In "Contagion" (Warner), Steven Soderbergh uses his camera lens as a kind of microscope to study the effects of a fictional pandemic. It's an eerie medical thriller with a very different atmosphere than the usual disaster thriller. DVD, Blu-ray and Digital Download. Videodrone's review is here.

 

"Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" (Sony), from producer/screenwrite​r Guillermo del Toro, is a remake of the 1973 haunted house TV movie, with Katie Holmes and Guy Pearce taking over the roles originally inhabited by Kim Darby and Jim Hutton. "Del Toro's additions to the script -- written alongside collaborator Matthew Robbins -- make the new iteration of the film more in line with his cinematic universe of dark fantasy, where creepy homes are explored by little kids wrapped up shroud-tight in the tenuous membrane between daylight reality and dimly lit nightmare," observes MSN film critic James Rocchi. "They also make it better." Troy Nixey directs this version, which adds a child into the mix of old dark house scares and creepy little creatures. The DVD includes three featurettes and the Blu-ray adds a gallery of conceptual art. The original 1973 telefilm is reviewed here.

 

"I Don't Know How She Does It" (Vivendi), starring Sarah Jessica Parker as a full-time professional and devoted mother spread thin, is "Toxic drool masquerading as a comedic paean to working moms," in the words of MSN film critic Kat Murphy. "Charm and chemistry don't enter into "I Don't Know How She Does It." No one but Kate Reddy lives in Parker-world; other actors are mostly props and extras in her character's lunatic soap opera." Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear co-star, but Murphy is more impressed with Christina Hendricks and Olivia Munn. On DVD and Blu-ray, with an interview featurette with author Allison Peason.

 

Chris Evans is a recklessly charismatic personal-injury lawyer and functioning drug addict who takes on a pharmaceutical company in "Puncture" (Millennium), a legal thriller based on a true story. Entertainment Weekly film critic Owen Gleiberman calls the film "a likable oddity: a rambling, low-budget 'Erin Brockovich' with a cokehead hero." Mark Kassen, who also directs the film with his brother Adam Kassen, plays his partner and friend, and Marhsall Bell, Vinessa Shaw, Brett Cullen and Jesse L. Martin co-star. On DVD and Blu-ray with no supplements. Also available via digital download.

 

View the trailer below, after the jump.

 

Indie release of the week:

Brendan Gleeson delivers one of the funniest performances of the year in "The Guard" (Sony), a wickedly offbeat black comedy of murder, smuggling and culture clash on the Irish coast. "I'm Irish, sir. Racism is part of my culture," he explains after a succession of impolitic comments at an HQ briefing with an American FBI agent (Don Cheadle) following a drug smuggling ring to rural Ireland. And sure enough, he's an unapologetic wild card in a cinematic world that channels Tarantino patter into British black comedy. John Michael McDonagh is the brother of Martin McDonagh, the creator of the inspired "In Bruges," and while he shares sense of humor, whimsy and dialogue dexterity, if not quite a command his filmmaking command. Still, it's enough to turn this into a skewed treat. Liam Cunningham is his more articulate superior and Mark Strong co-stars as a well-read thug keeping a low profile during the investigation.

 

The DVD and Blu-ray both feature commentary by writer/director John Michael McDonagh and actors Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle, a making-of featurette, director McDonagh's debut short film "The Second Death," deleted and extended scenes and outtakes among the supplements.

 

View the trailer below, after the jump.

 

Foreign Affairs:

Veteran French director Claude Miller collaborates with his son, Nathan Miller, on "I'm Glad My Mother is Alive" (Strand), the story of a trouble teenager (Vincent Rottiers) who searches for his birth mother, who gave him up for adoption as a toddler. When he finds her, his desire to reconnect becomes wrapped up in his anger and abandonment issues. New York Times film critic Stephen Holden praises the film, calling it "is anything but the clichéd fantasy of a blissful mother-child reunion. Although there are hints of joy once they reconnect, the wounds are too deep, and the characters too complex." In French with English subtitles.

 

Plus:

"Shark Night" (Universal) sends seven comely college kids to Louisiana lake that is filled with sharks. But of course! David R. Ellis of "Snakes on a Plane" fame executes this one and Sara Paxton, Dustin Milligan, Katharine McPhee and Donal Logue star.  Originally released in 3D but standard definition on home video. The DVD includes two featurettes, the Blu-ray adds two additional featurettes and a bonus digital copy.

 

"A Turtle's Tale: Sammy's Adventure" (Vivendi) is an animated film from Belgium arriving on DVD with a new title (it was also called "Sammy's Adventures: The Secret Passage" and "Around the World in 50 Years") and an American voice cast.

 

Jeremy Irons narrates "The Last Lions" (Virgil), a documentary that follows the life of a mother lioness and her three cubs surviving the African jungle.

