A somewhat pedestrian and air-quote small story of blue-collar despair, familial fracturing and choking uncertainty, writer-director So Yong Kim’s mastery of tone and elements turns For Ellen into a thing of tender, forlorn beauty. Anchored by a strong performance from Paul Dano, this wonderfully wrought character study is a spare, intimate treat that should find welcome reception with arthouse audiences.

Struggling singer-songwriter Joby Taylor (Dano, quite good) takes a break from life on the road — and rather purposefully leaves behind girlfriend Susan (Jena Malone) — to come in and try to amicably settle his impending divorce from wife Claire (Margarita Levieva), whom he has not seen in a very long time. Joby’s willing and ready to sign off on the house and other assets, but is distraught to learn that Claire does not want him to have any visitation rights to Ellen (Shaylena Mandigo), their six-year-old daughter that he long ago abandoned. As his buttoned-up lawyer, Fred (a bearded Jon Heder), tries to negotiate matters, Joby reflects on whether he can really walk away from Ellen for good.

Korean-American Kim, born in Pusan, South Korea but raised in Los Angeles, has a deft touch with alienation expressed through environmental chilliness. This was especially true of In Between Days, her semi-autobiographical feature debut, which in 2006 picked up a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and it remains true here. Working with cinematographer Reed Morano, Kim crafts a movie whose haunting, beautifully captured wintry landscapes are a physical stand-in for the roiling, distressed and self-destructive inner feelings of Joby.

Kim’s works also frequently touch upon issues of parental separation and abandonment, and it’s her comfort level and communicative skill with this theme that make Joby’s eventual visit with Ellen so arresting. Spanning more than 25 minutes, this sequence between Dano and the young Mandigo is masterfully orchestrated — almost a short film unto itself, full of carefully dosed regret, pain, ambivalence. Plenty of other films, and filmmakers, could (and have) tread the same terrain Kim does in For Ellen. She makes it personal, however, which — combined with her shrewd powers of observance, reservoir of passion for her characters, and refusal to indulge in a pat or “correct” conclusion — make her movie something special.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, For Ellen comes to DVD presented in a nice 1.78:1 widescreen transfer, alongside a 5.1 Dolby digital audio track that more than adequately handles the movie’s spare aural design. The only bonus feature, unfortunately, is a very short, three-minute behind-the-scenes featurette that seems almost as concerned as touting the sponsor of the movie’s Tribeca Film Festival premiere, American Express, as imparting much of consequence about Kim’s work. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; if brick-and-mortar retailers are still your thing, by all means do that. B+ (Movie) D+ (Disc)

Hey, do you feel like you want to read words about the new Star Wars fandom documentary Jedi Junkies, Katy Perry, Jean-Claude Van Damme, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and more? Then my latest Blu-ray/DVD column, over at ShockYa, is right up your alley. Click here for the read; commemorative patch sold separately.

In David Lynch‘s trippy, 1997 neo-noir psychological thriller Lost Highway, Bill Pullman’s Fred Madison explains his aversion to video cameras thusly: “I like to remember things my own way.” When pressed for a further explanation, he offers, “How I remembered them — not necessarily the way they happened.” For documentary director Ross McElwee — whose films have almost always been reflexively autobiographical, delving into his familial relationships and ancestral connections — it’s almost the opposite. His memories have, for years, been filtered through first his photographs and writings, and then his ever-present camera lens, to the point that even he begins to question how real, or accurate, some of his memories actually are.

The vehicle for this reflection is the beguiling, homespun Photographic Memory, triggered by some early-onset empty nest syndrome and domestic struggles. Attempting to make peace with the surliness, technological addiction and emotional waywardness of his 20-year-old son, McElwee decides to retrace some of his own footsteps from when he was around the same age, and spent a year abroad in France. The result is a delicate, mesmeric rumination on family, memory, the necessary growing pains of young adulthood, and the sloping banks of generational chasm that will always exist.

We first glimpse Adrian McElwee as a youngster, cavorting about with his younger sister. McElwee frequently filmed his kids growing up, and they used to love it. Now, despite his interest in becoming a filmmaker and/or graphic artist, Adrian is tired of his father’s looming lens; he’d rather hang out with friends, blow off school, smoke a bit of pot and film himself doing extreme ski tricks. Narrating his frustration, McElwee tries to channel and focus his son’s energies, while also dolefully noting certain behavioral similarities to his own adolescent wanderings.

McElwee deftly intercuts this story — of all the poking, prodding, hoping and cajoling attached to his son — with his own journey back in time, and a set of conflicted emotions that arise. Traveling back to St. Quay-Portrieux in Brittany, France, for the first time in almost four decades, the filmmaker tries to track down his first employer, a photographer named Maurice, as well as Maud, a woman with whom he had a brief but memorable romantic liaison.

On the surface Photographic Memory may sound simple, or irretrievably blinkered and personal, but McElwee has aself-awareness, sharp sense of observation and droll wit to boot that easily locates the universality of the material. McElwee’s film is honest about the sort of parenting mistakes born of trying to protect his son from himself, as well as wry articulations about the deep but tested roots of unconditional love (“Teenagers often don’t realize how protected they are from strangulation by the memories of smaller versions of themselves”).

If all that sounds a little too ethereal, Photographic Memory is also just a great little travelogue mystery, with the filmmaker subject’s twangy, Carolina-infused French, in his efforts to find Maurice and Maud, matching the uniquely accented sheer entertainment value of Werner Herzog’s nonfiction self-narration. So does McElwee locate these people from his past? Or are his memories of their time together, and reasons for parting, at all reliable? And what lessons might he learn from all of this travel in dealing with his son? McElwee makes movies to assay the human condition and try to sort things out for himself. This is another good one, full of both answers and questions, feelings and wonder. It shares many features in common with his previous efforts, and is of a certain piece with those movies, but also its own thing — and easily accessible for viewers with no memory or knowledge of McElwee’s canon.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Photographic Memory comes to DVD in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 audio track. Apart from a photo gallery and a bit of touting for other of McElwee’s films, there aren’t any other extras here. Given the hearty degree of on-sleeve authorial presence in the movie, further interview material would really (mostly) be kind of pointless. Still, some small measure of “update” on Adrian would be nice. To purchase the DVD via First Run Features, click here; if Amazon is your thing, meanwhile, click here. B+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)

A vivid and surprisingly emotive exploration of fashion modeling and the refracted reality and cost of the economic opportunities it presents for prepubescent Eastern European girls in particular, the spare but rather superb documentary Girl Model walks a tight-rope adjacent to exploitation, peering down into its caverns, and asking uneasy questions about whether the alternatives for so many young girls are really that much better.



