Week of December 28

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Violence for Hire

Hit man and weapons designer Jack (George Clooney) is on the run, hiding in a small, Italian town in Anton Corbijn's The American. Jack is told to wait in small-town solitude by his contact (Johan Leysen) who commissions him to make a rifle for an assassin (Thelka Reuten). Happy to have a job that doesn't require him to pull a trigger, Jack goes about his work professionally, but can't manage to stay isolated: he makes connections with the local priest (Paolo Bonacelli) and prostitute (Violante Placido), both of whom make him question his dangerous life. Unfolding slowly, The American progresses like a cross between a Jason Bourne adventure and Michelangelo Antonioni film from the 1970s. On DVD and Blu Ray.

After taking the head of a kingpin, assassin Bo (Jacky Wu) is stranded on one of Hong Kong's outlying islands during a typhoon in Legendary Assassin. He makes a connection with a woman who happens to be a police officer, and, after he intervenes on their behalf, the police befriend him as a wanderer with excellent kung fu... but when violence erupts on the island, and gangsters seek to avenge their fallen boss, Bo has to make a choice between his lethal profession and his new friends.

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Action hero Alice (Milla Jovovich), surviving three Resident Evil movies, is stripped of her mutant superpowers by evil Umbrella scientist Wesker (Shawn Roberts) in Paul W.S. Anderson's Resident Evil: Afterlife. Reunited with Claire (Ali Larter), she must help the leader (Boris Kodjoe) of a team of survivors (including Wentworth Miller and Kim Coates) in Los Angeles find Arcadia: a sanctuary from the zombie-like madness that has overrun the world. In her way are hordes of bloodthirsty zombies and seemingly indestructible Umbrella Corporation bio-weapons; on her side are scrappy fighters, guns that never run out of bullets, and lots of Matrix-style slo-mo and effects. With Spencer Locke. On DVD and Blu Ray.

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The conservative Stephanie (Amber Heard) and her wilder, more reckless friend Ellie (Odette Yustman) fight and split up during their bicycle trip through Argentina in And Soon the Darkness. When Ellie disappears, Stephanie searches for her; though the local police doubt her insistence that something's wrong, a stranger (Karl Urban) who's also lost someone is willing to help... but can Stephanie trust him?

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Harry (Jamey Sheridan) is summoned to his old friend's (Steve Buscemi) death bed to deal with the guilt of something from their past in Handsome Harry. Harry travels to the remaining members of his old Navy unit (including Aidan Quinn and John Savage) to ask them each about the night they savagely beat David Kagan, one of their own... a night he can barely remember. If Harry can piece together the story, then maybe he can find Kagan (Campbell Scott) and ask his forgiveness.

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Set during a rainy summer in a small town, the French comedy Let It Rain stars Agnes Jaoui as Agathe Villanova, an acclaimed feminist author. Traveling to the country to put her childhood home up for sale, she's followed by Jean-Pierre Bacri, who wants to make a documentary film about her. The comedy of class and station unfolds between the filmmaker, Agathe's family, and Jamel Debbouze, whose mother has worked for the Villanovas all her life.

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Will (Patrick Wilson) is an architect who lives by his designs in Life In Flight, and has designed himself a perfect life: a good career, a wife (Amy Smart), and a son. While working on a project that seems to be cursed, he partners with a talented designer (Lynn Collins) and the chemistry between the two of them make Will second guess the "perfect" life he's constructed for himself.

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This week's entry into Reckless Video's TV New Releases is the 2nd season of the Showtime drama The United States of Tara, rejoining the story of Tara's treatment for dissociative identity disorder and her struggles to lead a normal life under trying circumstances.

Week of December 21

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Lies, Façades, and Misplaced Trust

Angelina Jolie is CIA agent Evelyn Salt in Philip Noyce's thriller Salt, suddenly on the run when a Russian defector (Daniel Olbrychski) arrives at her office and names her as a Russian spy. Her longtime friend, agent, and boss (Liev Schreiber) trusts her, a counter-intelligence agent (Chiwetel Ejiofor) wants to interrogate her, but they both chase her as she flees from capture and becomes entangled in a web of deep-cover Russian agents planning to topple the United States. Salt can never be sure if anyone is who they seem to be, and no one knows if they can trust her: is her chase and trail of destruction Evelyn's fight to save the government or to destroy it? On DVD and Blu Ray.

Set 23 years after his own Oscar-winning Wall Street, Oliver Stone rejoins the unscrupulous Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. When Jake (Shia LaBeouf), a young trader, finds out his fiance (Carey Mulligan) is the Gekko's estranged daughter, he seeks out his legendary father-in-law to be. Jake begins working for Bretton James (Josh Brolin), the man who destroyed his beloved father-figure and boss (Frank Langella), while Gekko's deviousness begins to infect him as Jake's own practices become more morally ambiguous. Secretly trading business strategy for reconciliation with his daughter, Gordon develops a relationship with Jake, but they both have their own secrets and plans, and both have to survive Wall Street during the turmoil of the 2008 bail out. On DVD and Blu Ray.

