Although A Separation (Sony) won 2011’s Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, it’s still been a long wait for it to hit DVD/Blu-ray in America. But now home viewers can finally catch up on Asghar Farhadi’s rich Iranian drama, which explores gender, class, and religious tensions in his homeland via a conflict between a beleaguered, temperamental man and the housekeeper taking care of his Alzheimer’s-stricken father. It’s a socially complicated film, but a powerful, emotionally direct one…
Richard Linklater’s wonderful docu-dramedy Bernie (Millennium) is a heartwarming tale of murder centering on the too-strange-for-fiction case of a gay mortician/sweet-natured renaissance man (Jack Black, in the performance of a lifetime) so beloved in his small Texas town that nobody wants to punish him for the murder of a hateful old biddy (a sour-faced Shirley MacLaine) only he is able to tolerate, even after he confesses to her murder. MacLaine is a malevolent force of nature as a hideous shrew pretty much everyone concedes is better off dead, while Matthew McConaughey contributes a juicy supporting turn as a pragmatic prosecuting attorney with the unenviable task of trying the most popular man in town for a crime most folks view in an unmistakably positive light…
Sacha Baron Cohen embarked on one of his patented stunt-filled publicity tours in support of The Dictator (Paramount) and Admiral General Aladeen, his latest creation, an iron-fisted North African monarch who’s like a comedic amalgam of Gaddafi, Ahmadinejad, and the Saudi royals. But the tour did The Dictator a disservice by making it seem like another Borat or Brüno, placing a made-up wacky character in a real-world context. In fact, the film owes more to the inspired anarchy of the Marx Brothers, specifically Duck Soup: It’s full of barbed political humor and random bits of silly spoofery…
It’s unreasonable to expect a Disney nature documentary to avoid any cute anthropomorphized animal footage, but the better ones, like Earth and Oceans, at least try to strike a balance between wild-animals-are-just-like-us sequences with some helpful information about the environment. That never happens in Chimpanzee (Disney), which has the gall to frame the development of a baby chimp named Oscar as a real-life Lion King, complete with an evil rival clan headed by a thug named “Scar.”