Narrowly focused in savvy fashion, Girl Model interweaves the stories of two subjects who only briefly cross paths. There’s Ashley Arbaugh, an early-30s ex-model turned scout who scours rural Russian open casting calls looking for fresh faces, and one of her discoveries — Nadya Vall (above), a skinny, 13-year-old from a small Siberian town who describes herself as a “gray mouse,” and simple country girl.

Ashley specializes in finding models for the Japanese market (“not too tall, and young is important”), so after she taps Nadya and sends off some snapshots of her for her bosses’ approval, the young girl prepares for a trip alone to Tokyo, where a strict contract that limits her body measurements is supposed to guarantee her at least two jobs and $8,000. Speaking of course no Japanese and only a little English, Nadya (who wears a Teletubbies T-shirt to a going-away party thrown by her parents) is shy and naïve and homesick — all the things one expects of a provincial child. As her optimism about being able to rescue her family from their economic hardship begins to flicker and fade, Nadya’s dreams are contrasted with Ashley’s deep-seated ambivalence about the industry.

Directors David Redmon and Ashley Sabin occasionally intercede on Nadya’s behalf (helping bridge a language divide in brokering a ticket adjustment, and at one point loaning her a cell phone to call home), but they mostly just stand back, observe and shoot. On-screen questions are few and far between, and the film eschews traditional sit-down interviews, which likely wouldn’t have been as effective with Nadya anyway. Ashley, meanwhile, is guileless, and her complicated relationship with the fashion industry — something stirringly communicated through the use of self-shot video from her own heyday, in the late 1990s — gives Girl Model both a charged, unsettled quality and a deep vulnerability that runs parallel to Nadya’s story.

The cumulative effect of this masterful interweaving is a sparse, streamlined movie (running only 77 minutes) that is expressive without being heavy-handed. Girl Model is a film that comes to its provocation honestly and intellectually, without showiness or false pretense. There’s a surprising sense of tension that bubbles to the surface, over Nadya’s failure to book jobs and rising debt, and Ashley’s intimations and speculation about the slippery slope between underage modeling and prostitution. Perhaps darkest of all, however, Girl Model doesn’t preach or offer up easy advocacy. One of the Russian talent brokers talks somewhat creepily about the importance of finding girls when they are extremely young, but later shares with Ashley how he endeavors to scare girls straight and set them on a path of financial security. He seems sincere, leaving the viewer to ask their own tough questions about what constitutes smart and safe choices for those with frequently so little other opportunity for socioeconomic advancement.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Girl Model comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, featuring a somewhat thin 2.0 audio track. The movie’s trailer and eight extra deleted scenes constitute its supplemental features slate. The latter further sketch out things with both Ashley and Nadya, but aren’t wildly revelatory; I would have preferred interview material with Redmon and Sabin, or something on the original score contributed by Matthew Dougherty and Eric Taxier. To order the DVD via First Run Features, click here; or, if Amazon is your thing, by all means, click here. B+ (Movie) B (Disc)

British import Hollow cashes in on the found footage revival kicked off at least in part by 2009’s Paranormal Activity, telling the story of a quartet of friends who suffer a dark turn of events in a remote village in Suffolk, England that’s been haunted for centuries by a local legend. Solid, largely naturalistic performances and a nice technical package help offset a story whose bump-in-the-night eerieness reaches a certain level of diminishing return long before the end of its 95-minute running time, rendering Hollow a marginal recommendation for hardcore genre enthusiasts.

On holiday, Emma (Emily Plumtree) and James (Sam Stockman), freshly engaged, pile into their car with Scott (Matt Stokoe), Emma’s best friend since childhood. They pick up Lynne (Jessica Ellerby), Scott’s new-ish girlfriend, and head off to a countryside cabin near Emma’s adolescent home. Nearby, there’s a giant, twisted, old tree with an ominous hollow, which is said to be the resting place of a great evil. Emma recounts stories of warning from her family members, but a night of debauched partying leaves them out near the tree. They get spooked, some weird things happen, and when they try to leave the next night, things go even further sideways.

A world premiere at last year’s Fantasia Film Festival, Hollow isn’t a gory or effects-driven movie; it’s horror only in the broadest sense, rooted to the psychological underpinnings of the characters and maybe a pervasive human fear of the dark. (At home, you’re cheating yourself if you watch with the lights on.) Matthew Holt’s script opts to focus more on the characters’ relationships more than the legend of the place, which supposedly wills young couples to suicide. For point of comparison, Hollow is really more The Blair Witch Project than Paranormal Activity. And that’s fine. One wishes the movie had actually rooted down into personal matters even a little more, actually, because the fissures of Emma’s relationship with James, who suffers a wandering eye, seem to get a very surface-type treatment, and even more could have been done to dig down into the marrow of Scott’s romantic despair over seeing his unrequited crush slip away.

Director Michael Axelgaard does a generally good job of framing the action in a way that doesn’t elicit much irritation about the camera’s necessary, passed-around omnipresence. And he certainly extracts believably relaxed performances from his cast; Ellerby and Stokoe are the best, but no one embarrasses themselves, even if Plumtree’s character gets painted into something of a corner. Josh MacDonald and Evan Kelly’s similarly low-budget The Corridor, though, handled unraveling mental states much better. Hollow is content to unfold as an exercise in style when its conceit actually begs for even more exploration of its characters.

Then there’s the problematic finale, too, which doesn’t really extend the scares or spookiness quite as much as one would like. The last reel, marked by lots of yelling and narrative water-treading, represents a fumbled opportunity. Part of this is owing to the found-footage conceit itself, and the camera’s separation from a certain character. But a more innovative and active treatment, or even an authoritative bookend, would have benefited this material, and made Hollow feel a bit less hollow.

Housed in a regular Blu-ray snap-case in turn stored in a nice, vertical-loading complementary cardboard slipcover, Hollow comes to Stateside home video in a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, with a 16×9 1080p HD transfer and DTS-HS 5.1 and 2.0 master audio tracks. The picture is fairly solid given the narrative framing, with no issues with artifacting or edge enhancement and consistent colors throughout, at least until a bit of dodginess with the blacks of the movie’s last 20-plus minutes. A brief behind-the-scenes featurette is the set’s sole supplemental feature, in which the cast talk about the difficulty of ditching their cell phones for the shoot. A more ambitious release could have explored the found footage phenomenon, either with Axelgaard or just a bit more broadly; still, the multiple formats and nice packaging make this worthy of a pick-up for diehard genre collectors. To purchase the movie via Half, click here; if Amazon is your thing, meanwhile, click here. C+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)

In advance of tomorrow’s review of the fifth installment in the Die Hard franchise, A Good Day to Die Hard, here’s a look at the series’ new Blu-ray release, which includes a brand new feature-length documentary with loads of great anecdotes. Oh, I did forget to mention one tidbit: 17 — that’s the number of different fresh-to-soiled wife-beaters used for Bruce Willis’ character in the original movie. Otherwise, the full read is over at ShockYa, so click here if interested.

