Susan’s DVD UPDATE for week of Fri. Jan. 14:
Written, directed and starring Katie Aselton (TV’s “The League”), “The Freebie” centers on a couple with a stalled sex life who spices things up by agreeing to an experiment: for one night, each partner can freely cheat with no strings attached.
Richard E. Grant, Carrie-Anne Moss, Jenna Elfman and Janeane Garofalo suffer in “Love Hurts,” a painful romantic comedy that chronicles the beginnings of first love and an attempt to recapture old love.
A food critic can dish it out, but can he take it? That’s the premise of “Bitter Feast,” as revenge is on served up to a notorious blogger (Joshua Leonard) after he prints a rumor that collapses the culinary TV empire of chef Peter Grey (James LeGros); indie horror icon Larry Fessenden and renowned chef Mario Batali co-star.
In a more serious vein, based on Lt. Romeo Dallaire’s best-selling autobiography, “Shake Hands With the Devil” chronicles one man’s courage as genocide rages in Rwanda in 1994. And in “Psychosis,” Charisma Carpenter plays a successful but troubled horror novelist who begins to have horrifying visions of a deranged psychopath and a massacre that happened 15 years ago.
C.S. Lewis penned the Narnia Chronicles more than 50 years ago, yet they’re still as popular today, and in a documentary called “The Narnia Code,” young academician Dr. Michael Ward reveals answers to controversial questions that have eluded scholars for decades.
In Canada’s scenic Jasper National Park, the animated “Alpha and Omega” revolves around a wolf pack, separated into leaders and followers; one day, an Omega teenager (voiced by Apple pitchman Justin Long) and his Alpha friend (voiced by Hayden Panettiere) are hit by tranquilizing darts and shipped off to Idaho’s Sawtooth National Forest as part of a wolf-relocation project.
PICK OF THE WEEK: George Clooney stars in “The American,” a somber and spare meditation on the psyche of a master assassin; he’s a dour, taciturn loner, filled with melancholy inner turmoil while crafting a custom-designed weapon for another professional killer in Castel Del Monte, an ancient Abruzzo hill town in Italy.