DVD reviews from The Movie Snob:

A Streetcar Named Desire (A-). Cultural illiterate that I am, until now I could honestly say that everything I knew about Streetcar I learned from The Simpsons. (Remember the one where the town puts on a production of a musical version called "O Streetcar," starring Ned Flanders as Stanley Kowalski and Marge Simpson as Blanche DuBois?) Anyhow, I rented the movie with few preconceptions and was pretty much spellbound. Vivien Leigh is Blanche, a southern belle, no longer young, who leaves her ancestral home in Mississippi to stay with her younger sister Stella and her husband Stanley (Marlon Brando) in New Orleans for a while. Their rundown home in the French Quarter and Stanley's brutish and even violent ways are quite a shock to Blanche, who seems none too able to stand very many shocks of any sort. Stanley, for his part, cannot stand Blanche or her affected gentility, and he makes it his mission to find out why she really left Mississippi. Lots of great dialogue and Oscars went to Leigh, Kim Hunter (Stella), and Karl Malden, who plays a friend of Stanley that Blanche sets her sights on. The ending didn't quite ring true to me (and I have since read that the play ends quite differently), but I can see why this is considered a classic.

The Anniversary Party (D+). This mess of a movie is no classic. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming play a Hollywood couple (she's an actor, he's a novelist) who throw themselves a sixth-anniversary party. We quickly learn that they split up for a while and reconciled only a few months ago, and their relationship is still not exactly stable. I suppose that we are supposed to empathize with them as the evening wears on and we learn more and more about their troubles, but it didn't happen for me. Eventually, almost everybody at the party takes ecstasy, secrets are revealed, there's lots of yelling and crying, but I was neither touched nor entertained. The remarkable guest list (Kevin Kline, Gwyneth Paltrow, Phoebe Cates, Parker Posey, John C. Reilly) can't save this party. Skip it.