In my latest spin around DVD and Blu-ray releases over at ShockYa, I take a gander at the latest installment in the Paranormal Activity franchise, the latest film from budding auteur Ry Russo-Young, Coldplay’s 2012 concert documentary, The Amazing World of Gumball, and more. It’s a fairly quick and breezy read, so trip on over to ShockYa for a look.

An artful, perceptive look at human desire’s ability to arrive in sudden, rolling fashion, like a tidal swell, Nobody Walks is a delicate but somewhat mesmeric arthouse bauble from director Ry Russo-Young and co-writer Lena Dunham, who’s shot to popularity with HBO’s Girls. The winner of a special jury prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the movie is a fragile but rewarding slice of “Silver Lake cinema,” which is to say a fairly invigorating breath of fresh air for cineastes and something a bit too precious by half for audiences steeped in more melodramatic reward.

Decamping from New York, 23-year-old visual artist Martine (Olivia Thirlby) holes up in a guest house of the aforementioned trendy hilly community of Los Angeles. As a favor to his wife, Julie (Rosemarie DeWitt), sound editor Peter (John Krasinski) agrees to help Martine, the friend of a family friend, and the two set about concocting Lynchian soundscapes for her art installation film. Martine’s arrival brings changes, though. Julie and Peter have a blended family, and while 16-year-old daughter Kolt (India Ennenga, quite good), from Julie’s first husband Leroy (Dylan McDermott), is nursing a crush on David (Rhys Wakefield), Peter’s older assistant, David is also busy bedding Martine. As Peter’s own feelings for Martine surge, meanwhile, Julie, a pyschologist, deals with the possibly misplaced affections of a patient, Billy (Justin Kirk).

Russo-Young and Dunham have a nice rapport, and their sensibilities fit hand-in-glove. The latter’s skill with pin-prick dialogue (evident in Billy’s sessions with Julie) gives the movie some pleasant pop, but Martine’s backstory arrives by way of oblique hints rather than strenuously telegraphed motivations. This results in a movie that kind of leads from its back foot. While a story strand involving Kolt’s study of Italian with a tutor is less successful, and evidence of the piece’s ornamental expressionism, Nobody Walks (the “in L.A.” is understood) is predominantly a film of acutely observed moments of human longing and failing.

In swatches of story, tone and mood, Nobody Walks fitfully recalls other SoCal works like How to Cheat, Garden Party, Laurel Canyon and even Greenberg, and director of photography Christopher Blauvelt crafts a soft visual template that, with stirring original music by Fall on Your Sword, hints at melancholic fumbling and reinvention. Russo-Young (the rather striking You Won’t Miss Me, a 2009 collaboration with Stella Schnabel) again proves herself a stellar chronicler of the damages young people often self-inflict despite better judgments.

If its ending is a bit too pat — Russo-Young pulls an early ripcord in shrugging fashion, opting for conventional-leaning wrap-up when ambiguity would have seemingly served the story more truly — it’s to its considerable credit that Nobody Walks doesn’t unfold in a world where women are merely subject to the whims of sexual advance, but instead have their own conflicted feelings and desires. Reflected uncertainty doesn’t always make for the most comforting cinematic landscape, but here it’s a lovingly expressed inconvenient truth.

Housed in a regular Blu-ray case, Nobody Walks comes to the format on a dual-layer disc presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a six-channel DTS-HD master audio track. In addition to the movie’s trailer, it comes with a two-minute deleted scene, over 30 minutes of interview material and, the cool little standout, the full, five-minute version of Martine’s own short film. To purchase the Blu-ray via Half, click here; if Amazon is still your thing, click here. B- (Movie) B+ (Disc)

A sweet-natured and loose-limbed coming-of-age tale that delivers by way of its smart, sympathetic performances and an accumulation of telling details, actor Matthew Lillard’s directorial debut, Fat Kid Rules the World, tells a simple and familiar story, but one with not inconsiderable emotional purchase.

Sad-sack Seattle seventeen-year-old Troy Billings (Jacob Wysocki, of Terri) is overweight and suicidal — seemingly always at odds with his brother and emotionally conflicted ex-Marine father (Billy Campbell, delivering fine work). After Troy is saved from his darker impulses by Marcus (Matt O’Leary, of Natural Selection), a scruffy, talkative high school dropout and would-be musician, the two outcasts strike up an unlikely friendship. Despite the fact that Troy’s a complete musical novice, Marcus taps him to be his drummer in a new punk band, which helps Troy’s self-esteem blossom but also further complicates his relationship with his dad.

A premiere and audience award winner at the 2012 South by Southwest Film Festival, Fat Kid Rules the World definitely benefits from author Kellly Going’s award-winning source material — it feels rooted in the ways that only adaptations usually are — and Lillard has an obvious, in-the-bones affinity for his characters. And while it leans toward comedy, the movie locates an endearing sweet spot between uplift and melancholy, in a manner not unlike Abe Sylvia’s Dirty Girl, which also threw together two misfit characters. It’s frank about adolescence, and doesn’t try to sugarcoat the difficulties of growing up different (fat, or poor), and in less than ideal circumstances. Yet it also doesn’t dwell solely and myopically upon humiliation. It also allows for bursts of daydream fantasy from Troy, which give the movie a wider perspective.

The result is a movie of considerably rich, if familiar, feeling. Wysocki and O’Leary have a nice rapport. The former sometimes errs on the side of underplaying these, but is always emotionally on point and in the moment. O’Leary, meanwhile, has a wild, caffeinated energy, but also captures the say-anything, weather vane loquaciousness of a natural-born bullshitter. Peas in a pod these guys are not. Yet Lillard’s movie reminds viewers that the world is richer for all our differences.