 

"The Chateau Meroux" (Anchor Bay) is a romantic drama in California wine starring Marla Sokoloff, Barry Watson and Christopher Lloyd.

 

"Red: Werewolf Hunter" (Sony) reworks "Little Red Riding Hood" with Felicia Day in the title role. Billy Burke stars in "Removal" (Lionsgate), a thriller about murder and hallucinations.

 

"Don't Let Him In" (Image) is a horror film about a serial killer known as The Tree Surgeon and fresh blood in a cabin in the woods, and "The Undying" (MTI) is a ghost story with a doctor (Robin Weigert) who brings the spirit back to the physical world in the body of a dead patient.

 

View select trailers after the jump.

 

For more releases, see Hot Tips and Top Picks: DVDs and Blu-rays for January 3

 

"Mildred Pierce" (HBO) is less a remake than a new run at adapting the James M. Cain novel.

 

Previously made into a Hollywood classic (which earned Joan Crawford her only Oscar), it's been transformed into a five-hour mini-series by Todd Haynes, who casts Kate Winslet in the title role as the mother blindly devoted to her sneering, status-conscious daughter. There's none of the murder mystery plot that Hollywood added to the depression-era melodrama.

 

This is a character study in maternal sacrifice, a skewed success story rooted in guilt and damaged self-esteem and powered by willful blindness of her daughter Veda's (Evan Rachel Wood) evolution and her own compromises. She enables Veda's class snobbery and helps create the cold, manipulative human monster she becomes.

 

With the luxury of time, this series fills out Mildred's relationships to her husband (Brían F. O'Byrne), her husband's partner with whom she has an affair (James LeGros) and Monty Beragon (Guy Pearce), her broke aristocrat of a lover. And Haynes looks to the sepia tones of seventies Hollywood period pieces for the period recreation depression-era Los Angeles.

Nominated for an impressive 21 Emmy Awards, it took home two, for Outstanding Lead Actress Kate Winslet and Outstanding Supporting Actor Guy Pearce.

 

Salon.com TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz praised the show as the best TV of 2011. " If I see a richer, more perfect drama on TV this year, I’ll be surprised," he wrote in March. Let's just say there were no surprises by year's end as far as he was concerned. It's worth reading his reflections on the series, which he covered week by week in detailed essays, with an introduction and overview,  episodes 1 and 2, episode 3, and the finale (episodes 4 and 5). "I said it before and I’ll say it again: This miniseries is a masterpiece."

 

Available on DVD and Collector's Edition Blu-ray+DVD Set, both with commentary by director Haynes, co-writer Jon Raymond and production designer Mark Friedberg on two episodes. The Blu-ray edition also features five-minute "Inside the Episode" interviews with Todd Haynes for each episode and the 30-minute "The Making of Mildred Pierce," a well-made production documentary.

 

See the trailer below, after the jump.

 

For more releases, see Hot Tips and Top Picks: DVDs and Blu-rays for January 3

 

"Justified: The Complete Second Season" (Sony) confirms the FX original series as one of the best shows on TV.

 

U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) is still stuck in the Kentucky county he fled years before, this season reconnecting with his ex-wife (Natalie Zea) as he gets pulled into a complicated stand-off involving a family syndicate running the dope trade, meth, moonshine and other interests in Kentucky coal country. Margo Martindale won a well-deserved Emmy Award as the wily matriarch of the backwoods mafia taking on a corporate mining concern while her less disciplined sons (notably Jeremy Davies as a schemer with a grudge against Raylon) stir up trouble around the fringes of the business. What's a mother to do?

 

The series, adapted from an Elmore Leonard short story, is an exceedingly smart piece of pulp fiction with the rough edges of fascinating characters and storylines with dramatic blowback. Case in point: the journey of Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), Raylon's old friend turned criminal nemesis who begins the season trying to go straight with a job in the mines and finds himself drawn back to his strengths as the balance of power in the rural crime world shifts. Goggins' measured performance and controlled intensity makes Crowder the most dangerous character in the series, and the conviction of his principles and loyalties makes him a marvelous complement to Raylon, whose own loyalties and ideas of justice continue to get him in trouble. Timothy Olyphant's Raylon may be equal parts pulp cowboy and maverick TV cop, but he's the real deal with lived in flaws that tell us as much about the past he's trying to outrun as the man it turned him into.

 

13 episodes on three discs on both DVD and Blu-ray, with two featurettes, deleted scenes and outtakes. The Blu-ray features an exclusive roundtable discussion with the Elmore Leonard and the show runners, the 24-minute "Talking Shop." Needless to say, this is not to be watched until you've seen the season play out.

See a Season Two teaser below, after the jump.

