Susan Granger’s DVD Update for week of Friday, July 5:
Coming to DVD this Independence Day weekend, “Death by China” is Harvard-trained economist Peter Navarro’s alarming and alarmist documentary about the history and implications of the imbalanced U.S.-China trade relationship. Narrated by Martin Sheen, it gives background insight into the recent meetings between President Obama and China’s President Xi Jinping.
Alexander Siddig, Marisa Tomei and Joshua Jackson star in in the tense “Inescapable,” about a
Canadian businessman but must confront his past as a former Syrian military intelligence officer when his journalist daughter suddenly disappears in his hometown of Damascus.
Julianne Moore stars in the eerie, supernatural thriller “Six Souls,” as a forensic psychiatrist who specializes in debunking criminals’ claims of insanity and is challenged by a curious patien (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who convincingly shifts from one personality to another.
Taking responsibility for your own life is a difficult lesson, particularly if you have a self destructive personality like the sullen, south Texas mother (Abbie Cornish) who has lost custody of her five-year old son in writer/director David Riker’s “The Girl.”
Tennis fans should enjoy “Venus and Serena,” a documentary love letter to the African-American
Williams sisters, who left South Central Los Angeles to take the lily-white world of tennis by storm.
For film buffs, “56 Up” and “The Up Series” box set is a collection of Michael Apted’s ground-breaking documentary series, based on the belief: “Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” And there’s a new 20-film “Best of Warner Bros. Comedy Collection,” combining classics with modern favorites.
For foreign film aficianados, “The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu” is an exhaustive – and
exhausting – three-hour epic by Romanian filmmaker Andrej Ujica, meticulously chronicling the 25 year (1965-1989) reign of an arrogant, autocratic 20th century dictator.
PICK OF THE WEEK: “The House I Live In” is Eugene Jarecki’s award-winning documentary, dissecting America’s 40 year-long War on Drugs. Costing $1 trillion and resulting in 45 million
arrests, it’s failed to successfully address the problem, yet has made the US the world’s leading jailer, with 2.3 million people behind bars.