Housed in an eco-friendly plastic Amaray case, Fat Kid Rules the World comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with chapter stops and a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track. Its main menu is motion-activated, while its sub-menus are static. Apart from a copy of the movie’s trailer, the sole supplemental material comes by way of a collection of five short behind-the-scenes featurettes totaling around 20 minutes. Some of the on-set footage is nice (as is a bit of musical performance, and an excised cameo with Lillard), but one wishes there was a lengthier and more substantive interview chat with Lillard, to really root down into his connection to the material and reasons for wanting to make it his feature directorial debut. Even on low-budget independent movies, it’s forethought of this kind that gives home video releases that special extra value. Nonetheless, to purchase the DVD via Half, click here; if Amazon is your thing, meanwhile, click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)

Award-winning filmmaker Yung Chang drew praise for 2007’s Up the Yangtze, which focused on the many socioeconomically disadvantaged people impacted by the building of the massive Three Gorges Dam in Hubei. With his latest movie, he returns to China for another unexpectedly lyrical snapshot of that country’s rapidly changing economic landscape. A nonfiction look at the recruitment and training of young boxers for future hopeful Olympic glory, China Heavyweight is an unadorned, guileless work that starts slowly but accrues a deeper emotional hold and resonance as it winds on.

In not dissimilar fashion from Pelotero: Ballplayer, a recent documentary which examined teenage baseball prospects in the Dominican Republic, Chang’s film illustrates how sports are still one of the most widely pursued avenues out of outright familial poverty or working-class despair. The director follows Qi Moxiang, a former boxing star turned state coach, as he and his minions scour impoverished villages and small family farms across the rural Sichuan province, talking up the nobility of their sport, and the possibilities it brings. With a stable of young talent that makes it through local tournaments, Coach Qi and others then begin their years of work at national training centers, trying to sharpen teenage uncertainty and tribulation into resolve.

There’s a sort of studiously incurious tone and emotional remove to China Heavyweight that takes some time with which to become accustomed. This initially marks the movie as something of a state-sanctioned exercise in propagandistic celebration. Slowly, though, Chang reveals himself to be not a pliant cheerleader, but rather a shrewdly quiet observer. Through the movie, one gets a crystal-clear sense of China’s plan of stoked national pride; their plodding, rung-by-rung focus on provincial tournaments reminds one of videogame levels that must be cleared in order to advance to the next section of play.

And as much physical training as there obviously is, the approach of Coach Qi and his colleagues is also heavily invested in psychology, and laden with metaphor and simile. One trainer stresses that entering the ring isn’t like going to gallows, but is instead like music. “It’s your concert,” he says. Later, the same trainer compares his job to molding clay into pottery, and says that after his discovery and five years of such work his pupils are finally ready to move on to be fired, stamped and glazed.

These pupils, though, are of course teenagers, and so they’re both headstrong and fragile in all the normal ways one might expect. For some, this means there’s a strong desire to turn professional and start making money (not really the goal of this program, from the government’s perspective), even if that runs counter to adult advice. For others, it means a declining interest in boxing overall. China Heavyweight juggles all of these different personal stories — including Coach Qi planning a return to the ring — in beautiful fashion.

It certainly helps that the film is so cinematically lush. Through evocative framing and editing, Chang and director of photography Sun Shaoguang construct a document whose astute social commentary lies as much in its visual capture and rendering as its actual narrative inquiry. China is a land of both old and new, and the balanced tension between these two poles is in abundance almost everywhere, but especially in the searching eyes and souls of its young. Boxing — banned by Chairman Mao in 1959 for its violence and American roots, and only restored less than 25 years ago — may not be an escape or safe haven for most of these kids. But such widescale training programs opens minds to ideas and avenues other than just national glory.

Housed in a clear plastic Amaray case with a double-color insert sleeve, China Heavyweight comes to DVD in a nice HD transfer, enhanced for 16×9 widescreen viewing, with optional English and traditional Chinese subtitles. In addition to chapter stops and its theatrical trailer, the release also comes with more than 30 minutes of excised scenes, which offer up more interview and fight footage. For more information, click here to visit Zeitgeist Films’ website. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)

Nobody can push buttons of exasperation and pull levers of hair-trigger emotional reaction quite like family — those folks who know all of the faces of the past you’ve tried to shake and shed. That truth is borne out in Julie Delpy’s witty, winning new comedy of relationships and culture-clash, 2 Days in New York. A nominal follow-up to 2007’s 2 Days in Paris, in which Delpy played the same character with a different love interest, this rather delightful romp eschews complicated plotting to instead luxuriate in and connect via a fresh, fun, wound-up energy all its own.

French-born photographer and artist Marion (Delpy) lives comfortably with her radio talk show host boyfriend Mingus (Chris Rock) and their two children from previous relationships. But on the eve of a big show — the centerpiece of which is a conceptual piece in which she’s offering up her soul for sale, for $10,000 — Marion gets plenty of extra stress when her family arrives for a visit. This includes her over-sexed sister Rose (Alexia Landau); her sister’s outrageous, weed-obsessed boyfriend Manu (Alex Nahon), also one of Marion’s exes; and her merrily bizarre and gregarious father (Albert Delpy), who thinks showers “deplete the immune system.” Falling back into old patterns, Marion starts spinning out of control, and this new glimpse of craziness puts Mingus further on edge.

Delpy collaborated on the script with Landeau and Nahon — each of whom also reprise their characters from Paris — and it’s clear that their offscreen rapport informs much of the rapid-fire bickering and gussied-up misunderstanding that fuels the movie’s comedy. Yet Delpy’s worldview and tone — neurotic, but knowing — also echo a female Woody Allen by way of Lina Wertmüller, funky and funny without tipping over into tedium or speechifying. Much of this balancing act owes to her directorial style, which is light and playful throughout, incorporating photo montages and a bouncy score of her own composition.

The pairing of Rock and Delpy is also a true delight. It gives Rock a chance to stretch a bit and do something different while also playing to his verbal strengths. Mostly, though, 2 Days in New York simply provides a showcase for the unexpected mash-up of Rock and Delpy’s respective styles and rhythms. It’s the same premise, basically, behind Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell‘s casting in Bewitched, except that Delpy’s loose-limbed, lived-in movie is actually funny. 2 Days with this brood — in addition to what’s probably the year’s most inspired cameo appearance — will put a smile on one’s face.

