New on Disc: 'An Education,' 'Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel' and more …

An Education

Street 3/30
Sony Pictures, Drama, B.O. $12.5 million, $28.96 DVD, $38.96 Blu-ray, ‘PG-13’ for mature thematic material involving sexual content, and for smoking.
Stars Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Emma Thompson, Alfred Molina, Dominic Cooper, Rosamund Pike.
2009. The core story is a good one, about  a 16-year-old (most deserving Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan) being swept off her feet by a thirtysomething man of mystery (Peter Sarsgaard), who is not what he seems.
Extras: The bonus featurettes are the usual back-patting boilerplate, though I liked getting the chance to see screenwriter Nick Hornby. The deleted scenes, which include what appears to be an alternate ending, are well above average.
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Mad Men: Season Three

Lionsgate, Drama, $49.98 four-DVD set, $49.99 three-disc Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, January Jones, Vincent Kartheiser, Christina Hendricks, John Slattery.
2009. Along with “The Colgate Comedy Hour” in the 1950s and “Later With Bob Costas” in the 1980s, “Mad Men” is my favorite TV show of all time. This season of the 1960s ad agency drama puts into motion plot points that were subtly seeded in previous years.
Extras: In addition to some period documentaries (including one on civil rights figure Medgar Evers and another on cigarette advertising), every episode offers group commentary by cast or crew members.
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Collateral (Blu-ray)

Street 3/30
Paramount, Thriller, $29.99 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for violence and language.
Stars Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo.
2004. It now seems this underrated drama of a professional hit man and a hostage L.A. cabbie trekking him to nocturnal “appointments” represents some kind of recent peak for both Tom Cruise and director Michael Mann. Collateral was shot in high-def video, then kind of a novelty, and its rough, occasionally grainy look transfers effectively to Blu-ray as one of the best movies I know to convey “night.”
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Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel

Street 3/30
Fox, Comedy, B.O. $218.7 million, $29.98 DVD, $34.98 two-DVD set, $39.99 Blu-ray, ‘PG’ for some mild rude humor.
Stars Jason Lee, David Cross, Zachary Levi, Wendie Malick. Voices of Justin Long, Christina Applegate, Jesse McCartney, Amy Poehler, Anna Faris.
2009. This isn’t exactly a conventional “pick,” but it does provide an opportunity to reflect on just how amazingly long the Chipmunks have been with us.
Extras: The costlier DVD/Blu-ray Squeak-Along editions predictably milk it some with added featurettes.
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Wyatt Earp (American Experience)

PBS, Documentary, $24.99 DVD, NR.
2009. At 60 minutes, it’s short for an “American Experience,” but a lot is packed in. You can’t make this kind of stuff up, even though a lot of Hollywood movies based on the Old West lawman concocted material that wasn’t this interesting.
Read the Full Review

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New on Disc: 'The African Queen,' 'The T.A.M.I. Show' and more …

The African Queen

Street 3/23
Paramount, Adventure, $25.99 DVD, $39.99 Blu-ray, $50.99 DVD Boxed Set, $57.99 Blu-ray Boxed set, NR.
Stars Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Robert Morley.
1951. The easy verdict is that director John Huston’s adaptation of C.S. Forester’s novel has never looked anything close to as great as it looks now (especially on Blu-ray).
Extras: The hour-long documentary is outstanding. The pricier boxed sets include a reprint of Hepburn’s popular memoir The Making of the African Queen, as well as a 1951 Lux Radio
Theatre broadcast of Forester’s yarn.
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The T.A.M.I. Show: Collector’s Edition

Street 3/23
Shout! Factory, Music, $19.93 DVD, NR.
Featuring The Rolling Stones, The Supremes, James Brown.
1964. Serving up two hours of sheer exuberance, The T.A.M.I. Show is among my favorite movies ever. It captures so many performers at their peak and certainly in their youth.
Extras: The commentary by director Steve Binder and music historian Don Waller is packed with info. Filmmaker John Landis, in an enthusiastic voiceover with the movie’s original trailer, informs us that he was at the actual concert as a teenager.
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Days of Heaven

Street 3/23
Criterion, Drama, $39.95 Blu-ray, ‘PG.’
Stars Richard Gere, Sam Shepard, Brooke Adams.
1978. Seeing director Terrence Malick’s pastoral masterpiece on Blu-ray is the same kind of event it’ll presumably be when the recent restoration of The Red Shoes makes it to home release.
Extras: The Blu-ray basically replicates Criterion’s 2007 standard DVD, though adds a DTS-HD master audio soundtrack to make it even more visceral — the word cast member Sam Shepard uses to describe the movie in the first place on one of several outstanding extras.
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Bigger Than Life