For more releases, see Hot Tips and Top Picks: DVDs and Blu-rays for January 3

 

In "Contagion" (Warner), Steven Soderbergh uses his camera lens as a kind of microscope to study the effects of a fictional pandemic. It's as much social anthropology as medical thriller, with familiar faces playing out the roles of victims, medical professionals and bystanders, and Soderbergh holding it all at arm's length, clinical and removed as he observes with a mix of technical detail and swift efficiency. He covers a lot of objective information and subjective experience in 106 minutes.

 

While Soderbergh favors clinical detachment to human engagement, he has the good sense to offer Matt Damon as our everyman point-of-view, a husband and father who loses his wife and one of his children in the first bloom of the contagion and becomes what would in other circumstances appear zealously overprotective of his surviving daughter.

The rest of the fine cast -- notably Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Jennifer Ehle, even Jude Law's maverick blogger (with questionable motives) -- are more defined by their purposefulness and focus. Damon is as close as we get to the human equation and that gives the film a queasy atmosphere so removed from the melodrama and spectacle of the traditional disaster movie. We don't feel like we "know" these characters and as a result we are more focused on the big picture -- the isolation of the virus, the search for a cure / vaccine, the survival of society -- than the survival of individuals.

 

"Less hysterical than hushed, more numbing than terrifying, "Contagion" is closer to documentary -- an imagined record of how global citizenry might realistically react to monumental crisis," writes MSN film critic Kat Murphy. "Though far from a likeable movie, "Contagion" is admirable as a highly controlled, verging-on-Kubrickia​n exercise in directorial vision and style. What's most disturbing about this low-energy disaster movie is how tellingly it taps into America's current angst, the fear of a slow decline that can't be cured"

 

The DVD comes with the two-minute featurette "Contagion: How a Virus Changes the World," a bouncy, witty little animated primer on viral infection and pandemics, plus an Ultraviolet digital copy, for download and instant streaming. The Blu-ray adds two addition, somewhat more substantial featurettes: "False Comfort Zones: The Reality of Contagion," which takes a more serious approach to the idea of contagion, and "The Contagion Detectives," which talks about the real-life CDC and WHO workers. There's also a Combo Pack with Blu-ray, DVD and Ultraviolet editions and all the supplements mentioned.

 

For more releases, see Hot Tips and Top Picks: DVDs and Blu-rays for January 3

 

New Releases:

In "Contagion" (Warner), Steven Soderbergh uses his camera lens as a kind of microscope to study the effects of a fictional pandemic. It's an eerie medical thriller with a very different atmosphere than the usual disaster thriller. DVD, Blu-ray and Digital Download. Videodrone's review is here.

 

"Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" (Sony), from producer/screenwrite​r Guillermo del Toro, is a remake of the 1973 haunted house TV movie, with Katie Holmes and Guy Pearce. DVD and Blu-ray.

 

"I Don't Know How She Does It" (Vivendi), starring Sarah Jessica Parker as a full-time professional and devoted mother spread thin, is " Toxic drool masquerading as a comedic paean to working moms," in the words of MSN film critic Kat Murphy. DVD and Blu-ray.

 

Brendan Gleeson delivers one of the funniest performances of the year in "The Guard" (Sony), a wickedly offbeat black comedy of murder, smuggling and culture clash on the Irish coast. Videodrone's review is here. Chris Evans is a recklessly ambitious young lawyer who takes on a volatile case in "Puncture" (Millennium), a legal thriller based on a true story.

 

Also new this week: the nature-gone-feral thriller "Shark Night" (Universal) and the French drama "I'm Glad My Mother is Alive" (Strand) from Claude and Nathan Miller.

 

Browse the complete New Release Rack here

 

TV on DVD:

Kate Winslet is "Mildred Pierce" (HBO) in the HBO mini-series directed by Todd Haynes, who returns to the James M. Cain novel for a more faithful (if less dynamic) adaptation than the Hollywood classic with Joan Crawford. Salon.com TV critic proclaimed the series "a masterpiece" and named it the best of 2011 TV. On DVD and Blu-ray. Videodrone's review is here.

 

"Justified: The Complete Second Season" (Sony), starring Timothy Olyphant as maverick U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens, confirms the FX original series as one of the best shows on television, a smart piece of pulp fiction with the rough edges of fascinating characters and storylines with dramatic blowback. On DVD and Blu-ray. Videodrone's review is here.

 

"Royal Pains: Season Three, Volume One" (Universal) features 10 more episodes of house calls for concierge doctor Hank Lawson, who meets his estranged grandfather this time around, and "Man in a Suitcase: Set 2" (Acorn) features the final 15 episodes from the late-sixties British espionage drama starring Richard Bradford as a disgraced American spy turned free agent in the lucrative European market.

 

Plus: the short-lived 1999 British comedy series "Dr. Willoughby" (Acorn) with Joanna Lumley and the SyFy Original movie "Ice Quake" (Anchor Bay).