Quick witted and bright Olive (Emma Stone) ends her highschool anonymity in Easy A-- a lie about losing her virginity to an imaginary boyfriend is overheard by Marianne (Amanda Bynes), the crusading leader of a puritanical church group... someone who spreads the gossip through the school. By pretending to have sex with a gay classmate (Dan Byrd), Olive rescues him from his violent, homophobic classmates and furthers her bad girl image. She flaunts her fictitious scandal by stitching a red "A" onto her clothes, a la The Scarlet Letter (assigned to her class by Thomas Haden Church, her favorite teacher) as Marianne crusades to have her thrown out of school... but as Olive's new image threatens to destroy her life, she finds that she can't un-tell her own lies. With Penn Badgley. On DVD and Blu Ray.

Quarantine director John Erick Dowdle helms the first entry in producer M. Night Shyamalan's "The Night Series"-- Devil traps five strangers in an elevator: a security guard, an elderly woman, a salesman, an ex-Marine, and a woman of uncertain means. As the elevator lights flicker out and they are killed off, one by one, each of them reveals an unsavory past that may have won them their harm, and a terrifying truth that something else is in locked in the elevator with them. With Chris Messina. On DVD and Blu Ray.

"If you meet your double, you should kill him. Or that he will kill you... two of you is one too many. By the end of the script, one of you must die."

The strangely meta Double Take is a Hitchcockian "wrong man" thriller about Alfred Hitchcock himself. Investigating the concept of doubles along with newsreel and television footage from the Cold War era, the film combines a paranoid short story and the question of identity into a semi-documentary about reality, truth, and self.

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Dramas

Ned (Ben Mendelsohn) returns to his family's isolate, Australian home to visit his dying father (Bryan Brown) in Beautiful Kate. Accompanied by his young fiance (Maeve Dermody), Ned reunites with his family, but being home unearths old memories of his twin sister, Kate, and his older brother, Cliff; as he remembers more of his past, he begins to understand more of the family's secrets, and has to try and control the impact they'll have on his present.

Set in early 1900s Britain, Angel is the first English language film by director Francois Ozon. Angel Deverell (Romola Garai) begins as a willful and imaginative teenager who writes fanciful novels, dreaming up a world where she's adored and respected. When a publisher (Sam Neill) and his wife (Charlotte Rampling) embrace her work, Angel's reality becomes the kind of larger-than-life melodrama she writes and daydreams about. With Lucy Russell and Michael Fassbender.

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Moose, who promised not to street dance anymore, is studying electrical engineering at NYU, but he stumbles into a dance battle in Step Up 3. Winning the battle, he joins a tightly knit dance troupe with Rick Malambri and Alyson Stoner. Without enough time for both studying and practicing with his crew, Moose has choose between his academic career and embracing his love of dancing.

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Makoto is a normal girl who has one bad day that should end with her flying over her handlebars into an oncoming train, but after the crash, she wakes up a few minutes before the train arrives in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. When she realizes she can jump back in time to relive moments she'd like to fix, Makoto uses her new power for trivial things, but every inconvenience she saves herself ends up affecting someone else. She begins to understand the consequences of her actions when she discovers the limits of her time leaps, and the tragedies she set in motion that she may not be able to fix.

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Misha Collins is a controversial scientist in SyFy's Stonehenge Apocalypse, and he discovers disturbances in the earth's electromagnetic field. His readings suggest Stonehenge is part of an ancient machine that could destroy the earth, and he joins an elite team to prevent a doomsday cult (led by Hill Harper) from using Stonehenge to bring about the end of the world.

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New this week in Reckless Video's TV New Releases are the second half of the Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica, the return of science fiction comedy Futurama, and Family Guy's take on Return of the Jedi: It's a Trap!

We also have a Christmas Classics Sing-A-Long DVD, collecting songs from Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph, and Santa Clause Is Comin to Town (among others), and two Miffy and Friends discs: Miffy's Christmas Tree and Miffy's Adventure.

Week of December 14

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Flash and Spectacle

Director Joe Carnahan delivers the origin story of a group of 80's action icons with The A-Team, jumping into a mission with Hannibal Smith (Liam Neeson) and Faceman Peck (Bradley Cooper) as they meet B.A. Baracus and Howling Mad Murdock (Sharlto Copley) and become an unstoppable team. Framed by a devious CIA agent (Patrick Wilson) and pursued by a DCIS lieutenant (Jessica Biel), the team is on the run and must out fight, out run, and out plan everyone that's chasing them and clear their names. On DVD and Blu Ray.