Street 3/23
Criterion, Drama, $39.95 DVD or Blu-ray, NR.
Stars James Mason, Barbara Rush, Walter Matthau.
1956. The first movie I know to deal with a prescription drug nightmare in the suburbs.
Extras:  Typically savvy for Criterion, with commentary by critic Geoff Andrew, a 1977 interview with director Nicholas Ray, a new interview with the director’s widow and more retrospectives.
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Super Bowl XLIV Champions: New Orleans Saints

Warner, Sports, $24.98 DVD, $34.99 Blu-ray, NR.
2010. These overviews are generally as interesting as the season was. Novelist Anne Rice even appears early on.
Extras: The Super Bowl halftime show featuring The Who.
Read the Full Review

 

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New on Disc: 'Broken Embraces' and more ...

Broken Embraces

Street 3/16
Sony Pictures, Drama, B.O. $4.7 million, $28.96 DVD, $34.95 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for sexual content, language and some drug material.
Stars Penélope Cruz, Lluis Homar, Bianca Portillo.
2009. Taken as a brief for the rarified view that cinema is life’s highest calling, here’s one of the stronger arguments, given what happens to its blinded filmmaker protagonist, for the sanctity of the “director’s cut.” Simply calling it a reasonably good time falls a tad short because the portions that Penélope Cruz dominates are pretty potent.
Extras: A Variety Q&A with Cruz, a short film by director Pedro Almodóvar, deleted scenes and some red carpet material from last fall’s New York Film Festival.
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The Brothers Warner

Warner, Documentary, $19.98 DVD, NR.
2008. To paraphrase Calvin Coolidge, the business of this documentary is business, which is why the limited utilization of classic Warner Bros. scenes isn’t a problem here. This one is about blood kin. And, at least figuratively speaking, blood.
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Paris

MPI, Drama, $19.98 DVD; $29.98 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for language and some sexual references. In French with English subtitles.
Stars Juliette Binoche, Romain Duris, Fabrice Luchini.
2009. The story undeniably takes place in one of the world’s photographic cities, and the DVD had a richer sound mix than I expected (which can pull you into the action in subliminal ways). Oscar winner Juliette Binoche is merely the best-known name in a large cast, deglamorized to play a no-frills social worker and single mom whose dancer brother (Romain Duris) needs a heart transplant.
Extras: Minor making-of and background featurettes.
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Building Alaska

PBS, Documentary, $24.99 DVD, Unrated
2009. Putting politics aside, you can’t find a more apt keyword for this 87-minute documentary to have in its title than “building.” So much of it deals with primitive highways, railroads, bridges and trestles — all constructed over land that tends to buckle some due to seasonal weather change.
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Gambit

Available Now via Amazon.com CreateSpace
Universal, Comedy, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Shirley MacLaine, Michael Caine, Herbert Lom.
1966. Gambit was never more than agreeable fluff, but agreeable easily trumps disagreeable, right? The plot hinges on the physical resemblance of a Eurasian nightclub entertainer (Shirley MacLaine) to the dead wife of an Arab multimillionaire played by (longtime Inspector Clouseau nemesis) Herbert Lom. The Amazon print is a little grainier than I’d like, but I think this is due less to it being an on-demand DVD-R than the fact that Gambit was shot in cost-cutting Techniscope, whose inherent grain was better suited to Sergio Leone Westerns than escapist comedies. But this is still a handsome couple hours of entertainment, having earned Oscar nominations for costumes and art/set decoration and sound.
Read the Full Review
 

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New on disc: 'Up in the Air,' 'Precious' and more …

Up in the Air

Street 3/9
Paramount, Drama, B.O. $82.1 million, $19.99 DVD, $29.99 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for language and some sexual content.
Stars George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, Jason Bateman.
2009. An instant milestone in the career of George Clooney dealing with the recently laid-off economic underclass, Jason Reitman’s adaptation of the Walter Kirn novel is topical to eerie extremes — yet also funny at times and always psychologically deft.
Extras: Commentary, a featurette, a music video, and deleted scenes that deliver more entertainment than most major studio releases from last year.
Read the Full Review

Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire

Street 3/9
Lionsgate, Drama, B.O. $47.1 million, $29.95 DVD, $39.99 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for child abuse including sexual assault, and pervasive language.
Stars Gabourey Sidibe, Mo’Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey, Sherri Shepherd, Lenny Kravitz.
2009. Despite the inevitable high-test squalor of any story about a 450-pound Harlem teenager being twice impregnated by her own father and left HIV-positive, director Lee Daniels takes some chances with fantasy sequences, occasionally even eliciting an intended chuckle or two. Somehow, it all works and even becomes more than the sum of its parts.
Extras: Commentary with Daniels, Gabourey Sidibe’s audition, a deleted scene and several featurettes full of the usual back-patting, which, in this case, seems earned.
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Capitalism: A Love Story

Street 3/9
Anchor Bay, Documentary, B.O. $14.4 million, $29.98 DVD, $39.98 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for some language.
2009. The swath cut here is wide, even for Michael Moore, and when he’s denouncing capitalism wholesale, one senses that the subject is likely beyond the scope of the kind of movies he usually makes.
Extras: As per usual for a Moore documentary, the DVD and Blu-ray versions come with a lot of extra featurettes.
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We Live in Public

IndiePix, Documentary, B.O. $0.04 million, $24.95 DVD, NR.
2009. Though his accomplishments never matched his own inflated view of them, Internet pioneer Josh Harris’ warped mindset can’t be totally discounted, which is what gives this hard-to-shake yarn its tension.
Extras: Behind-the-scenes backgrounders, with director Ondi Timoner relating her own interesting story.
Read the Full Review

The List of Adrian Messenger

Available Now via Amazon.com CreateSpace
Universal, Mystery, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars George C. Scott, Kirk Douglas, Dana Wynter.
1963. Sprinkled throughout John Huston’s mystery movie are brief appearances by well-known actors with faces buried under mounds of makeup (starting with Kirk Douglas), and at least part of the mystery has to do with our guessing who they are.
Read the Full Review

 

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New on DVD: 'Ponyo,' 'The September Issue' and more …

The September Issue

Lionsgate, Documentary, B.O. $3.8 million, $29.98 DVD, ‘PG-13’ for brief strong language.
2009. This is the story of how the September 2007 issue of Vogue came to be, which was financially huge even by seasonal standards. Actress Sienna Miller is one of the issue’s major photographic subjects — the cover personality, in fact. Even she’s reduced to someone who is all but punching a time clock in a chronicle that in several ways gives a Devil her due.
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Alice in Wonderland

Street 3/2
Universal, Fantasy, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Charlotte Henry, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, W.C. Fields.
1933. A strange movie even by “Alice” standards, it would be a stretch to call this version engaging a la Disney’s animated 1951 version. But it is carried to some extent by its innate weirdness and some captivating décor. This is very good print and a nice mastering job, by the way.
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Kitten With a Whip

Available Now via Amazon.com CreateSpace
Universal, Drama, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Ann-Margret, John Forsythe, Peter Brown, Richard Anderson.
1964. Some movies were just born from the get-go to attain followings – though, of course, this time, the title helps. Ann-Margret’s performance is so extreme that it ventures into camp-ville, yet the twisted star-power she brings to it is the one reason the movie has a trash-lover’s cult appeal.
Read the Full Review

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Ponyo

Street 3/2
Disney, Animated, B.O. $15.1 million, $29.99 DVD, $39.99 Blu-ray, ‘G.’
Voices of Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Tina Fey, Liam Neeson, Cloris Leachman, Betty White, Lily Tomlin, Noah Lindsey Cyrus, Frankie Jonas.
2009. The latest from revered Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke) doesn’t bludgeon us with its environmental message, yet there’s one there in almost every frame — many jammed with enough artfully cluttered visual detail to drop socks all the way down to your beach clogs. While they’re being entertained — and they will be — kids will get the beneficial message that creeps who use the ocean as their private litter box deserve to be, say, booted into the same pit of wolves who munched out on Ernest Borgnine in The Vikings.

This story, however, has a much gentler tone. Sosuke is a 5-year-old boy who lives with his mom (cute when she’s angry and with the voice of Tina Fey) on a seaside cliff where the water licks the shore in arresting fashion that never fails to engage the imagination. Ponyo is a female goldfish, who, after the lad saves her from death, licks his cut finger in gratitude, tastes human blood for the first time and is thus somehow transformed into something close to a real girl.