 

Flip through the TV on DVD Channel Guide here

 

Cool, Classic and Cult:

"X: The Unheard Music" (MVD), a lively, playfully-directed portrait of the defining L.A. punk band of the eighties, is one of the great rock docs of all time. It debuts on both DVD and Blu-ray for the film's 25th Anniversary, with supplements. Videodrone's review is here.

 

The controversial 1973 documentary "Swastika" (Kino) is a kind of autobiography of Adolph Hitler constructed from home movie footage shot by Eva Braun and propaganda films approved by Hitler himself.

 

All of the Cool, Classic and Cult here

 

Blu-ray Debuts:

"Pearl Jam Twenty" (Columbia), Cameron Crowe's portrait of the Seattle band, arrives on Blu-ray, along with the romantic drama "Serendipity" (Lionsgate) with John Cusak and Kate Beckinsale and "She's All That" (Lionsgate), a high school redo of "Pygmalian" with Rachael Leigh Cook and Freddie Prinze Jr.

 

For calendar of upcoming releases, click here

 

 

Oscar-nominated documentary producer and director and soundtrack archivist Nick Redman doesn't just know movies, he knows the business of movies.

 

Earlier this year, Redman and business partner Brian Jamieson (another industry veteran with impeccable qualifications) launched their own DVD label -- Twilight Time -- with a unique business model. Their releases, licensed from Fox and now Sony, are offered in limited run batches and sold exclusively through Screen Archives, the biggest distributor of CD soundtrack recordings in the U.S. Their first DVD releases arrived ---- and their debut Blu-ray releases, licensed from Sony's Columbia Picture catalogue, arrived just a few months ago.

 

Redman was interviewed for Home Theater Forum earlier this week and his comments were illuminating. Not just about the details of Twilight Time but on home video in general.

 

"Given how huge DVD was and how much money the studios were raking in hand over fist in the late 90s and early 2000s, right up to 2007-2008. I never thought the business would decline to the degree that they would, in a sense, prefer to outsource to a third party.  But that day has come and it’s come in spades, because I don’t see the situation ever reversing."

 

His comments on the pricing and distribution of DVD and Blu-ray is enlightening and the discussion on the board following the interview continues the debate on the future on physical media and the business of DVD and Blu-ray in the age of streaming video and digital download. 

"I think that home video, the physical media, is going to be like the soundtrack business became in the 90s, which is when the major labels got out of soundtracks, and the future of releases depended on niche labels to carry the entire weight of that small world.  And I think that DVD and Blu-ray particularly is going to devolve to a third party world while the studios concentrate much more on the digital future: downloading and streaming and beaming it into your house directly. Physical media is coming to an end, which is why we called the label Twilight Time. I mean that was the joke: it’s Twilight Time.  The sun is setting on the world of physical media.  This is what it’s about.  This is the last go-round--this is the end of home video as we have known it up to now."

Read the entire interview and the discussion at Home Theater Forum here.

 

Coming on Blu-ray from Twilight Time in the upcoming months: "Picnic," "Pal Joey," "Bell, Book and Candle," "Bite the Bullet," "Major Dundee," and "The Big Heat."

 

For more releases, see Hot Tips and Top Picks: DVDs and Blu-rays for December 27

 

The acclaimed "Buck" (IFC) is a documentary profile of Buck Brannaman, the real-life horse trainer who inspired "The Horse Whisperer." The film is "beautiful, thoughtful and a look inside a world few of us know," observes MSN film critic James Rocchi, but ultimately the film "works less as a discussion of how to ride and more as a discussion of how to live." Features commentary by the filmmakers with Buck Brannaman and deleted scenes.

 

There are Christmas horror movies and Christmas comedies but no Christmas film as weird as "Santa Claus" (VCI), the 1959 Rene Cardona-directed holiday fantasy where Santa Claus takes on the devil. That's right, horns and everything. K. Gordon Murray imported this oddity from Mexico, dubbed it into English and ran it as a family matinee for unsuspecting kids. VCI's Blu-ray features both the American and original Mexican versions of the film, along with commentary by K. Gordon Murray historian Daniel Griffith, a making-of featurette and other supplements.

 

"The Moon in the Gutter" (Cinema Libre), Jean-Jacques Beineix's follow-up to "Diva," is a neo-noir starring Gérard Depardieu and Nastassja Kinski. Film critic Roger Ebert described the film as "a sumptuous, dazzlingly photographed melodrama that becomes, alas, relentlessly boring" in his 1983 review. The Blu-ray debut features "Mr. Michel's Dog," the debut short film from Jean-Jacques Beineix, as well as a video interview with Jean-Jacques Beineix conducted by Tim Rhys and a still gallery.

 

For more releases, see Hot Tips and Top Picks: DVDs and Blu-rays for December 27