Susan Granger’s DVD Update for week of Fri., April 20:
In the wake of increasingly tragic shootings in the news, Emil Chiaberi’s “Murder By Proxy: How America Went Postal” is the first documentary to look at the spree-killing phenomenon through the lens of a socio-economic shift that began years ago. And David Sington tackles why our economy collapsed in “The Flaw,” a lively, iconoclastic look at the current crisis in capitalism.
In “The Man on the Train,” Donald Sutherland teams up with musician Larry Mullen Jr. as two disparate men examine the choices they’ve made in their lives. And Dennis Farina stars as an aging, short-money hustler who discovers in his retirement that the world he once knew has completely changed in “The Last Rites of Joe May.”
With more Christian religious propaganda than plot, “Jerusalem Countdown” is ostensibly about nuclear weapons being smuggled into the United States and how one FBI agent (David A.R. White) works with a shifty arms dealer (Lee Majors) to find them before they’re detonated.
British video artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen’s “Shame” is a depressing dirge that explores the pathology of insatiable sex addiction, featuring both Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan full-frontal naked in what amounts to graphic, soft-core porn.
In the bleak, low-budget, sci-fi thriller “The Divide,” a nuclear strike hits Manhattan, forcing terrified residents of an apartment building to seek refuge in the basement, where the janitor (Michael Biehn) takes command, as his prisoners inflict depraved physical and psycho-sexual torment on one another.
For foreign film aficionados, nothing is what it seems in Giuseppe Capotondi’s Italian thriller, set in Turin, where a former cop (Filippo Timi) falls for a Slovenian chambermaid (Ksenia Rappoport), but their romance takes a dark turn as her murky past resurfaces and her reality starts to crumble. If you prefer comedy, Jean-Pierre Ameris’ refreshing “Romantics Anonymous” tells the story of two shy people (Isabelle Carre, Benoit Poelvoorde) whose desire to create delicious chocolate delicacies brings them together in a film that some have called ‘Amelie’ meets ‘Chocolat.’
PICK OF THE WEEK: In “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol” Tom Cruise not only scales the dizzying heights of the world’s tallest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, but he successfully re-energies this durable, high-octane franchise with a palm-sweating popcorn picture filled with spectacular feats of derring-do.