Housed in a regular Blu-ray case, 2 Days in New York comes to the format via an AVC-encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a DTS-HD 5.1 audio track that more than adequately handles the film’s fairly straightforward aural demands. Its supplemental extras include a five-minute EPK-type piece which intersperses interview footage with clips from the movie, the film’s original theatrical trailer, and a collection of interviews with Landeau, Nahon, Rock and the Delpys from the movie’s Sundance Festival presentation. There are also two separate interviews with Rock and Delpy, the latter of which — at 22 minutes — is the disc’s crown jewel, spanning casting inspiration to production. To purchase the Blu-ray via Half, click here. Or if brick-and-mortar retail is still your thing, by all means, rock on with your bad self. B (Movie) B (Disc)

Middling animation and an erratic tone weigh down director Oskar Jonasson’s Thor: Legend of the Magical Hammer, a so-so family offering that offers up a different spin on the tale of the headstrong son of Norse god Odin.

Originally titled Legends of Valhalla, this foreign-produced effort finds village blacksmith Thor, empowered by a talking hammer that falls from the sky, battling an evil Ice Queen and her army of vicious giants threatening his village. The additional rub? Said Ice Queen has kidnapped Thor’s mother… so it’s personal as well!

The animation here leans toward that of the Aardman variety, but without as much skillful shading or nuance. Likewise, Fridrik Erlingsson’s screenplay seems like a catch-all grab-bag, informed as much by Shrek-style rude humor and attention-deficit-disorder-dictated action sequences as any of the mythological underpinnings of its actual narrative. Brisk (it clocks in at just over 80 minutes, inclusive of credits) but throwaway entertainment, this Thor makes Kenneth Branagh’s recent version look like the high art its visual vocabulary and framing wanted it to be; only those in need of some video babysitting need apply.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a complementary cardboard slipcover with raised lettering, Thor: Legend of the Magical Hammer comes to DVD presented in letterboxed widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 English language audio track. While the transfer is solid and free of any artifacting or edge enhancement issues, there are no supplemental bonus features included herein. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s website. C- (Movie) D (Disc)

Concert doc meets engaging travelogue in the form of Ike & Tina: On the Road 1971-72, a nonfiction snapshot of musical duo Ike and Tina Turner as told from the perspective of legendary rock ‘n’ roll photographer Bob Gruen and his wife Nadya, who toured with them early during the decade that fashion forgot. In addition to awesome renditions of many of Ike and Tina’s best known tunes, this brisk but captivating movie also affords viewers a glimpse of the group at work in the recording studio, practicing their dance routines, goofing around in airports and even primping their ‘dos.

The complete track listing, for those interested, charts “River Deep, Mountain High,” “Pick Me Up (Take Me Where Your Home Is),” “Oh Devil,” “Gulf Coast Blues,” a wild version of “Shake a Tail Feather,” “There Was a Time,” “Heard It Through the Grapevine,” “Respect” (which now seems more than a little ironic in duet), “A Love Like Yours (Don’t Come Knockin’ Every Day)” (ditto), “Under the Weather,” “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” “Walking the Dog,” “You’ve Got to Get That Feeling,” “Try a Little Tenderness,” a characteristically rollicking “Proud Mary,” “I Smell Trouble,” “Shine” and “I Want To Take You Higher.”

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Ike & Tina: On the Road 1971-72 comes to DVD on a region-free disc. Lacking supplemental features, there’s no grand contextualization here for Turner newbies, unfortunately — nor a honest reckoning about the spousal battering that would explode their union. This is still a nice showcase for the music itself, however. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) C- (Disc)

A solidly constructed little character study of dark romantic bloom commingled with slipping knot mental instability, The Good Doctor finds producer-star Orlando Bloom once again attempting to strike out and proactively define a screen personality separate and distinct from the blockbuster pin-up status conferred upon him by the Pirates of the Caribbean and The Lord of the Rings movies. The scale and stakes are much smaller than in something like The Talented Mr. Ripley (and the behavioral urges somewhat different as well), but director Lance Daly (Kisses) capably pulls strings in a manner that elicits tension and also elucidates the impulses of obsession.



Bloom stars as Dr. Martin Blake, an ambitious but insecure young doctor in the early days of his residency. Already nervous about making a good impression on his supervisor and would-be mentor, Dr. Waylans (Rob Morrow), and concerned with the impact of a minor slip-up on his chances at an end-of-year fellowship, Martin lives each day with an electrical storm of anxiety and quiet contempt for others raging in his head. He looks down his nose at Jimmy (Michael Peña), an admittedly less-than-professional orderly, and takes disproportionate offense at the slights of Theresa (Taraji P. Henson), a nurse whom he feels doesn’t show him the proper deference and respect.

When a teenage patient, Diane (Riley Keough), is admitted with a relatively minor kidney infection, Martin gains self-esteem from aiding in her recovery, and strikes up a friendship with her. Martin’s interest soon becomes warped, however, and when Diane’s condition improves he begins tampering with her treatment in order to bring her back into his life. When Jimmy later discovers evidence of this, it further compromises Martin’s professional future.

The Good Doctor effectively threads the needle between intimate character study and psychological thriller. Working from a script by John Enbom, Daly delivers a spare portrait of howling neediness that unfolds in a world without a lot of extra flourishes in setting or scope. There’s a smart, compact focus to the movie (even the specific city in which it unfolds is meaningless, apart from a coastal connection) that puts an audience right alongside Martin, and believably in his head, while still allowing for slight modulations in tone. It’s a different animal from something like Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave, but similar in that it is both at home with and achieves intrigue, dark comedy and a slowly escalating tension and uncertainty about how things will play out.

The precision of Daly and cinematographer Yaron Orbach’s wide frames abet the actors, allowing for a rich and subtle interplay of action and reaction. Morrow is excellent, Keough is radiant and enchanting, and Peña is amusing as a smarmy, weaselly clock-puncher looking to capitalize on his bit of informational leverage. Bloom’s performance is very occasionally a bit self-conscious (he seems an actor always aware of the camera’s position) but also restrained. He succeeds in tapping into Martin’s vulnerability and self-delusion in equal measure — no small task.

The fairly late introduction of an investigating detective (J.K. Simmons), while meant to ratchet up the stakes, feels a bit like a rushed gambit to bring closure and finality to the narrative. Still, The Good Doctor doesn’t opt for a pat conclusion or render a moral judgment writ large. Its open-endedness is an enchanting conversation-starter — and bound to conjure up speculation about the out-of-office lives of your own care providers during your next doctor’s appointment.

