Susan’s DVD Update for week of June 25:
“Green Zone” re-teams Matt Damon with “Bourne” director Paul Greengrass for a gritty, far-fetched thriller set in the chaotic early days of the Iraqi War when no one could be trusted and every decision could detonate unforeseen consequences.
Robert Pattinson segues from vampire in the “Twilight” franchise to tortured young man mode in “Remember Me,” which begins in the summer of 2001 as two grief-laden New York college students embark on a romantic relationship.
Aimed specifically at ‘tweens and teens, the imaginative fantasy-adventure “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief” finds frustrated Percy (Logan Lerman) sent to Half-Blood Camp, where a centaur (Pierce Brosnan) tells him he’s a demigod, son of Poseidon, and suspected as a thief. Since Percy’s real name is Perseus, it’s inevitable that he and his pals will decapitate menacing, snake-haired Medusa (Uma Thurman).
A dorky TSA agent (Jay Baruchel) can’t believe his luck when a blonde bombshell (Alice Eve) falls for him in “She’s Out of My League,” a crass rom-com filled with gross-out humor and absurd sex jokes. And you can skip “Thirst,” a nightmarish story of what can happen when stranded in the hot, desolate California desert.
Foreign film fans will enjoy “The Maid,” Sebastian Silva’s darkly humorous film about an overworked, psychotic 41 year-old housemaid (Catalina Saavedra) in the upper class suburbs of Santiago, Chile; it’s in Spanish with English subtitles. And the documentary “Sex Positive” explores the life of Richard Berkowitz, a revolutionary gay S&M-hustler-turned-AIDS activist who helped ‘invent’ safe sex.
“Tom and Jerry Deluxe Anniversary Edition” celebrates the most enduring duo in animation history, compiling 30 of their best, most popular shorts, including a 1945 “Anchors Away” excerpt in which Jerry dances with Gene Kelly.
PICK OF THE WEEK: Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren play acclaimed Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy and his aristocratic wife, Countess Sofya, in “The Last Station,” an intriguing, if melodramatic true story that chronicles the final year of his life, tackling universal themes like love, greed and sexual politics, set against the perennial divergence between idealism and reality.