This Week's DVD Releases

The weather is getting summery, but if you still want to spend some time indoors, there's plenty of movies for your rental pleasure.  Let's check out this week's new releases on DVD, care of our good friends at Scarecrow Video. 

If you can't wait till Wednesday for your Robert Pattinson fix, there's the romantic drama Remember Me, in which R-Patz falls for Lost's Emilie de Ravin before tragedy strikes in the form of a spoiler you can easily look up all over the internets. A slightly less realistic romance occurs in She's Out of My League, with dweeb of the moment Jay Baruchel. If you're looking for the inner workings of a real relationship, please see The Last Station starring Christopher Plummer and Dame Helen Mirren as Leo Tolstoy and his wife Sofya.

This week also brings Green Zone, in which Matt Damon is a soldier in Iraq. It's directed by Paul Greengrass, which means there's lots of handheld camerawork, translating into action sequences where you can't tell what's occurring or who is chasing whom. We get it already--war is confusing!  Too bad this film culminates in the shocking reveal two-thirds of the way through:  there are no WMD in Iraq.  Do yourself a favor and avoid this Snore Identity.

It's a good week for foreign releases and classics coming to DVD.  Controversial Catherine Breillat retells a fairy tale of two sisters in Bluebeard, while the live-in help gets jealous of the new employee in Argentina's The Maid.  A Star is Born is finally on Blu-Ray, along with Criterion editions of Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up and Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert. If you love French New Wave, don't miss Jean-Louis Trintignant and the lovely Romy Schneider in Alain Cavalier's fascist romance Le Combat Dans L'ile. And Shout Factory just released another Roger Corman flick, Death Race 2000.

A few odds and ends: Fuel documents the dire need for a revamped comprehensive energy policy (now more than ever), while in The Good Guy Alexis Bledel can't choose between two Wall Street hotshots. Sigh. Meanwhile, Timer looks to be more than just your run-of-the-mill indie sci-fi rom-com.