Susan Granger’s DVD Update for week of Fri., Oct. 5:
In “People Like Us,” when a glib trade negotiator (Chris Pine) realizes he’s in deep trouble with the FTC, he returns home, only to discover he has a half-sister (Olivia Wilde) he never knew existed.
More family trouble erupts in the comedy/drama “Peace, Love and Misunderstanding,” as a devastated Manhattan lawyer (Catherine Keener) heads upstate to Woodstock with her two teens (Elizabeth Olsen, Nat Wolff) to stay with her estranged flower-child mother (Jane Fonda).
Exploring an action-packed 24 hours in the life of a London drug dealer, “Shifty” is a British crime drama about the underworld culture he inhabits. And exiled to Germany’s remote Carpathian Mountains, a hitman-in-hiding must survive in “Snowman’s Land.”
If you crave documentaries, “Hungry For Change” challenges what you think you know about food, weight loss and nutrition. “Beatles Stories” captures new stories about the most influential band of all time, and “David Blaine: A Decade of Magic” contains Blaine’s three TV specials.
Michelle Yeoh embodies Burma’s iconic freedom fighter/ Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi in Luc Besson’s reverential “The Lady” with David Thewlis as her devoted, London-based husband. And a Muslim Algerian immigrant living in Vichy France befriends a Jewish singer and joins the Resistance in the W.W. II French thriller “Free Men.”
From sublime to ridiculous, “Red Lights,” starring Sigourney Weaver, Cillian Murphy and Robert De Niro, is a psychological thriller about how fraudulent psychics, ghost whisperers and faith healers dupe the gullible public. A family returns to their favorite winter getaway for some peaceful ice fishing, little suspecting that they’re prime bait for a hideous underwater creature in “Hypothermia.” And it’s “Inglorious Basterds” meets “Spaceballs” as The Reich strikes back in the sci-fi comedy “Iron Sky,” when a secret Nazi space program plots revenge from the Dark Side of the Moon.
For youngsters, “Tom & Jerry: Robin Hood and His Merry Mouse” is a fun-filled, animated take on the classic story.
PICK OF THE WEEK: Slyly laced with supernatural humor, Tim Burton’s “Dark Shadows” brings back the classic cult TV series with deliciously demonic Johnny Depp as gothic vampire Barnabas Collins.