Coming to Blu-ray in a regular case, The Good Doctor comes to the format in a superb 1080p high definition transfer, with rich color consistency and no edge enhancement or artifacting issues. The soundtrack, a 5.1 DTS-HD master audio track, is nice and subtle, abetting the movie’s understated atmosphere. Apart from the obligatory chapter stops, the movie’s theatrical trailer and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles, bonus features consist of two short behind-the-scenes featurettes — a 10-minute bit that intersperses clips and on-set interviews, and a five-minute, even more promotionally-oriented segment for AXS TV. A more in-depth interview with Daly would greatly benefit this disc. To purchase The Good Doctor Blu-ray via Half, click here; if Amazon is your thing, meanwhile, click here. B (Movie) C+ (Disc)

Narrated by Ringo Starr, animated and directed by Oscar-winner Fred Wolf, with songs written by Grammy-winner Harry Nilsson, 1971’s The Point is an unusual, enchanting little hippie-dippy holdover, a peacenik fable of multi-culturalism and make-good that connects chiefly as a slice of nostalgia.

Set in the Land of Point, where everyone is born with a pointed head and everything — from cars and houses to the trees — has the same sort of notch, The Point‘s story centers around the one notable outsider: Oblio, a round-headed boy who, with his trusted dog Arrow, is banished to the Pointless Forest because of how different he is. Musical-themed wackiness and wonderment ensues, including the psychedelic “P.O.V. Waltz.”

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with a deep-seat spindle, The Point: Definitive Collector’s Edition comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 widescreen transfer, with seven chapter stops. In addition to a slate of previews, bonus features consist of a nice quartet of new behind-the-scenes featurettes, clocking in at under a half-hour cumulatively. It doesn’t quite translate over the generational chasm, but for the oldest amongst the Schoolhouse Rock! set, there’s a certain evocative reward to be found in The Point. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) B (Disc)

Its title is rather brilliant, in its own way; there can be little confusion about exactly what type of story Kids Go to the Woods… Kids Get Dead is aiming to tell. Unfortunately, there’s neither any imagination nor slickness of execution on display in writer-director Michael Hall’s terrible, micro-budgeted slasher flick.

Kids Go to the Woods centers on a group of kids who… OK, you get the picture. There’s characteristically virginal Casey (Leah Rudnick), her bookish younger brother Scott (Andrew Waffenschmidt), and five of Casey’s friends (Seth Stephens, Amanda Rising, Kristen Adele and the spunky Meghan Miller) as well as her boyfriend Derrick (Eric Carpenter). After the requisite run-in with a weird convenience store clerk (Kevin Shea) who warns of dark things, the kids repair to the cabin of a stoner uncle of one of them. Some drinking, make-out sessions and a spooky ouija board gathering ensue, until a masked killer starts his stalking.

Nevermind the wildly uneven acting or the fact that (once again) this is a movie which tries to pass off burly 25-year-olds as teenagers who can’t buy beer. Apart from a couple passably amusing throwaway lines of dialogue and one mildly entertaining kill scenario, this is a movie with no imagination. It’s poorly paced and flatly shot, in often terribly conceived single-shot style.

And when a movie is this bad, it usually further manifests in a variety of frustrating ways — things like having characters carry and toast with empty cups, and, in this instance, stand thisclose to a wall while using a stand-up urinal, and having characters rest their arms on top of it. Oh, there’s also a murder scene where blood appears on a pillow before anyone gets stabbed.

To additionally pad out his movie’s 85-minute running time, Hall concocts a wrap-around device with “horror host” Candy Adams (Carly Goodspeed), loosely in the vein of Rhonda Shear or Vampira, except by way of Swingers. This gimmick, along with occasional video interference and mock bits of taped-over commercials and home movies, is meant to conjure up warm VHS memories; it’s lame, and adds nothing to the proceedings. Yes, there’s some nudity here (three out of the four ladies get topless), for the Joe Bob Briggs set, but even that — which made the ’80s-era movies this knock-off seeks to emulate worthwhile for a certain audience — only illustrates how pointless and out of touch Hall’s Kids is.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Kids Go to the Woods… Kids Get Dead comes to DVD on a region-free disc, in 16×9 widescreen, with optional chapter stops. In addition to a trailer, its slate of bonus features includes three deleted scenes and a collection of four brief behind-the-scenes segments which spotlight the filming of different scenes. The high point, though, is a five-minute gag reel in which wiffeball accidents occur, a kitten wanders into frame, and virtually every cast member simulates fellatio; it’s Miller, though, who gets the ultimate win, for her energetic spit take. As far as DIY, low-budget indies, this is at least an admittedly decent packaging. F (Movie) C+ (Disc)

With its comfortably ramshackle plotting and character archetypes, director Daryl Wein’s offbeat romantic dramedy Lola Versus is on the one hand just another fairly sharp and sparkling showcase for a bit of solid joke-writing. But with a watchability that stems chiefly from a collection of nuanced observations about human frailty rather than any lip-nibbling, cutesy set-ups, the film exists and unfolds in a realistic miasma of bewilderment and late-twentysomething confusion. It’s a serially silly movie about the serious discombobulation of change in life — the shock and fear attached to it, and the swirl of ambivalence that rushes in to fill the void of old habits and routines. And though it didn’t find welcome reception in theaters earlier this year, Lola Versus should only grow in value and reputation with time, as wider mainstream audiences become more familiar with the rising star of Greta Gerwig.



The actress stars as the title character, a New York grad student working on a dissertation about society’s discomfort with silence. When her fiancé Luke (Joel Kinnaman), a painter, nervously dissolves their engagement just weeks before their destination wedding, Lola is devastated. Her parents (Bill Pullman and Debra Winger) swoop in to help bolster her spirits, and Lola also leans on her best friends — Alice (co-writer Zoe Lister-Jones, above left), a manic singleton, and Henry (Hamish Linklater), a sensitive indie rocker whose relationship with Lola extends back to their adolescence. Over the course of the next year, as Lola cycles through some bad decision-making and various love triangles form and dissipate both inside of her social circle and outside of it, Lola tries to locate her personal compass and get it situated upwards.

It’s true that the grander narrative arcs of Lola Versus eventually devolve into a collection of discrete bits: a pregnancy scare, a hypnotherapy appointment, and a couple bits involving Nick (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a one-time sexual coupling that Lola comes to regret. But there’s a funky energy here that helps the material transcend its navel-gazing roots, even if its final resting place of self-actualization is somewhat predetermined.

Lister-Jones and director Wein previously collaborated on 2009’s Breaking Upwards, a slyly autobiographical tale of a New York couple who, battling codependency, meticulously plot out their own separation. Their off-screen lives clearly also inform the backdrop and flavorings of Lola Versus, shot through with little bohemian asides and dialogue that crackles. Lola and Alice’s patter (“Is your Match.com log-in still let-me-be-your-hole?”) capture the easy rhythms of a friendship in which niceties are not paramount, while other bits score simply as one-liners. There are also some funny gags (like Alice confusing Oxycontin with Oxytocin) that are smoothly interwoven into the scenes surrounding them.

