Library

Languages: English (Original Language) English (Subtitled) Spanish (Subtitled)

Sound: Dolby

Summary: A highly advanced robotic boy longs to become real so that he can regain the love of his human mother. Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 02/13/2007 Starring: Haley Joel Osment Jude Law Run time: 145 minutes Rating: Pg13 Director: Stephen Speilberg

Languages: English, Spanish, French

Subtitles: English, Spanish, French

Sound: Dolby

Summary: As with "Star Wars", the George Lucas-produced "Indiana Jones" trilogy was not just a plaything for kids but an act of nostalgic affection toward a lost phenomenon: the cliffhanging movie serials of the past. Episodic in structure and with fate hanging in the balance about every 10 minutes, the "Jones" features tapped into Lucas's extremely profitable "Star Wars" formula of modernizing the look and feel of an old, but popular, story model. Steven Spielberg directed all three films, which are set in the late 1930s and early '40s: the comic book-like "Raiders of the Lost Ark", the spooky, "Gunga Din"-inspired "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom", and the cautious but entertaining "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade". Fans and critics disagree over the order of preference, some even finding the middle movie nearly repugnant in its violence. (Pro-"Temple of Doom" people, on the other hand, believe that film to be the most disarmingly creative and emotionally effective of the trio.) One thing's for sure: Harrison Ford's swaggering, two-fisted, self-effacing performance worked like a charm, and the art of cracking bullwhips was probably never quite the iconic activity it soon became after "Raiders". Supporting players and costars were very much a part of the series, too--Karen Allen, Sean Connery (as Indy's dad), Kate Capshaw, Ke Huy Quan, Amrish Puri, Denholm Elliot, River Phoenix, and John Rhys-Davies among them. Years have passed since the last film (another is supposedly in the works), but emerging film buffs can have the same fun their predecessors did picking out numerous references to Hollywood classics and B-movies of the past. "--Tom Keogh"

Languages: English (Original Language) French (Original Language) English (Subtitled) Spanish (Subtitled) French (Subtitled) Spanish (Dubbed)

Sound: Dolby

Summary: The presidents plane gets hijacked and his beliefs are put to the ultimate test by the rebels who are using his wife and child as bargaining chips. Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 12/21/2004 Starring: Harrison Ford Gary Oldman Run time: 125 minutes Rating: R Director: Wolfgang Petersen

Languages: English (Original Language) French (Original Language) English (Subtitled)

Sound: Dolby

Summary: The quintessential movie spoof that spawned an entire genre of parody films, the original Airplane! still holds up as one of the brightest comedic gems of the '80s, not to mention of cinema itself (it ranked in the top 5 of Entertainment Weekly's list of the 100 funniest movies ever made). The humor may be low and obvious at times, but the jokes keep coming at a rapid-fire clip and its targets--primarily the lesser lights of '70s cinema, from disco films to star-studded disaster epics--are more than worthy for send-up. If you've seen even one of the overblown Airport movies then you know the plot: the crew of a filled-to-capacity jetliner is wiped out and it's up to a plucky stewardess and a shell-shocked fighter pilot to land the plane. Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty are the heroes who have a history that includes a meet-cute à la Saturday Night Fever, a surf scene right out of From Here to Eternity, a Peace Corps trip to Africa to teach the natives the benefits of Tupperware and basketball, a war-ravaged recovery room with a G.I. who thinks he's Ethel Merman (a hilarious cameo)--and those are just the flashbacks! The jokes gleefully skirt the boundaries of bad taste (pilot Peter Graves to a juvenile cockpit visitor: "Joey, have you ever seen a grown man naked?"), with the high (low?) point being Hagerty's intimate involvement with the blow-up automatic pilot doll, but they'll have you rolling on the floor. The film launched the careers of collaborators Jim Abrahams (Big Business), David Zucker (Ruthless People), and Jerry Zucker (Ghost), as well as revitalized such B-movie actors as Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Robert Stack, and Leslie Nielsen, who built a second career on films like this. A vital part of any video collection. --Mark Englehart

Languages: English (Original Language) English (Subtitled) Spanish (Subtitled)

