DVDS THIS WEEK

Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2008

DVDS THIS WEEK

Release Date: February 19, 2008

AMERICAN GANGSTER

Cast: Carla Gugino, Denzel Washington, Josh Brolin, Russell Crowe, Chiwetel Ejiofor

Synopsis: Academy Award® winners Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe team with director Ridley Scott (Gladiator) for an epic story as powerful as it is true. Armed with ruthless, street-wise tactics and a strict sense of honor, crime boss Frank Lucas (Washington) rules Harlem's chaotic drug underworld. When outcast cop Richie Roberts (Crowe) sets out to bring down Lucas's multi-million dollar empire, it plunges both men into a legendary confrontation. American Gangster is 'a brutal and brilliant film' (Pete Hammond, Maxim)

IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH

Cast: Charlize Theron, James Franco, Jason Patric, Susan Sarandon, Tommy Lee Jones

Synopsis: Mike Deerfield returns to the U.S. after his tour of duty in Iraq and abruptly goes missing. His father Hank (Tommy Lee Jones), a spit and polish ex-MP from the Vietnam era, goes looking for him. What he finds goes to the heart of American combat experiences in the Iraqi conflict.
Academy Award ® -winning* Crash filmmaker Paul Haggis teams with Oscar® -winning* actors Jones, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon in a probing and powerful look at a nation and the young soldiers it sends into battle. Hank’s quest lays bare a tangled web of cover-up, murder, mystery and profound revelation about the personal cost of war.

KURT COBAIN: ABOUT A SON

Cast: Kurt Cobain

Synopsis: Kurt Cobain: About A Son is an intimate and moving meditation on the late musician and artist Kurt Cobain told entirely in his own voice. The film presents a rare personal portrait of a boy who becomes a musician, a husband, a rock star, a father and a songwriter whose words have touched millions.
Cobain’s story unfolds through his own narrative assembled from more than 25 hours of audiotaped conversations, never before made public, recorded during late-night sessions with noted journalist Michael Azerrad for his book Come As You Are: The Story Of Nirvana. This improbable autobiography is a profound firsthand account of Cobain’s successes and failures, fears and sense of humor that allows the audience unprecedented access into a person who turned out to be the most mysterious rock legend of his generation and beyond.
Features original score by DCFC’s Gibbard and longtime Nirvana producer Steve Fisk, plus the music of more than 20 artists who influenced Cobain during his life.

LUST, CAUTION

Cast: Joan Chen, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Tang Wei, Wang Leehom

Synopsis: The new film from Ang Lee, the Academy Award-winning director of 'Brokeback Mountain' and 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.' A startling erotic espionage thriller about the fate of an ordinary woman's heart, it is based on the short story by revered Chinese author Eileen Chang, and stars Asian cinema icon Tony Leung opposite screen newcomer Tang Wei. Shanghai, 1942. The World War II Japanese occupation of this Chinese city continues in force. Mrs. Mak, a woman of sophistication and means, walks into a café, places a call, and then sits and waits. She remembers…how her story began several years earlier, in 1938 China. She is not in fact Mrs. Mak, but shy Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei). With WWII underway, Wong has been left behind by her father, who has escaped to England. As a freshman at university, she meets fellow student Kuang Yu Min (Wang Leehom) Kuang has started a drama society to shore up patriotism. As the theater troupe's new leading lady, Wong realizes that she has found her calling, able to move and inspire audiences – and Kuang. He convenes a core group of students to carry out a radical and ambitious plan to assassinate a top Japanese collaborator, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung). Each student has a part to play; Wong will be Mrs. Mak, who will gain Yee's trust by befriending his wife (Joan Chen) and then draw the man into an affair. Wong transforms herself utterly inside and out, and the scenario proceeds as scripted – until an unexpectedly fatal twist spurs her to flee. Shanghai, 1941. With no end in sight for the occupation, Wong – having emigrated from Hong Kong – goes through the motions of her existence. Much to her surprise, Kuang re-enters her life. Now part of the organized resistance, he enlists her to again become Mrs. Mak in a revival of the plot to kill Yee, who as head of the collaborationist secret service has become even more a key part of the puppet government. As Wong reprises her earlier role, and is drawn ever closer to her dangerous prey, she finds her very identity being pushed to the limit...

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING

Cast: Jack Black, Jennifer Jason Leigh, John Turturro, Nicole Kidman, Sophie Nyweide

Synopsis: Margot Zeller (Nicole Kidman) is a short story writer with a sharp wit and an even sharper tongue. On the eve of her estranged sister Pauline's (Jennifer Jason Leigh) wedding to unemployed musician/artist/depressive Malcolm (Jack Black) at the family seaside home, Margot shows up unexpectedly to rekindle the sisterly bond and offer her own brand of 'support.' What ensues is a nakedly honest and subversively funny look at family dynamics.

