Susan Granger’s DVD Update for week of Fri., June 22:
Chaos reigns in “Project X,” a crude teen comedy about an unsupervised 17th birthday celebration filled with reckless revelers, a party that was unwittingly initiated by sex-starved Thomas Mann, Oliver Cooper and Jonathan Daniel Brown.
In the silly rom-com “Wanderlust,” Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd are a stressed-out Manhattan couple who, en route to Atlanta, stumble on Elysium, a seemingly idyllic, rural Utopia, run by a resident guru (Justin Theroux) and filled with colorful, carefree eccentrics.
Two good-natured slackers (Jason Ritter, Jake Sandvig) are forced to grow up in “A Bag of Hammers” when parenthood is thrust upon them in the form of an abandoned 12 year-old (Chandler Canterbury).
Nicolas Cage stars in “Seeking Justice” as a happily married man whose life is turned upside-down when his wife (January Jones) is brutally attacked one night and he’s approached by a stranger (Guy Pearce) offering to arrange to have a complete stranger exact vengeance – for a price.
Set in snowy Kenosha, Wisconsin, “Thin Ice” is a crime saga about a shady insurance agent (Greg Kinnear) whose scheme to steal a valuable violin from an unsuspecting old geezer (Alan Arkin) gets derailed by a volatile burglar-alarm installer (Billy Crudup).
The Duplass brothers’ “Jeff, Who Lives at Home” is an absurdist art-house comedy, detailing a cosmic incident in the drab life of a stoner (Jason Segel).
Paralleling the life of a legend and the birth of cinema, “Mary Pickford: The Muse of the Movies” chronicles how she became the first and only movie star ever to command 50% of a film’s revenue.
For French film aficionados, “My Afternoons With Margueritte” relates the subtly compassionate relationship between a lonely, illiterate construction worker (Gerard Depardieu) and a fragile, elderly lady (Gisele Casadesus) who reads aloud to him on a park bench.
PICK OF THE WEEK: As told by a young Inuit boy, the family-friendly, feel-good “Big Miracle” reveals the real-life rescue by a local TV newscaster (John Krasinski) and an avid Greenpeace organizer (Drew Barrymore) of three stranded gray whales, trapped under the ice near Barrow, Alaska.