Sound: Dolby

Summary: An interesting feature of Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, and Alien Resurrection, worth watching together if only for the chance to see how different directors handle essentially the same idea. The results are decidedly mixed. Ridley Scott's Alien is the most traditional of the bunch, essentially a haunted-house picture set on a space freighter, where a monster is picking off crew members one by one. James Cameron's Aliens is the all-out adrenaline bath, a pulse-pounding action thriller from start to finish. It plays a little like a Western in outer space, where the settlers are waiting for a cavalry that never comes--and the Indians are acid-veined aliens. And David Fincher's Alien 3 is the rock-video version, in which substance and storytelling are sacrificed to editing and imagery, as the aliens attempt to take over a space penal colony. --Marshall Fine

Languages: English (Original Language) French (Original Language) English (Subtitled) French (Subtitled)

Sound: AC-3

Summary: A mind-altering trip into the heart and mind of a scientist hell-bent on finding the beast within. Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 06/01/2004 Starring: William Hurt Blair Brown Run time: 103 minutes Rating: R Director: Ken Russell

Summary:

Languages: English (Original Language)

Sound: Dolby

Summary: When youve got nothing to lose you might as well risk everything. Lester burnham is in a rut. Facing a midlife crisis lester reverts into a maddening rebirth of adolescence. His sudden irreverant rebellion enrages his wife and confuses his daughter when he turns a lustful gaze toward her friend. Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 01/17/2006 Starring: Kevin Spacey Thora Birch Run time: 122 minutes Rating: R

Languages: English (Original Language) English (Subtitled)

Sound: Dolby

Summary: In the tradition of such obsessively driven directors as Erich von Stroheim and Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola approached the production of Apocalypse Now as if it were his own epic mission into the heart of darkness. On location in the storm-ravaged Philippines, he quite literally went mad as the project threatened to devour him in a vortex of creative despair, but from this insanity came one of the greatest films ever made. It began as a John Milius screenplay, transposing Joseph Conrad's classic story "Heart of Darkness" into the horrors of the Vietnam War, following a battle-weary Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) on a secret upriver mission to find and execute the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has reverted to a state of murderous and mystical insanity. The journey is fraught with danger involving wartime action on epic and intimate scales. One measure of the film's awesome visceral impact is the number of sequences, images, and lines of dialogue that have literally burned themselves into our cinematic consciousness, from the Wagnerian strike of helicopter gunships on a Vietnamese village to the brutal murder of stowaways on a peasant sampan and the unflinching fearlessness of the surfing warrior Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who speaks lovingly of "the smell of napalm in the morning." Like Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God, this film is the product of genius cast into a pit of hell and emerging, phoenix-like, in triumph. Coppola's obsession (effectively detailed in the riveting documentary Hearts of Darkness, directed by Coppola's wife, Eleanor) informs every scene and every frame, and the result is a film for the ages. --Jeff Shannon

Languages: English (Original Language)

Sound: Dolby

Summary: Mankind's greatest adventure is remembered for the digital age. The DVD format changed the way we look at movies and especially TV series, with massive complete-season sets. That concept is spectacularly taken one-step further with Spacecraft Films' definitive collections of the Gemini and Apollo space missions, stuffing in nearly every scrap of TV transmissions and on-board footage. The three- to six-disc sets use the full functions of the DVD format; see a liftoff in six different angles (some remixed with 5.1 sound) or listen to a mixture of air-to-ground communications, official NASA narration, or post-flight debriefings, most often carefully synched to the exact moment of footage seen. Like any good research paper, every bit of footage may not be interesting, but taken as a chronicle of history, it's irreplaceable.

NASA's most monumental mission was Apollo 11, placing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the surface of the moon. Unfortunately, it's one of the least stunningly photographed missions, with grainy black-and-white TV footage for the two-hour moon walk. However it's so rare that hardly anyone has seen more than a few seconds of this broadcast since 1969. Watch the broadcast as it was (alas, no Walter Cronkite, but this is the NASA feed--not a network), or watch the 16mm color footage shot by a stationary camera inside the lunar module, or watch a composition of both that also displays the famous photographs at the moment they were taken (how cool is that?). The moon walk is only one of three discs and there's another eight hours of footage, including all the onboard film and TV transmissions, pre-and post flight news conferences, and 15 views of the launch. Plus there's plenty of behind-the-scenes footage--the assembly of the giant Saturn 5 spacecraft, moon-walk rehearsals, and capsule recovery. For space junkies, it's the ultimate visual treasure trove. Any kid who has primed himself watching Ron Howard's majestic Apollo 13 (which featured no real space footage) will probably be disappointed in the lack of "cool" footage (oddly, the earlier Gemini missions have more "whoa" photography), but anybody interested in the moon mission finally has a complete chronicle of what it looked like when it happened. --Doug Thomas