This doesn’t set too well with her father (voice of Liam Neeson), a driven if generally agreeable one-man ecological police force who patrols the big drink in what looks like old Peter Max duds. He acts as if he has a lot of abrasive sand you-know-where when it comes to polluting humans, which creates significant tension when Sosuke (voice of kiddie Jonas Brother Frankie) and Ponyo (Mylie Cyrus’s younger sister Noah) start to become as much of an item as children this young can be.

A Cyrus connection here? The Jonas Brothers? Yes: the corporate benefactor of each — Disney — has taken Miyazaki’s original work and given it a borderline Goofy touch that simply adds to the movie’s strangeness (in generally a good way).  For this hand-drawn 2D venture, Mr. Pixar himself  — the great John Lasseter — signed on as executive producer. And the credited producers are Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy (the 'A'-list continues), who like Lasseter, give forth with a few words on the disc’s meager extras.

By strangeness — some may rightly prefer to call it surreality — we mean the casting of American voices. Here, for instance, are the pipes of Betty White coming out of a resident’s mouth at the old folk’s home where Sosuke’s mother works — though, truth to tell, it’s probably no more weird than seeing Betty White get tackled on a football field in the now famous Snickers commercial from Super Bowl XLIV. But having Sosuke’s father being a “Koichi” who has Matt Damon’s very recognizable voice — well, you don’t get this everyday.
 

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The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

Street 3/2
Screen Media, Drama, B.O. $0.3 million, $27.98 DVD, $29.98 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for sexual content, brief nudity, some drug material and language.
Stars Robin Wright, Alan Arkin, Blake Lively, Maria Bello, Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Julianne Moore, Monica Bellucci.
2009. I can’t call this late-year limited release a normal “pick” because it’s the kind of maddening navel-gazer about miserable people that can sometimes give independent films a bad name. But occasionally, a project features enough well-known actors (see Alice in Wonderland above) to qualify as a curiosity. This one certainly goes a long way to consolidate the Screen Actor’s Guild directory: Watching it is like getting one of those annual Christmas letters that friends send out, jamming a year’s experiences onto a page.

Robin Wright, her Pippa character’s story told in flashback, is a wayward teen who married a much older literary figure (Alan Arkin) before even beginning to figure out what made herself tick. As we eventually see in the movie’s one real shocker scene, this necessitated Arkin ridding himself of an inconvenient wife played by Monica Belluci — and if you want to jettison someone with Belluci’s looks, you need to establish that the woman has a shortcoming or two in other departments. Whatever else writer/director Rebecca Miller does or doesn’t do, this one she pulls off.

Wright herself has gone from pure looker (The Princess Bride) to accomplished actress, and even when Miller’s script persists in spelling out every thought on her mind via maddening voiceover narration, you can’t fault her performance. The actress’s later scenes with Arkin — now aged but unable to face it that twilight is here even after he moves to a stagnant retirement home — are credible enough. But only when she crosses paths in a few scenes with another resident’s son (Keanu Reeves, if you can imagine him selling cigarettes in a convenience store) is there anything resembling narrative tension. By the way, if you think you’ve seen chest tattoos, the one Reeves sports here is practically in Imax.

Maria Bello plays Pippa’s speed-freak mother when Pippa is a child — a good idea given that the actress’s physical resemblance to Wright is well within the bounds of credibility, and we all know that Bello can do “harried.” "Gossip Girl" star Blake Lively plays Pippa as a young woman — which is not a good idea because the actresses don’t look enough alike for us to make the leap and because it’s harder to accept that Arkin’s character would have fallen for her as portrayed (not a problem in Wright's parts of the picture).

So who else? Julianne Moore shows up for a blink as a lesbian buddy of Pippa’s aunt; Winona Ryder is a perpetual dinner guest who takes a novel approach to suicide attempts; Steve Binder is one of Arkin’s writers; the recently ubiquitous Zoe Kazan is Pippa’s grown daughter; and Shirley Knight is Reeves’ in all way retro mother, whose character name is “Dot” and at one point actually says, “None of my beeswax.”

Lives has been praised in some circles for its literary qualities, but those who want to travel this road with an emotionally fraught inter-personal story would be better off looking or re-looking at 2006’s Little Children — perhaps the most horribly marketed (in theaters) great movie of the last quarter-century. But Wright is the real deal here, and the movie did get a 68% Rotten Tomatoes rating, which just goes to show how misleading even a must-read Web site can be.

