Mean Streets" to be at least as good as any of his movies. His later films are more polished and appeal to a wider audience, but I like the raw, personal feel of "Mean Streets."

At last this great classic movie gets the DVD treatment it deserves. Read a review of Meet Me in St. Louis on DVD.

"He's despondent. He's desperate. He's suicidal. All the comic elements are in place." So says a playwright in the film Melinda and Melinda, which was written and directed by Woody Allen. And for me, all the comic elements were in place when I watched this movie on DVD—I got a lot of laughs out of it.

A heavy metal band with a mission statement and a therapist? According to the behind-the-music documentary, that was the case during the period 2001-2003 for the rock group Metallica. Read more...

Read a DVD review of Miami Vice, a pulpy, operatic, visually stylish crime drama written and directed by Michael Mann.

Read a review of the movie on DVD.

When I watched this Millions on DVD, I smiled a lot and laughed out loud several times. But the film also brought me close to tears. Find out more in this review of the movie on DVD.

Read a review of the film on DVD.

Charlize Theron won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in this downbeat drama.

Robert Bresson (1907-1999) was a French filmmaker whose legacy includes Pickpocket (1959) and Au hasard Balthazar (1966), titles that often appear in lists of the greatest movies of all time. But Bresson made several other films that are extraordinary, including Mouchette (1967).

Mr. Arkadin (1955) is one of the strangest movies I've ever seen, yet it's quite entertaining. Read a review of this movie on DVD.

Munich is an emotionally and intellectually engaging movie that reminded me of cinema's power as an art form. Read a review of this movie on DVD.

I rate this film as one of the great American classic movies.

A review of the film on DVD, including an depth look at the special features of the three-disc set.

Directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro, this is a curious film that can get under a thoughtful viewer's skin.

No Direction Home has aired on television on both PBS and the BBC, but I watched it on DVD. It's the best music documentary I've seen, and I consider it among the best documentaries of any kind.

I don't consider F. W. Murnau's film to be scary in a panic-inducing sort of way, but I do find it eerie, unsettling, and haunting. Read a full-length review of this movie on DVD.

A DVD review of this laugh-out-loud-funny comedy from Joel and Ethan Coen.

Forest Whitaker received the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in this drama. He is unforgettable in the role of Idi Amin, the sometimes brutal, sometimes charming, always eccentric dictator of Uganda during the 1970s. Another good reason to watch the film is for the location shooting in Kampala, Uganda's photogenic capital city.

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, The Lives of Others is a suspenseful, psychologically intense drama.

Maxim Gorky's play The Lower Depths is about a group of people living in a flophouse in Czarist Russia. Two of cinema's greatest filmmakers have made movies based on that play: Jean Renoir in 1936 and Akira Kurosawa in 1957. On DVD, Criterion Collection produced a two-disc set containing both Renoir's and Kurosawa's film versions.

Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer received Academy Award nominations for their performances in The Last Station (2009), which was written and directed by Michael Hoffman. The story centers on the last months in the life of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, the famed author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The film has a fine cast that includes Paul Giamatti, James McAvoy, Kerry Condon and Anne-…

DVD Review: The Kids Are All Right

The 2010 version is billed as "The Complete Metropolis," although it still seems to be about six minutes shorter than a widely shown 1927 version.

Nominated for 12 Oscars, The King's Speech won four: Best Picture, Best Actor (Colin Firth), Best Director (Tom Hooper) and Best Original Screenplay (David Seidler). It's an old-fashioned crowd-pleaser about friendship and duty that is impeccably crafted and features marvelous acting.

'Madagascar' is a documentary that originally aired as three one-hour programs on the BBC in February 2011. In the US, an abridged version was broadcast in May 2011 on Animal Planet as a single two-hour special. But the DVD discs contain the full-up UK version, and the value of the package is considerably enhanced by the inclusion of two...

The Marx Brothers were originally a vaudeville act, but in the mid-1920s began doing Broadway plays. They then moved on to make five feature films at Paramount, the first two of which — The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers — were adaptations of their Broadway plays. But the last three Paramount films — Monkey Business,Horse Feathers (1932) and...

The Lincoln Lawyer is a clever, engrossing, entertaining legal thriller.

Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray (1921-1992) is most famous for the Apu Trilogy — but he made at least one other masterpiece that has often appeared on lists of the 100 greatest movies of all time. That masterpiece is The Music Room.