Soren (Jim Sturgess) is a young owl who dreams of the epic adventures he hears in legends when he and his brother Kludd (Ryan Kwanten) are captured by a nation of evil owls in Zack Snyder's Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole. Imprisoned by Metalbeak (Joel Edgerton) and Nyra (Helen Mirren) who are brainwashing their captives, Kludd is taken in by them, but Soren escapes to find his legendary guardians and ask them to help wage a war to stop the evil owls and free their prisoners. With Sam Neill and Geoffrey Rush. On DVD and Blu Ray.

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Unconventional Families

Supervillain Gru (Steve Carell) is afraid he's being upstaged by Vector (Jason Segel), a new villain who's stealing the world's monuments. To prove his worth, Gru has to steal Vector's shrink ray and then shrink and steal the moon in Despicable Me... but Vector's defenses only seem to have one weakness: he opens his fortress for three orphan girls selling cookies door to door. Gru works out a cookie-based strategy, but in order to make it work he needs to adopt the girls; now he has to orchestrate an evil scheme while being a dad. Can he be a supervillain while he's taking the girls to Super Silly Fun Land and dance recitals? On DVD and Blu Ray.

Isabel Green (Maggie Gyllenhaal) has her hands full trying to keep up the family farm, run a village shop with Maggie Smith, and care for her three rambunctious children while her husband is away fighting during WWII. When she suddenly has to care for her spoiled niece and nephew, she needs some magical help in Nanny McPhee Returns, and while Nanny McPhee (Emma Thompson) can stop the two groups of kids from warring amongst themselves, Isabel's disreputable brother-in-law (Rhys Ifans) might be more trouble than anyone can handle.

A more adult film about family, Jay & Mark Duplass's Cyrus sees John (John C. Reilly), seven years divorced, finally starting up a new relationship with Molly (Marisa Tomei), who lives with Cyrus (Jonah Hill) her 21-year-old son. When John tries to pursue his romance with Molly, he finds that the relationship between mother and son is more intimate than he expected, and Cyrus might see him as an intruder and a threat.
Bazil (Dany Boon) catches a stray bullet in the head that costs him everything and nearly costs him his life in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Micmacs. When he's taken in by "Slammer" (Jean-Pierre Marielle), Bazil joins a group of misfits that live underneath a junkyard who adopt him as one of their own. When he decides to strike back at the people who made the weapons that unraveled his life, Bazil uses his new family (and their unique talents) to compose an elaborate revenge caper. On DVD and Blu Ray.

Karen's (Annette Bening) whole adult life has been shaped by giving her daughter, Elizabeth, up for adoption when she was 14 in Mother and Child. Now in her late thirties, fiercely independent Elizabeth (Naomi Watts) is a successful lawyer driven to be in control of her own life; neither mother or daughter have tried to contact the other. Meanwhile, Lucy (Kerry Washington) and her husband are seeking to adopt a baby because they can't have one of their own. As the mothers and daughters work through the adoptions that dominate their lives, they each begin to understand their own paths to happiness. With Jimmy Smits and Samuel L. Jackson.

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Cops and Robbers

Desk bound detectives Allen and Hoitz (Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg) aren't the "car chase and explosion" cops like Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson... they're The Other Guys. Too egotistical to realize they're not immortal, the hero cops jump from a 20 story building while chasing bank robbers, leaving laughingstocks Allen and Hoitz to fill the gap. Though Allen is more interested in investigating accounting than the kind of high profile work Hoitz prefers, one of Allen's permit violation cases puts the duo on the trail of Steve Coogan's multi-billion dollar scheme: a serious case than could make them heroes, if they can survive the gunfights, Ray Stevenson, and each other. On DVD and Blu Ray.

The directorial follow-up to his acclaimed Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affeck's The Town is the story of a group of Bostonian hijackers and bank robbers. Jem (Jeremy Renner), fresh out of prison and eager to pull another job, re-teams with Doug (Ben Affleck) and his crew only to have a bank job turn sour... which causes hot-headed Jem takes a hostage (Rebecca Hall). While Doug keeps up with their former hostage and the two begin to form a relationship, an FBI agent (Jon Hamm) starts to find ways to take apart the underground fraternity of heist men. With Pete Postlethwaite and Blake Lively. On DVD and Blu Ray.

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Documentaries

A film about a film about street artists, Exit through the Gift Shop is directed by the street artist Banksy. Originally, casual filmmaker Thierry Guetta, who fell in love with street art and filmed all the artists he could, intended to make a film about Banksy; once Thierry had thousands of hours of footage, Banksy turned around and made the movie about Thierry, his obsession with art, and what does or doesn't separate art from product and hype... all of which may or may not be real.