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Picking the Oscars: 2010 Edition

With the single exception of missing Around the World in 80 Days’ best picture win for 1956 — this is what you get for mouthing off to your fourth-grade teacher and being forbidden by your parents to watch the show — I have seen every Academy Awards presentation since the 1954 gala.

And what a gala it was: Marlon Brando, Grace Kelly, Walt Disney, Elia Kazan, Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, Dorothy Dandridge, emcee Bob Hope trading insults with Bing Crosby, Jerry Lewis introducing Dean Martin to sing winning song “Three Coins in the Fountain,” William Holden and (in a filmed segment from Europe) Audrey Hepburn.

Over-analysis by every pundit and his cousin’s brother-in-law — plus the frigid precision of prognostication in the 2000s — has made the evening almost immeasurably less interesting than it used to be, though I suppose one can’t have lived through more than a half-century’s worth of these affairs without having a few opinions about what’s to come at this year’s ceremony, which takes place March 7.  So here are a few:

Best Picture

Am I the only one who thinks Avatar sags some and gets redundant in the middle? I like it well enough, but it and The Abyss are the only James Cameron movies I haven’t been able to go all the way with since before The Terminator (yes, I love True Lies). If Avatar wins, it’ll be among the less distinguished honorees in a while (special effects breakthroughs obviously excepted) — and this from a filmmaker whose manner likely puts off a lot of voters. On the other hand — and adjusting for inflated dollars — The Hurt Locker would be a contender for the most atypical Oscar winner ever and with the least box office. So could Inglourious Basterds (the year’s most self-conscious movie) sneak in there with an upset? Someone advanced this theory the other day, and I’m intrigued. For the record, my favorite 2009 movies were A Serious Man and Up in the Air, both best picture nominees.

Best Actor

Just as Sterling Hayden appeared in more great and certainly durable movies than Clark Gable, Jeff Bridges has starred in more black-belt cult movies than anyone: Fat City, Bad Company, The Last American Hero, The Iceman Cometh, Rancho Deluxe, Hearts of the West, Stay Hungry, Cutter’s Way, Tron, Nadine, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Fisher King, American Dream, Fearless, The Big Lebowski (which, by now, may have transcended cult status) and The Door in the Floor. Plus three more — along with Lebowski — I personally don’t care for: Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Winter Kills and Starman. Plus The Last Picture Show and Iron Man, which are definitely more than cult movies. All this is a way of saying that if Bridges is going to get an Oscar, it can’t help but make me (and so many others) happy for him. I’m just sorry it’s for Crazy Heart, which wouldn’t be much of anything if the actor didn’t elevate it about 500 notches. (Maggie Gyllenhaal’s nomination is a real stretch.) I’d prefer George Clooney for Up in the Air because old-school star power is such a lost art — though had Shutter Island been released in 2009 as originally intended, I might be going for Leonardo DiCaprio because he has the toughest lead actor role in recent memory: taking it right up to the top but stopping at the brim.

Best Actress

Of the 10 best-picture nominees, The Blind Side is the only one that can’t at be all be justified, given that it is, at best, only on the moderately high side of exactly what you expect while perpetually playing to the third balcony. I’ve liked Sandra Bullock since she played the waitress in 1993’s woefully underrated Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, but — as with Bridges and Crazy Heart — I’m in the “anti-Cliff Robertson/Charly” school that thinks a cited performance ought to serve a movie of at least minor distinction.

Though I love Carey Mulligan in An Education (damned good movie, too), I’d prefer to see her in something else before taking the plunge. I’d probably give the award to Meryl Streep — who, interestingly, has become a box office figure in middle age when she wasn’t earlier in her career. Like Jessica Lange and Michelle Pfeiffer, Streep was giving great performance after great performance two decades ago while the broad demographic that prefers to shell out for the likes of The Blind Side was staying away.

Best Supporting Actor

The biggest shaft of the entire 2009 run goes to un-nominated Christian McKay, who (as Orson) should be getting the Oscar for Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles (a movie that sent the dean of American film critics, Andrew Sarris, spinning into ecstasy). Though favorite Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds) is basically his equal, there have been a lot of memorably oily Nazis in movie history, but few characterizations of McKay’s caliber when it comes to playing a bigger-than-life figure (no pun intended — and besides, this is the relatively thinner 1930s Welles) we all know.