The acting, though, is what really elevates Lola Versus, trumping a fairly meandering narrative and making it such a treat. Zoe-Lister is quite fun, and gifted with an innate sense of comedic timing. And as Lola’s liberal-minded parents, Pullman and Winger are also delightful, beautifully filling in a backstory which is only hinted at. Then there’s Gerwig, whose expressive reactions and skillfully embodied vulnerability anchors the movie. Her choices are always interesting, conveying the choppy, at-odds inner cadences of a character who tries to argue her way out of a bad decision by exclaiming, “I’m slutty, but a good person!” She makes the film both funny and a bit heartrending.

Lola Versus lacks the adventurousness and certainly the stylishness of (500) Days of Summer, but it is a sort of more femme-centric version of that, crossed with Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture. One of those movies hit it big at the box office and the latter, like Lola Versus, disappeared with the tiny “plunk!” of a small pebble tossed off a pier into the ocean. But Dunham’s star rose again with HBO’s zeitgeist smash Girls, and the incandescence of Gerwig is such that it only remains a matter of time until her mainstream breakthrough.

The film’s Blu-ray bow features a 1080p treatment of the movie, in non-anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen with a DTS-HD master audio 5.1 track and optional French and Spanish language tracks. A fun audio commentary with Wein and Lister-Jones anchors a great slate of bonus materials, which also includes a polished little “Fox Movie Channel” featurette on Gerwig, and another featurette touting her charms. The disc’s other two featurettes focus on the filmmakers and the movie’s premiere, respectively. Rounding things out are a complement of deleted scenes and amusing outtakes, in which, yes, obscenities are amply showcased. To purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) A- (Disc)

A low budget psychological thriller that makes good use of the resources it has, The Frozen avoids a lot of genre pitfalls in telling a deceptively simple story of strain, environment and the human condition.

Having embarked upon a perhaps inadvisable winter camping trip, Mike (Seth David Mitchell) and his girlfriend Emma (Brit Morgan, not to be confused with Brit Marling) suffer a snowmobile accident and get stranded in the deep woods. Emma reveals her pregnancy, and an argument ensues. When Mike disappears after trying to work on the snowmobile, a stressed-out Emma — who’s already seeing things that may not be there — is left to battle the elements and elude a mysterious man (Noah Segan) who’s seemingly tracked the pair through the forest.

Written and directed by Andrew Hyatt, The Frozen trends a bit more arthouse than a simpler rendering of its basic conceit might suggest. The grappling-with-a-stranger-in-wintry-elements set-up is of course ripe for genre stalking, but Hyatt has other plans. Along with cinematographer Max Gutierrez, he constructs an effectively muted palette for the movie that matches its emotional chilliness. The lingering problem, however? Some poor editing choices, courtesy of David Heinz. The end result, all in all — the smooth merging of story and environment — is not quite as skillfully executed as something like 2007’s Wind Chill, starring Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes, but neither does it quite need to be.

The reason for that lies chiefly in Morgan’s solid, attention-holding performance, and Hyatt’s smart instincts in not wildly overplaying things in an effort to drum up too many desultory scares. Partially about the wild, partially about slipping-knot sanity and partially about… something else, The Frozen is a comfortably unnerving genre treat — canted and alluring in ways that seemingly independent features of this sort only ever really get to be. It’s not perfect, by any means (one wishes it trusted itself a bit more), but hey, it’s better than Dream House.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a complementary cardboard slipcover, The Frozen comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track. Apart from the movie’s trailer, there are no supplemental features, which is a shame, since one figures Hyatt would have a good bit to say about both its production and conception. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) C- (Disc)

Science fiction serials and films get a bad rap for a lot of reasons, and a lot of the more sophisticated offerings are often rated PG-13 or R, or relegated to international territories (as with Dr. Who) that come with their own set of stigmas or viewing challenges. So how are much younger kids — the sci-fi fans of the future — supposed to find suitable inroads into the genre?

Enter the SyFy Channel, which has made a mission out of peddling futuristic action dramas and apocalyptic doomsday fare to audiences of a younger demographic. The two meet in Collision Earth, a movie no one would necessarily mistake for high art, but one that nonetheless checks a lot of boxes of intrigue for less discerning viewers.

Penned by Ryan Landels and directed by Paul Ziller, the movie centers on a massive comet that strikes the sun and knocks Mercury out of its orbit, which has disastrous consequences for Earth. With the now-magnetized heavenly body drifting closer and unleashing all sorts of gravitational chaos, a disgraced scientist (Kirk Acevedo) and the lone surviving crew member on a crippled, distant space shuttle (Diane Farr) must work together to reactivate a top secret planetary defense system and try to avert this extinction-level event.

Collision Earth‘s budgetary limitations definitely constrain the scope of its story, as well as its psychological hold. And the movie doesn’t fully escape the tendency that far too many sci-fi films have to bend and bow to action rather than work through their theories on a more intellectualized plane. But if one forgives it these shortcomings and some hammy dialogue, there’s an interesting story here, buoyed by invested lead performances and competent editing. And the scariness never becomes overwhelming, making this a nice little sci-fi introduction for the younger ones in your brood.

Housed in a regular Blu-ray case, Collision Earth comes to the format presented in a 1080p 1.78:1 widescreen transfer, with a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio track and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. As for bonus features… well, apart from a couple trailers on start-up, there are none. Nevertheless, to purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) C- (Disc)

A spinoff to 2010’s wonderful How to Train Your Dragon, the animated Riders of Berk collects a quartet of small screen adventures continuing the story of Hiccup, Toothless and fearless friends.

The cinematography and scope of animation (especially in its 3-D presentation) was a huge part of what made How to Train Your Dragon so special, and in its whittled-down, less complicated form, some of the lack of that same level of visual flourish feels like a bummer. The stories here, which are very much of the self-contained variety, find young Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) again frequently clashing with his Viking father, but the fact that so many of the main voice cast — save Gerard Butler, Kristen Wiig and Jonah Hill, really — returns to this serial presentation helps mitigate the rather wan token antagonism, in the form of Mildew (voiced by Stephen Root). Well… at least for younger, less demanding audiences.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Dragons: Riders of Berk comes to DVD presented in a sharp, 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English and Spanish subtitles. Bonus features are limited to a couple previews, including that of Rise of the Guardians and How to Train Your Dragon‘s live show, though it’s worth noting that a set of five collectible cards spotlighting different dragons is also included. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)

A boozy exercise in cinematic self-indulgence that cross-pollinates Leaving Las Vegas, Bret Easton Ellis and the worst instincts of precious Hollywood navel-gazing, writer-director Adam Sherman’s Crazy Eyes at least gives mousy lead Lukas Haas a chance to live out the dream of playing a lothario, if nothing else.

