DVDs In Brief: October 28, 2009

Dinosaurs and wooly mammoths come together again for the very first time in Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs (Fox), another harmless, forgettable entry in a franchise that keeps its ambitions nearly as low as Saturday-morning cartoons. It’s a shame that a series once staked on the novelty of mammoths and saber-toothed cats has finally succumbed to dinosaur fever through the silly premise of a cave full of squirreled-away dino eggs. Crude jokes and sweet lessons follow…

If the twist hasn’t been spoiled for you in advance, Orphan (Warner Bros.) may be the year’s guiltiest pleasure, a standard-issue evil-kid movie juiced by one stupefying plot turn. If you know the twist already, it’s still fun to see how the film arrives at it; no matter how much groundwork it lays down in advance, there’s just no buying it. Add to the mix genuinely excellent performances by Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga, and Orphan makes for a surprisingly potent experience, even if much of that experience is spent giggling… 

If warmth and good cheer were aesthetic values on par with great screenwriting and inspired direction, then Nothing Like The Holidays (Anchor Bay), a genial comedy-drama about a Latino family Christmas, would be a masterpiece. As it stands, however, a loaded cast—including Alfred Molina, Elizabeth Peña, Freddy Rodríguez, John Leguizamo, and the reliably excellent Luis Guzmán—can’t bail out the raft of clichés that overwhelm its myriad subplots. It’s basically a recast The Family Stone…

Are you extremely well-versed on the ins and outs of Italian politics over the past half-century? No? Well, give up trying to follow Il Divo (MPI), a baffling account of the 50-plus-year career of Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, but don’t dismiss director Paolo Sorrentino’s magnificently ornate style, which makes the Italian government look like a rogues’ gallery right out of Reservoir Dogs.