Susan Granger’s DVD Update for week of Fri., May 3:
In “The Guilt Trip,” Barbra Streisand plays the widowed mother of an organic chemist/inventor (Seth Rogen) who has a new product he’s trying to pitch to manufacturers/distributors. Sensitive to his mother’s loneliness, he invites her to join him on a road trip while he secretly schemes to reunite her with a lost love, a man she adored before she met and married his father.
Tobey Maguire is a self-effacing, suburban doctor in Jacob Estes’ dark, existential comedy, “The Details,” setting off a chain of events that puts him at odds with his wife (Elizabeth Banks), gets him involved with nosy neighbors (Laura Linney, Ray Liotta) and tangled in a bizarre mess of extortion, infidelity and organ donation.
Russell Crowe and Mark Wahlberg become adversaries in “Broken City,” a mundane melodrama that unravels the dense web of criminal conspiracies in New York City Mayoral politics.
Having achieved remarkable success creating HBO’s “The Sopranos,” David Chase makes his writing/directing debut with the nostalgic, coming-of-age drama “Not Fade Away” about a garage band caught the rock ’n’ roll shift that took place during the 1960s.
A bright, ecologically concerned 13 year-old (Perla Haney-Jardine) in rural Illinois tries to spread the word about global warming in Jenny Deller’s powerful, heart-wrenching drama “Future Weather,” featuring supporting performances by Amy Madigan, Lily Taylor, Marin Ireland and William Sadler.
In Hebrew with English subtitles, Eytan Fox’s “Yossi” is a follow-up to “Yossi and Jagger,” the poignant love affair between two officers in the Israeli army; it revolves around a dedicated cardiologist whose solitary existence as a closeted gay man in Tel Aviv is shaken by the arrival of a middle-aged woman (Orly Silbertsatz)from his past.
In Spanish with English subtitles, “The Queen of the People” is a political documentary about an unlikely beauty pageant in Caracas in 1944 that became the first universal election in Venezuela.
PICK OF THE WEEK: Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro star in “Silver Linings Playbook,” a quirky, off-beat, romantic dramedy, set in Philadelphia, which explores engaging, if dysfunctional relationships between unstable, psychologically damaged people.