Even though he’s divorced and has a five-year-old son, Zach (Haas) seems to enjoy his hard-partying, Los Angeles lifestyle, abetted by a trust fund that means he doesn’t really have to work. A functional alcoholic who mainly hangs around with his bartending pal Dan (Jake Busey) and juggles a seemingly endless rotation of temporary jock-warmers, Zach finds himself thrown for a loop when he comes across the flirty but withholding Rebecca (Madeline Zima), whom he dubs “Crazy Eyes.” Damaged and no less dependent on booze for escape, Rebecca starts spending a lot of time with Zach, but keeps him at bay, both physically and emotionally (“I might be in love with someone else, I should check…”).

Zach becomes even more obsessed. His parents (Ray Wise and Valerie Mahaffey) pop up for Thanksgiving, and then his dad suffers a stroke that lands him in the hospital. Still, Zach is mainly concerned with having Rebecca; he’s basically blind to everything else in life, even though neither he nor Rebecca completely stop seeing other folks on the side.

Sherman (Happiness Runs) underlines and highlights every point he wishes to make in Crazy Eyes (Zach is yearning for a deeper human connection, don’tcha know), and the tone here is meandering to the point of near-psychosis. Not all of the drunk-acting is bad, but neither Haas nor Zima is able to strongly convey a three-dimensional character. So many of the narrative tidbits herein seem arbitrary, and ergo the film fritters away any chance at making a viewer care about the plights of its damaged souls.

Presumably housed in a regular plastic Amaray case (this review was based on a screener copy), Crazy Eyes comes to DVD in anamorphic widescreen with a 5.1 Dolby digital surround sound audio track. Its menu screen features a bit of flickering fluorescent lights in the bar sign rendering of its title (a nice touch), but apart from trailers of this and a couple other Strand titles there are no supplemental bonus features, which feels especially like a cheat on a movie so purportedly rooted in autobiography. D (Movie) D+ (Disc)

Proving its subjects uncommon thinkers as well as uncommon fighters, documentary Klitschko is a surprisingly humanizing and informative look at the Ukrainian-born world champion boxing brothers of the same surname. Striking a nice balance between the personal and professional and for the most part avoiding the pitfalls of overly worshipful hagiography, the movie casts a spotlight on a deep, sincere and certainly much more well adjusted fraternal love than on display in last year’s Oscar-winning The Fighter.



Shot over the course of two years by director Sebastian Dehnhardt, Klitschko has an immediate currency, given the brothers’ collective lock on the five heavyweight championship boxing belts (and correlative promise to their mother not to fight one another). Few documentaries of this depth and considerable access come out this close to the apex of an athlete’s career. Still, Klitschko is mostly gripping or at the very least as interesting for what it gets into outside of the ring as what the insight it provides into professional boxing. The sons of a career military man, Vitali, six years older, and Wladimir (above right), the softer spoken of the two, translated the driven nature and communicated high expectations of their parents into success in both school (both would eventually earn post-graduate degrees) and boxing. Remarkably, though separated in age by a good bit, the two share an amazingly tight bond, and seemingly the same otherworldly focus required to hone their bodies into the physical specimens they are today.

Interviews with former combatants like Lennox Lewis, Lamon Brewster and Chris Byrd provide a nice outside perspective, and help underscore a largely unspoken but still ever-present current coursing through the film — that of the brothers as Cold War proxies, and therefore fighters whose talents (and, later, accomplishments) were not to be trusted, but instead denigrated. The Klitschkos’ mother and father share significant, shading family memories, but it’s the brothers themselves who are of course the main attraction. Dehnhardt allows the Klitschkos — who are each conversationally fluent in English — to speak mostly in their native tongues, allowing the amusing, idiosyncratic nuances of their recollections to more fully come through.

If it’s a bit overlong for some details to not be seemingly given their full due — like Vitali’s temporary retirement and foray into Ukrainian politics, in which he remains still active today — Klitschko at least showcases behemoth athletic champions who are worthy of role model status for reasons other than just their physical accomplishments. And the fact that its title is singular and not plural… well, that says something too.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Klitschko comes to DVD presented in 16×9 widescreen, with Dolby 2.0 stereo and 5.1 surround sound audio tracks and optional English subtitles. Bonus features consist of the movie’s theatrical trailer, plus previews for other Corinth titles, as well as a nice selection of deleted scenes. Given that the Klitschkos themselves provide such a voice for the movie, it would have been nice to hear a bit more from Dehnhardt in this arena, via a commentary track or something of the sort. To purchase the DVD via Half, click here; if Amazon is still your thing, click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)

An evocative DVD cover design can’t rescue Slaughter Tales, a low-budget, DIY-level horror offering that puts a VHS spin on The Ring. Director Johnny Dickie gets nominal credit for scraping together enough resources to actually complete his movie, but the story here is a yawner, and the acting, suspense and general execution all sub-par — with the supposed justification that the latter is all on purpose.

The story? A no-good teen steals a mysterious videocassette, only to find himself tormented by spirits that accompany the horrible film that lies within. Dickie uses this as a device to then spin off into anthology-style schlock and gore (hence the Slaughter Tales title), but he can’t touch the sporadic brilliance of something like V/H/S, and not only owing to meager means. It’s mainly a matter of imaginative staging and execution. Dickie wears many hats, and boldly charges into the breach, sure. Hell, Troma maestro Lloyd Kaufman even pops up, blessing by association this work. But the best no-budget cheapies showcase some sort of mad brilliance in their willful recklessness, a quality that is decidedly lacking here.

Housed in a regular but clear plastic Amaray case, Slaughter Tales comes to DVD presented on a region-free disc, with a nice slate of supplemental materials. In addition to an engaging if congratulatory audio commentary track with Dickie and some folks from the website VHShitfest, there are two separate featurettes — one of which focuses on the movie’s special effects work, and one of which is a more general behind-the-scenes look at production, seeded with on-set footage. A couple of trailers round things out. To purchase the DVD via Half, click here; if Amazon is your thing, meanwhile, click here. D (Movie) C+ (Disc)