Susan’s DVD Update for week of Friday, July 23:
With a kinetic musical charge of female empowerment, “The Runaways” is a biopic about the rise and fall of the ‘70s most influential all-girl band with “Twilight’s” Kristen Stewart strutting as Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning stealing the picture as Cherie Curie.
“Our Family Wedding” is a sweetly amiable, yet hackneyed and cliché-laden culture clash comedy about the travails of a Latino bride (America Ferrera from “Ugly Betty”) and her African-American groom (Lance Gross from “House of Payne”), proving once again that when you marry someone, you marry their entire family.
For those who like mindless mayhem, “The Losers” centers around renegade Special Forces soldiers, led by Jeffrey Dean Morgan and bankrolled by sexy, secretive Zoe Saldana, who vow revenge against a CIA betrayal that set them up for slaughter.
Aptly named “Cop Out” is Kevin Smith’s grossed-out, interracial buddy action comedy, teaming Bruce Willis with Tracy Morgan as longtime NYPD partners who become involved with a baseball-loving Mexican drug kingpin (Guillermo Diaz).
Artsy Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s slow, sordid “Chloe,” starring Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson and Amanda Seyfried, is an edgy, psychosexual “Fatal Attraction”-type thriller that turns out to be little more than soft-core pornography, revolving around a scorned woman.
Ric Burns’ PBS documentary “Into the Deep: America, Whaling and the World” is equal parts fantastic sea adventure, mythic saga of man-vs.-beast, and cautionary economic and environmental tale, exploring the fate of the infamous whaleship Essex, interwoven with the story of the young Herman Melville, who later wrote “Moby Dick.”
For tots, there’s “Thomas & Friends: Creaky Cranky” and “Music, Music Everywhere” with Barney, Bob the Builder, Thomas & Friends, Kipper and Angelina Ballerina.
PICKS OF THE WEEK: The documentary “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers” is as powerful as any fictional thriller. Directed by Judith Erlich and Rick Goldsmith, it details how disillusioned Ellsberg risked spending the rest of his life in prison to reveal how a litany of lies by five Presidents, from Truman to Nixon, fueled the U.S. war in Vietnam.