POOR BOY'S GAME

Cast: Danny Glover, Flex Alexander, Greg Bryk, Laura Regan, Rossif Sutherland

Synopsis: Donnie Rose (Sutherland) has been in prison for the past nine years for beating a black teen so brutally that it left him handicapped for life. Now, Donnie is out. He's a different man with only one place to go: back home to the same violent and racist place that created him. George Carvery (Glover) has waited nine years to avenge his son's fate at the hands of Donnie. The instrument of justice will be Ossie Paris (Alexander), a devastatingly talented boxer who challenges Donnie to a match. But when George and Donnie meet face to face, the need for revenge subsides, and they form the unlikeliest of bonds as Donnie prepares for the fight of his life.

RENDITION

Cast: Alan Arkin, Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, Peter Sarsgaard, Reese Witherspoon

Synopsis: When a man mysteriously vanishes from an overseas flight, his disappearance sends shockwaves all the way to the nation's capitol. Desperate for the truth, his wife begins a search for the missing man which leads a CIA unit head and a novice agent into an international web of deceit, conspiracies and top secret truths far more frightening than the lies that conceal them.

SPIRAL

Cast: Amber Tamblyn, Tricia Helfer, Annie Neal, Joel Moore, Zachary Levi

Synopsis:Portland in the fall is a solitary city. A city where a lonely man can lose himself, insulated beneath the cold, and the clouds, and the rain. Mason (Joel David Moore) is just such a man. A gifted artist, Mason is never-the-less neurotic and reclusive, living a life of anonymity, working from a drab cubicle in a florescent-lit phone bank, repeating the same meaningless conversation with faceless strangers ad nauseam.
Mason is never truly noticed by anyone, save his boss, Berkeley (Zachary Levi), not quite a friend, but a sole source of companionship in an otherwise isolated existence. That is, until he meets a gregarious co-worker named Amber (Amber Tamblyn), a girl struggling with her own loneliness and need to define herself. Amber's jovial demeanor and seemingly carefree attitude provides a sort of catharsis for Mason, and allows his true gifts to come to light as she poses for his art.
It is an unlikely, and unusual courtship that helps Mason find peace for possibly the first time in his life. But as Mason's defenses lower, and the man inside is revealed, there may be something behind the surface darker than anyone expected. For not everything that is hidden should be found, and not every love is meant to be. And you can't paint over your past...

MICHAEL CLAYTON

Cast: George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Tom Wilkinson, Michael O'Keefe, Sydney Pollack

Synopsis: Attorney Michael Clayton is a “fixer,” the go-to guy when his powerful New York law firm wants a mess swept under the rug. But now he’s handed a crisis even he may not be able to fix. The firm’s top litigator in a $3-billion case has gone from advocate to whistleblower. And the more Michael tries to undo the damage, the more he’s up against forces that put corporate survival over human life – including Michael’s. George Clooney portrays Michael, backed into a career corner that offers little room to fight free in this suspense- and star-packed thriller written and directed by Tony Gilroy (writer/co-writer of the Bourne movie trilogy). Keep your eyes on Michael Clayton. He has some life-or-death decisions to make. Fast.

REDACTED

Cast: Izzy Diaz, Kel O'Neill, Patrick Carroll, Rob Devaney, Ty Jones

Synopsis: A fictional story inspired by true events, REDACTED is a unique cinematic experience that will force viewers to radically reconsider the filters through which we see and accept events in our world, the power of the mediated image and how presentation and composition influence our ideas and beliefs. A profound meditation on the way information is packaged, distributed and received in an era with infinite channels of communication, REDACTED utilizes a variety of created source material—video diaries, produced documentary, surveillance footage, online testimonials, news pieces—to comment on the extreme disconnect between the surface of an image and the reality of ideas and the truth, especially in times of strife. Centered around a small group of American soldiers stationed at a checkpoint in Iraq, REDACTED alternates points of view, balancing the experiences of these young men under duress and members of the media with those of the local Iraqi people, illuminating how each have been deeply affected by the current conflict and their encounters with each other. The charged apotheosis of Brian De Palma's filmmaking career, REDACTED caps off a body of work which has explored the politics of image-making and reception more fully than any living filmmaker.

Source: CelebrityWonder.com

| Tuesday, February 19, 2008

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