Lake Bell’s wildly creative, comfortably low-key comedy about the daughter of a famous movie trailer voice-over artist trying to emerge from her father’s shadow to narrate trailers herself – I love that the movie allows me to write this sentence – was one of the Indie standouts of 2013, and definitely among the year’s best comedies. The entire cast is great, and the film’s charm only grows the more time one spends among the characters, but Bell is the standout here, in all three of her roles – as writer, director, and star – for she has managed not only to make something inventive, charming, and amiable, but also crafted an extremely strong and stealthy female empowerment narrative about what a woman’s voice means in our modern, patriarchal world.
In a World… will arrive on DVD and Blu-Ray January 21st.
[h2]Iron Man 3[/h2]
2013 may have been the year many critics grew tired of the superhero movie, but it also happened to be a year filled with great ones, with Iron Man 3 in the genre’s all-time upper tier. Shane Black brought his own unique voice to the project, and wound up crafting an Iron Man that was bigger and better than its predecessors in almost every way, with stupendous action set pieces, a pleasantly surprising James Bond-esque narrative style, and some of the most complex comic-book movie characterization this side of The Dark Knight.
When I wrote about the film in May, I called it “an insightful and engaging psychological analysis of an impossibly rich and fascinating central character,” and said “it may be the current pinnacle of the superhero film as character piece.” I still think that’s true, and when you factor in the seemingly endless amounts of humor and intrigue, not calling Iron Man 3 one of the year’s best films seems like the crazy thing to do. Marvel is on a roll, and I for one feel tremendously lucky to be along for the ride.
Iron Man 3 is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray. Read my analysis of the film here.
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