New Releases: ‘No’ is a savvy political satire
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No
Sony, $30.99; Blu-ray, $35.99
Available on VOD beginning Tuesday
Formidable Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain does his best work with the sly satire rooted in history — and a recent Oscar nominee for foreign-language film. Gael García Bernal stars as a young advertising executive, hired to craft a campaign arguing for the ouster of President Augusto Pinochet. “No” fictionalizes an actual event, but Larrain also comments on political fervor, social change and how the superficial appeal of packaging can affect both. It’s a savvy film, at once cynical and reassuring about why different generations make the choices they do. Bernal and Larrain bring additional insight to the DVD and Blu-ray, via a commentary track and interview.
The Beatles: Help!
Universal Blu-ray, $29.98
“A Hard Day’s Night” gets all the love, but in a lot of ways the Beatles’ second feature film is more evocative of who the band really was and more true to its own time. Made in 1965, “Help!” is an international caper picture in the spirit of James Bond and countless mid-’60s adventure spoofs, and as such it gave director Richard Lester more license to be gratuitously silly and psychedelic than he’d been with “A Hard Day’s Night.” The new, fully restored Blu-ray edition of “Help!” adds nearly an hour of featurettes that look back at where the Beatles were in 1965, when they were four of the most famous people in the world, and explores how this project allowed the band to be goofy and fallible during its time of intense, incomparable musical brilliance.
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The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
Warner Bros., $28.98; Blu-ray, $35.99
Available on VOD beginning Tuesday
The underwhelming comedy stars Steve Carell and Steve Buscemi as Siegfried & Roy-like Las Vegas magicians whose livelihood is threatened by the ascendance of a Criss Angel-David Blaine-esque “street magician,” played by Jim Carrey. Carell, Buscemi and Carrey are funny guys — as is Alan Arkin, playing an older magician who once inspired the generations that came after him — but director Don Scardino and screenwriters John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein have a hard time balancing the satirical and the sweet and so rely too heavily on wigs and makeup for comic effect. The DVD and Blu-ray add deleted scenes, a gag reel and tongue-in-cheek featurettes — all standard issue for this kind of movie.¿
Upside Down
Millennium, $28.99; Blu-ray, $29.99/$34.99
Available on VOD beginning Tuesday
Argentine writer-director Juan Solanas tries something daringly different — but not all that successful — with his sci-fi romance. Jim Sturgess and Kirsten Dunst play childhood sweethearts who literally come from different worlds: he from an impoverished planet, and she from a wealthy one that looms alongside the poor one. Solanas means “Upside Down” as a metaphorical, poetic meditation on cultural differences and class mobility, but while the movie is beautiful to look at, it’s also tediously wonky, with much of the dialogue dedicated to explanations of how gravity works. Few things sink a whimsical movie faster than characters trying to ground the flights of fancy in dumb ol’ plausibility. The DVD and Blu-ray contain a plethora of featurettes.
And…
The Call
Sony, $30.99; Blu-ray, $40.99
Available on VOD beginning Tuesday
In the Family
New Yorker, $29.95; Blu-ray, $39.95
Phantom
20th Century Fox, $22.98; Blu-ray, $29.99
Available on VOD beginning Tuesday
The Rambler
Starz/Anchor Bay, $22.98; Blu-ray, $24.99
Available on VOD beginning Tuesday
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