Best Supporting Actress

My top picks for 2009 were Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick for Up in the Air, who are both nominated. Assuming a vote split, this probably clears the path for Mo’Nique in Precious, which would be a fine choice — her character the ironic African-American equivalent of the white racist mother-from-hell harridan Shelley Winters played in A Patch of Blue. And Winters won the 1965 supporting Oscar.

Best Director

Here’s a legitimate set-up for The Hurt Locker’s Kathryn Bigelow to become the first woman to win a directorial Oscar — so if it doesn’t happen, it’ll be the story of the night. But she will win.

Passing thought: Though the Coen Brothers got a most deserved original screenplay nomination, it’s worth noting that A Serious Man is as directed-to-the-hilt as The Hurt Locker. In fact, I can’t fault the movie on any level.

 

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New on DVD: 'The Informant,' 'Make Way for Tomorrow' and more …

Brothers

Prebook 2/24; Street 3/23
Lionsgate, Drama, B.O. $28.5 million, $29.95 DVD, $39.99 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for language and some disturbing violent content.
Stars Tobey Maguire, Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Sam Shepard, Clifton Collins Jr., Mare Winningham.
2009. This remake of 2004’s Brodre (from Denmark) has the ability to gnaw at you around the edges if not always straight down the middle. It delivers on a casting coup that must have occurred to everyone at one time or another — Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal suggest one another so much that it’s almost surprising that the industry found room enough for both.
Extras: Commentary by director Jim Sheridan and two behind-the-scenes featurettes.
Read the Full Review

The Informant!

Street 2/23
Warner, Comedy, B.O. $33.3 million, $28.98 DVD, $35.99 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for language.
Stars Matt Damon, Scott Bakula, Joel McHale, Melanie Lynskey.
2009. Matt Damon got a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, but the 2009 performance for which he’ll be more remembered came in the first Steven Soderbergh movie in an age not composed of aren’t-we-cute smirkiness (all three “Ocean’s” capers) or designed for instant oblivion in theatrical auditoriums holding 150 seats (Che, et al.).
Extras: Commentary with Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns.
Read the Full Review

The Damned United

Street 2/23
Sony Pictures, Drama, B.O. $0.4 million, $28.96 DVD, $34.95 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for language.
Stars Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall, Colm Meaney, Jim Broadbent.
2009. Unusual sports biopic about the late soccer coach Brian Clough (Michael Sheen) is made by its all-star lineup of some of the screen’s most recognizable character actors.
Extras: In addition to commentary by Sheen, director Tom Hooper and producer Andy Harries, the extras look at the real Clough and soccer in the 1970s.
Read the Full Review

Make Way for Tomorrow

Street 2/23
Criterion, Drama, $29.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Beulah Bondi, Victor Moore, Fay Bainter, Thomas Mitchell.
1937. There won’t be a dozen movies out this year as great as Leo McCarey’s classic about elderly parents who lose their home and none of their five grown children can make it right.
Extras: Great interviews with Peter Bogdanovich and Gary Giddins discussing McCarey, and a booklet with adoring essays by biographer/historian Tag Gallagher. 
Read the Full Review

Dragnet

Available Now via Amazon.com CreateSpace
Universal, Drama, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Jack Webb, Ben Alexander, Richard Boone, Ann Robinson.
1954. Whatever else this classic police drama is or isn’t, this medium-sized box office hit is a supreme artifact of its age.
Read the Full Review

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New on DVD: ‘Good Hair,’ ‘Hunger,’ ‘Contempt’ and more …

Last week, in talking about the new-to-DVD 1966 TV version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, I alluded to the 1933 oddball movie version of Alice in Wonderland. Now, it turns out that Universal is releasing it Mar 2 to cash in on the new Tim Burton Alice. The movie has a rep as a misfire, and I haven’t seen it since the early 1960s. But my curiosity is up due to the supporting cast: Cary Grant (Mock Turtle), Gary Cooper (White Knight) and W.C. Fields (Humpty Dumpty).

