Pick of the week:  The Wrestler (10/10).  Definitely one of the best movies of the year.  Heartbreaking, powerful, moving and sublimely acted by Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei.  Watch this today.  (Rent it – you will want to buy it when the real edition comes out with actual bonus features.)

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The Wrestler

 Documentary of the week:  A Jihad For Love (9/10).  A truly remarkable movie about gay and lesbian muslims trying to reconcile their sexuality with their faith.  A fascinating character study of these men and women, the movie tells the story almost entirely through their words, and doesn’t feature a ton of obnoxious pundits.  Fantastic!

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A Jihad For Love

 TV series of the week:  Hawaii Five-O Sixth Season (6/10).  Still a classic, although it feels ridiculously dated by the intervening years.  Worth it just for the theme music.

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Hawaii Five-O Season Six

 Box set of the week:  Inside the Third Reich (9/10).  A very thorough four-disc box set that examines four facets of World War II and Nazi Germany.  The British bombing campaign against civilians during the late stages of the war, the German network of underground tunnels and factories, the early TV propaganda network run by the Nazis, and the best disc is an examination of the mind of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister under Hitler.

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Inside The Third Reich

 Kids pick of the week:  iCarly, Season One Volume Two (6/10):  What could easily be a very irritating show ends up being surprisingly entertaining.  Even my nine-year-old stepson enjoyed it, and he hates girly things!

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iCarly Season One Volume Two

 Blu-Ray of the week:  Arctic Tale (7/10):  Not a great movie, just a pretty good one.  But the Arctic landscape and the amazing camera work make this the kind of movie for which Blu-Ray was invented.

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Arctic Tale Blu-Ray

   The Caller (6/10):  Two terrific performances by Frank Langella and Elliott Gould make this mystery-thriller better than it ought to be.  Langella hires Gould, a private investigator, to follow him around knowing that he is about to be killed.

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The Caller   Marie And Bruce (7/10):  Julianne Moore and Matthew Broderick star in this movie about…a married couple…both of whom suck…and I can’t really describe it any better than that.  A stage play redone as a movie, the dialogue is crisp, witty and funny, but the film is so artsy I couldn’t really follow it.  All I know is I liked it.

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Marie And Bruce   America Betrayed (8/10):  An eye-opening muckraking documentary about the Army Corps of Engineers and the questionable business practices and corrupt policies that led to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina and the diastrous cleanup effort.

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America Betrayed

   House of the Sleeping Beauties (3/10):  A creepy, self-involved movie from Germany about an old man who pays a brothel owner to sleep next to beautiful naked young women who never wake up.  The concept is creepy, the voyeurism is disturbing, and the movie itself is depressing and boring.  Also, there is a fully-erect penis in the film, which is unusual for a movie.  But it appears to be a body double, and not actually that of the old man.  Which is weird.  But it sure doesn’t make the movie any better.

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House of the Sleeping Beauties

    Life of Ryan (3/10):  Another MTV show about another skateboarder.  This one is young, still in high school, and that is supposed to be enough to make the show interesting.  It isn’t.  Ryan Sheckler just isn’t charismatic enough to carry a reality show, and the script writers who write his narration for him (I am, of course, assuming he doesn’t write it himself) are terrible.

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Life of Ryan Complete Series

    Frost/Nixon:  Should be terrific.  I have seen the original interviews, and they are compelling and riveting.  In the hands of Ron Howard, this movie should be wonderful.

   Notorious:  No, not the Hitchcock movie.  I guess they figure people will have forgotten that one exists…this one is a biopic of the Notorious B.I.G., who did indeed have an interesting life and death.  Could be quite good.

   Personal Effects:  Michelle Pfeiffer and Kathy Bates make this sound promising…Ashton Kutcher makes it sound irritating…he has a relationship with Pfeiffer.  And I guess Bates does some stuff.  I do like Kathy Bates.

   Into the Blue 2:  The Reef:  The first one was an excuse to get Kate Bosworth into a bikini and make her a Maxim pinup girl.  She is not back for this instalment.  Which means this is just a sequel to a terrible, terrible movie.

   Hearts of War:  There seem to be a lot of occupied-country World War II movies of late.  Daryl Hannah and Roy Scheider and Colm Feore and Kim Coates star in this one.

   Caprica:  This is – no joke – a prequel to Battlestar Galactica.  Nerds, have at it!

Also out:

The Bastards
The Bodyguard
The Bodyguard 2
The Burrowers
Kicking The Dog
The Nature of Things
The Poker Club
The Stone Council
Toronto Stories

On Blu-Ray this week:

The Arrival
   The following bundles are amazon.com exclusives:
Blu-Ray Action Bundle Vol. 2 (Bulletproof Monk/Commando/Kiss of the Dragon)
Blu-Ray Action Bundle Vol. 3 (Broken Arrow/Entrapment/Rising Sun)
Blu-Ray Comedy Bundle Vol. 3 (Dodgeball/Dude, Where’s My Car?/Super Troopers)
Blu-Ray Comedy Bundle Vol. 4 (Little Miss Sunshine/Office Space/Napoleon Dynamite)
Blu-Ray Comic Book Hero Bundle (Daredevil/The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen/X-Men)
Blu-Ray Cult Classic Bundle (Edward Scissorhands/Donnie Darko/Boondock Saints)
Blu-Ray Epic Movie Bundle (Kingdom of Heaven/Cast Away/Master And Commander)
Blu-Ray Jason Statham Bundle (In The Name of the King/The Transporter/The Transporter 2)
Blu-Ray Michael Douglas Bundle (Wall Street/Romancing the Stone/Jewel of the Nile)
Blu-Ray War Bundle Vol. 4 (Men of Honor/Hart’s War/The Marine)
Frost/Nixon
Gary Moore and Friends:  One Night in Dublin – A Tribute to Phil Lynott
Genghis Khan:  To The Ends of the Earth and Sea
Hellraiser
Hellraiser (Puzzle Box edition)
Josh Groban: Awake Live
The Last Word
Linkin Park: Road to Revolution – Live at Milton Keynes
Michael Buble:  Caught in the Act
Notorious
Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy
The Showdown
Sin City
Styx:  One With Everything
The Wages of Fear
The Wrestler
X-Men
X2: X-Men United
X3: The Last Stand
X-Men Trilogy

Out next week:

Bride Wars
Hotel For Dogs
The Uninvited
JCVD
While She Was Out
Battle In Seattle
Legally Blondes
Grimm Love
Never Surrender
Ron White: Behavioural Problems
The Spectacular Spider-Man: Vol. 4
Sex and Lies in Sin City

On Blu-Ray next week:

Amazing Journeys
Bride Wars
Connected
The DaVinci Code Blu-Ray Gift Set
The DaVinci Code
Green Day:  Bullet in a Bible
Handel: Giulio Cesare
Handel: Orlando
Hotel For Dogs
In The Realm of the Senses
JCVD
The Reader
Star Trek – The Original Series:  Season One
Torroba: Luisa Fernanda
The Uninvited
What Doesn’t Kill You

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 6:56 am and is filed under New DVD releases. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.