The critically acclaimed Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work looks at the long professional life of Joan Rivers, and all of the peaks and valleys she's traversed over a decades-long career. Spending time behind the scenes as she continues to work on television, in clubs, and commercials, and the effects of her singular drive to keep her status in show business.

Documentary filmmaker Linda Hattendorf went to find artist Jimmy Mirikitani in the aftermath of 9/11in The Cats of Mirikitani. The film explores the painter's life selling art on the streets of New York, his history during World War II, and eventually to his life in the fallout of the World Trade Center, where he was still on the streets around Washington Square Park.

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Based on actual events, Dear Mr. Gacy tells the story of Jason Moss (Jesse Moss) who, in trying to write a thesis paper, began writing letters to notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy (William Forsythe). Posing as a victim in Gacy's "type," the two begin to develop a relationship as Gacy writes to and calls Moss, and Moss allows Gacy to believe he's seducing a vulnerable young man.

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New this week to Reckless Video's TV New Releases are the 8th and final season of 24, and the 4th season of the British comedy The IT Crowd.

Week of December 7

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The World of the Mind

Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) stages elaborate heists in Christopher Nolan's Inception, but instead of bank vaults he breaks into dreams, stealing secrets instead of physical wealth. Few people believe an idea can be put in to someone's mind (as opposed to taking one out), but he's hired by an entrepreneur (Ken Watanabe) to place a new thought into the mind of a competitor (Cillian Murphy) because Cobb is the only person who's ever effectively implanted an idea into someone's dream. With such a delicate (and dangerous) job, he needs to put together an expert team of his "point man" (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a forger (Tom Hardy) who can take on different identities within dreams, an architect (Ellen Page) to design the worlds inside minds, and a chemist (Dileep Rao) to design the custom sedatives to keep them all in the dream world. Cobb is the only one who can lead the near-impossible mission, but his jobs are haunted by a ghost (Marion Cotillard) in his own mind that could destroy the entire team. On DVD and Blu Ray.

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Holidays

Based on the holiday classic It's a Wonderful Life, Mike Myers stars in Shrek Forever After where he feels less like a "real ogre" and more like a suburban dad, but a wish brings him to an alternate world where he's still feared by villagers but never met the people he loves in his real life. Helped by a Donkey (Eddie Murphy) who doesn't recognize him (but believes his story), Shrek has to fight against fate and once again win the heart of Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz) to reverse the wish and get his life back. On DVD and Blu Ray.

Zeus is a former police dog is adopted from the pound as an early Christmas present in The Dog Who Saved Christmas, but when he's left alone on Christmas Eve and burglars try to break in, the dog has to protect his new house, Home Alone-style. When the family goes to a ski resort in The Dog Who Saved Christmas Vacation, Zeus has a hard time fitting in with the other dogs but gets to prove his worth when the burglars return for another robbery, and Zeus gets to save the day. With Dean Cain.

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Being a responsible adult

Barry Munday (Patrick Wilson) is a commitment-free womanizer when a girl's father catches them in a movie theater and beats him so badly that Barry's hospitalized and has to have his testicles removed. When a woman from a one-night stand he doesn't remember (Judy Greer) files a paternity suit against him, Barry sees it as his only chance to be a father. Even though she can't stand him, Barry tries to be a part of her life and be useful parent-to-be. With Mae Whitman, Malcolm McDowell, and Chloe Sevigny.

Jeff Bridges is a frustrated writer in A Dog Year when he adopts a border collie named Devon who seems, at first, to be the "dog from hell." Devon acts out and seems untrainable because of his troubled past, but if Bridges is going to help the dog, he has to become a more compassionate man to have any effect. With Lauren Ambrose, Lois Smith, and Welker White.

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Documentaries

A pair of documentary filmmakers joined a US Army platoon for a year to film Restrepo, even accompanying them into the Korengal Valley, known as "the most dangerous place in the world," in 2007. The documentary is cut together from over 150 hours of footage, creating a critically acclaimed and realistic portrait of modern warfare and the soldiers in the field.

Best Worst Movie looks into the phenomenon of Troll 2, considered by some to be the worst movie ever made. Focusing on the festivals and screenings put on by the film's rabid cult following, the documentary reunites the cast and crew and gets behind the scenes of a well loved (but terrible) movie.

The story of Pacific Northwest Ballet's Sokvannara "Sy" Sar, discovered doing traditional dance in Cambodia, and Anne Bass, the dance patron who saw Sy's talent and took him to America. Considered too old to begin studying ballet, Dancing Across Borders follows Sy to school in New York and his eventual success in Seattle, covering his unique rise to acclaim in the dance world.