Now on to this week’s picks:

 

Good Hair

Street 2/16
Lionsgate, Documentary, B.O. $4.2 million, $27.98 DVD, ‘PG-13’ for some language including sex and drug references, and brief partial nudity.
Stars Chris Rock.
2009. Comic Chris Rock tries to do for African-American cosmetology what Bill Maher did for God in Religulous — embarking on an odyssey to educate himself on the big-business aspect of hair and all the sub-categories this entails.
Extras: Commentary by Rock and producer Nelson George.
Read the Full Review

Hunger

Street 2/16
Criterion, Drama, B.O. $0.2 million, $39.95 DVD or Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham.
2008. Brit video artist Steve McQueen’s justly acclaimed political prison drama focuses on the 1981 Maze Prison hunger strike masterminded by real-life Irish Republican Army prisoner Bobby Sands (Fassbender) amid his weakened final days.
Extras: McQueen recalls how the strike, which he says was vastly underreported by the Brit press, affected him during his youth; interviews with the cast and writer Enda Walsh and others; the BBC’s 1981 look at the strike; and an essay by critic Chris Darke.
Read the Full Review

Contempt (Le Mepris)

Street 2/16
Lionsgate, Drama, $39.99 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, Fritz Lang.
1963. Studio Canal appears to be challenging industry-standard Criterion to a game of HORSE when it comes to making arthouse classics look like opening night. Contempt is among the most gorgeous-looking European films of the era.
Extras: Jammed: an intro by film professor/historian Colin MacCabe, which packs an amazing amount of historical info into five minutes; and scads of look-backs clocking in at various length — some done at the time, some more recent.
Read the Full Review

The Music Man

Warner, Musical, $28.99 Blu-ray, ‘G.’
Stars Robert Preston, Shirley Jones, Buddie Hackett, Ron Howard.
1962. Warner Home Entertainment didn’t pull many muscles serving up the paltry extras on its Blu-ray of The Music Man, but this best picture Oscar nominee was shot in pristine Technirama, which means that, visually speaking, even lesser renderings invariably start a few gallops out of the gate.
Read the Full Review

The Perfect Furlough

Available Now via Amazon.com CreateSpace
Universal, Genre, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Tony Curtis, Linda Cristal, Janet Leigh.
1958. The art of director Blake Edwards ceases to exist without letterboxing. Even fluff such as The Perfect Furlough needs the widescreen treatment. Tony Curtis plays a corporal given a Paris furlough with an Argentine actress (Linda Cristal) to boost the morale of his unit. Once the story gets out of confined spaces, and Edwards gets to the countryside, the movie is a pleasant diversion.
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Bad Girls of Film Noir Vol. 2

Sony Pictures, Drama, $24.96 DVD, NR.
Stars Janis Carter, Cleo Moore, Ida Lupino
1946-56. Vol. 1’s companion amounts to a Cleo Moore film festival, though the one movie here the late buxom blonde isn’t in is best of the bunch. The set includes, in order of preference, Night Editor (1946), Over-Exposed (1956), Women's Prison (1955) and One Girl's Confession (1953).
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New on DVD: ‘A Serious Man,’ ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ and more …

A Serious Man

Street 2/9
Universal, Comedy, B.O. $9.2 million, $29.98 DVD, $36.98 Blu-ray, ‘R’ for language, some sexuality/nudity and brief violence.
Stars Michael Stuhlbarg, Sari Lennick, Richard Kind, Aaron Wolff.
2009. You know those days when you wish you could go back to bed and start over? Substitute “life” for days and you get the closest thing to a flawless movie the Coen Brothers have made since 1996’s Fargo — if not ever.
Extras: Three featurettes.
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Alice Through the Looking Glass

Street 2/9
Infinity, Musical, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Judi Rolin, Jack Palance, Agnes Moorehead, Nanette Fabray.
1966. With curiosity high about Tim Burton’s March 5 take on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, it makes sense to revive the NBC-TV musical version of Carroll’s Glass sequel. You can’t get too snarky over an oddity for the ages that casts Jimmy Durante as Humpty Dumpty.
Extras: Two entertaining short segments with co-producer Bob Wynn, who spins anecdotes about showbiz in general and this specific show — including worries about hiring Jack Palance because their Jabberwocky had previously decked a couple directors.
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Twelve Angry Men

Street 2/9
E1, Drama, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Robert Cummings, Franchot Tone, Edward Arnold.
1954. Three years before the famed theatrical feature, Reginald Rose’s Emmy-winning teleplay was performed live on CBS’s “Westinghouse Studio One.” This solo DVD release is the marketing standout of a superb 2008 boxed set ($59.98) that anthologized the series. Also included on this DVD is another Rose teleplay (for 1954’s An Almanac of Liberty), which was included on the same boxed set.
Extras: A cool 16-page booklet with lots of backgrounders.
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Bad Girls of Film Noir Vol. 1