Languages: English (Original Language) Spanish (Original Language) English (Subtitled) Spanish (Subtitled) French (Dubbed)

Sound: AC-3

Summary: For the crew of apollo 13 it was a dream trip of a lifetime. Their mission was to stroll the moons surface and collect data. That is until a sober message came from space: houston we have a problem. The world watched in silence for four days as the crews worked around the clock to bring the space capsule back. Studio: Uni Dist Corp. (mca) Release Date: 08/22/2006 Starring: Tom Hanks Kevin Bacon Run time: 103 minutes Rating: Pg13 Director: Ron Howard

Languages: English (Original Language) Spanish (Original Language)

Sound: AC-3

Summary: After new york city is damaged by hundreds of small meteorites nasa discovers an asteroid is on a collison course with earth. They recruit the best deep core driller in the world harry stamper to train astronauts who will go to the asteroid drill into the center and detonate a nuclear warhead. Studio: Buena Vista Home Video Release Date: 05/16/2006 Starring: Bruce Willis Liv Tyler Run time: 151 minutes Rating: Pg13 Director: Michael Bay

Languages: English (Subtitled) Spanish (Subtitled) French (Subtitled)

Sound: Dolby

Summary: If you don't think Austin Powers is one of the funniest movies of the 1990s, maybe you should be packed into a cryogenic time chamber and sent back to the decade whence you came. Perhaps it was the 1960s--the shagadelic decade when London hipster Austin Powers scored with gorgeous chicks as a fashion photographer by day, crime-fighting international man of mystery by night. Yeah, baby, yeah! But when Powers's arch nemesis, Dr. Evil, puts himself into a deep-freeze and travels via time machine to the late 1990s, Powers must follow him and foil Evil's nefarious scheme of global domination. Mike Myers plays dual roles as Powers and Dr. Evil, with Elizabeth Hurley as his present-day sidekick and karate-kicking paramour. A hilarious spoof of '60s spy movies, this colorful comedy actually gets funnier with successive viewings, making it a perfect home video for gloomy days and randy nights. Oh, behave! --Jeff Shannon

Languages: English (Original Language) English (Subtitled)

Sound: Dolby

Summary: Austin powers the international man of mystery is back and groovier than ever. This time the shagadelic british secret agent matches libidos with cia agent felicity shagwell who helps austin stop his arch-nemesis dr. Evil from destroying the world. Studio: New Line Home Video Release Date: 12/09/2008 Starring: Mike Myers Seth Green Run time: 95 minutes Rating: Pg13

Languages: English (Original Language)

Sound: Dolby

Summary: Despite symptoms of sequelitis, Austin Powers in Goldmember is must-see lunacy for devoted fans of the shagadelic franchise. Unfortunately, the law of diminishing returns is in full effect: for every big-name cameo and raunchy double-entendre, there's an equal share of redundant shtick, juvenile scatology, and pop-cultural spoofery. All is forgiven when the hilarity level is consistently high, and Mike Myers--returning here as randy Brit spy Austin, his nemesis Dr. Evil, the bloated Scottish henchman Fat Bastard, and new Dutch disco-villain Goldmember--thrives by favoring comedic chaos over coherent plotting. Once they've tossed Austin into the disco fever of 1975 (where he's sent to rescue his father, gamely played by Michael Caine), Myers and director Jay Roach seem vaguely adrift with old and new characters, including Verne Troyer's Mini-Me and pop star Beyoncé Knowles as Pam Grier-ish blaxpo-babe Foxxy Cleopatra. A bit tired, perhaps, but Powers hasn't lost his mojo. --Jeff Shannon

Languages: English (Original Language) Italian (Original Language) French (Subtitled) Spanish (Subtitled) English (Dubbed) French (Dubbed) Spanish (Dubbed)

Sound: Dolby

Summary: Studio: Tcfhe Release Date: 04/15/2008 Run time: 108 minutes Rating: Pg13