Street 2/9
Sony Pictures, Drama, $29.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Lizabeth Scott, Evelyn Keyes, Gloria Grahame.
1950-53. Echoing Sony’s “Martini Movies” line, the lineup shrewdly combines film history with a luridly commercial hook, and deep-sea diving into the archives is always to be encouraged. In order of preference, the set includes The Glass Wall (1953), The Killer That Stalked New York (1950), Bad for Each Other (1953) and Two of a Kind (1951).
Extras: Two of a Kind’s Terry Moore interviewed today, plus a 1956 Blake Edwards teleplay called The Payoff.
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Welcome to Nollywood

IndiePix, Documentary, $19.95 DVD, NR.
2007. Considering that the Nigerian film industry didn’t exist until 1990, it’s remarkable that it was the world’s third largest at the time this rather raucous documentary was made. The interviewed filmmakers, like their peers, bankroll the movies out of their own pockets, which has dire lifestyle consequences if the result doesn’t meet public favor.
Extras: Commentary by writer/director Jamie Meltzer.
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New on DVD: ‘More Than a Game,’ ‘As It Is in Heaven’ and more …

Elvis

Prebook 2/2; Street 3/2
Shout! Factory, Drama, $19.97 DVD, NR.
Stars Kurt Russell, Shelley Winters, Season Hubley, Bing Russell.
1979. Boilerplate biopic, albeit very high-end, spanning 1952-69 (when Presley made his Las Vegas debut). John Carpenter directed the eventual Golden Globe nominee for ABC. Kurt Russell’s performance is exceptionally studied (if your subject is Elvis, it had better be), and his nailing of the singer’s mannerisms and speech patterns (uh-huh, uh-huh) still leaves me all shook up.
Extras: Commentary by Ronnie McDowell (who re-creates Elvis’ “voice” in the movie — and very well) and Presley cousin Edie Hand; minor featurettes. 
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More Than a Game

Street 2/2
Lionsgate, Documentary, B.O. $1 million, $27.98 DVD; ‘PG’ for brief mild
language and incidental smoking.
2009. Remarkable access again distinguishes a basketball documentary. This time, it’s championship high-school team St. Vincent-St. Mary, out of Akron, Ohio, in the early 2000s – whose standout player just happened to be current Cleveland Cavaliers superstar LeBron James.
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As It Is in Heaven

Street 2/2
Kino, Drama, $29.95 DVD, NR. In Swedish with English subtitles.
Stars Michael Nyqvist, Frida Hallgren, Helen Sjoholm.
2004. Seeking inner peace, a renowned symphony conductor (Michael Nyqvist) returns to the Swedish village where childhood bullies once pummeled him — only to be cajoled into leading a church choir of oddballs and upsetting a closed community’s rhythm. Enjoyable — though at times, this foreign-language Oscar nominee seems like another of those humanistic feel-good imports that Oscar frequently nominates for foreign-language feature in its sleep.
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Leonard Bernstein: Omnibus

E1, Music, $49.98 four-DVD set, NR.
1954-58. Here’s Lenny in the just-plain-folks mode that some inevitably found off-putting — but he still has charm to burn explaining Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, jazz, conducting, American musical comedy, “modern music,” Bach and opera. Remarkably restored and remastered from kinescopes by the Archive of American Television.
Extras: A CBS broadcast of Handel’s Messiah from Christmas Day 1955. Note, also, young Carol Burnett’s appearance on the musical comedy program.
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Ruggles of Red Gap

Available Now via Amazon.com CreateSpace
Universal, Comedy, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Charles Laughton, Zasu Pitts, Charles Ruggles, Mary Boland.
1935. This is director Leo McCarey’s gentle jewel, epochs overdue on DVD. For lead Charles Laughton, it kicked off one of the greatest single years any actor has ever enjoyed. The recent availability of this best picture Oscar nominee is a nice lead-in to Criterion’s much-awaited Feb. 23 release of McCarey’s never-more-topical 1937 tearjerker Make Way for Tomorrow.
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TCM Greatest Classic Films: Sci-fi Adventures

Street 2/2
Warner, Sci-Fi, $27.92 two-DVD set, NR.
Stars Kenneth Tobey, James Whitmore, Hugh Marlowe, Lois Maxwell.
1953-56. Another keenly packaged Turner Classic Movies four-pack offers The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Them!, World Without End and Satellite in the Sky. My, what large scales or pincers you have.
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