You could describe Take Shelter (Sony), the second feature from the talented Jeff Nichols, as an apocalyptic thriller, but this is a different kind of horror.

Working class husband and father Curtis LaForche, played with sincere compassion and palpable anxiety by Michael Shannon, has visions of an Armageddon of Biblical proportions: black rain, Earth-scorching storms, birds gone mad. In most horror films, this would be his gateway to a greater understanding of powers beyond the realm of science. Here, they chart his slide into schizophrenia and the terror of the visions are made all the more devastating by his self-awareness. He’s watching his own descent into obsession and mental illness. Which doesn’t mean the visions aren’t real.

Shannon, so often cast as intimidating toughs and psychos, gives the role a startling fragility. His rough-hewn face and sturdy intensity are focused here on protecting his family, and his outward strength only makes his inward helplessness more agonizing, and Jessica Chastain meets his strength head-on, equally terrified by his transformation but determined to help him through.

Director/writer Jeff Nichols, whose debut film Shotgun Stories also starred Shannon in an emotionally intense and conflicted role, takes us through Curtis’ nightmarish visions but keeps his story and his ordeal rooted in the real world. The way they struggle through as he loses his job and sinks them into debt echoes with the very real anxieties of many Americans, but this isn’t simply some metaphor for the stress of economic hardship on American families. This cuts to the soul.

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Quentin Tarantino made his second foray into television directing in CSI: Grave Danger (Paramount), the two-part finale to the fifth season of the hit procedural series.

It is arguably the high water mark of the show to date, like a mini-movie set within the CSI universe, and Tarantino (a long time fan of the show) is true to that television universe while expanding it, riffing on the characters and the conventions through his own sensibilities. You can see the Tarantino touch in his pop-culture references, entertaining dialogue digressions, and inspired celeb guest spots (Tony Curtis, Frank Gorshin, John Saxon), but his real contribution is the way he connects to the characters and draws on their backstories while they search for their kidnapped colleague (George Eads). Gus Grissom (William Peterson) uses his entomology expertise, Catherine (Marg Helgenberger) calls on her gangster father (Scott Wilson) for a favor, and the rest of the crew pitches in doing whatever needs to be done.

Tarantino slows the pace of the show to his own rhythm (it was initially slated to be a single episode, but as the producers watched the dailies stretch the running, they decided to expand rather than cut) and stirs in plenty of narrative play and sharp turns, but he remains true to the character and style of the show and the integrity of its characters. It’s the rare Tarantino production that isn’t R-rated.

Previously available in the “Season Five” DVD collection, this Blu-ray+DVD two-disc set includes the first Blu-ray release of the episode, and allows Tarantino fans to add it to their collection without springing for the entire season. Also includes the featurette “CSI: Tarantino Style” from the earlier set.

Life, death, faith, hope, and the proposition that we live in a bleak, godless universe are debated over the course of a long day in this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s play, adapted by the author and produced and directed for HBO by Tommy Lee Jones.

It’s what’s known as a “two-hander” in stage parlance and this production is stripped down to the core: a single set – a run-down tenement apartment in a New York City slum – and two unnamed characters, with the world outside suggested by sound effects, the changing light and weather out the window, and the dialogue. Jones is an atheist and philosophy professor who has just tried to kill himself (he jumped in front of a train, the Sunset Limited of the title) and Samuel L. Jackson is the ex-con who spends the day trying to talk him out of suicide.

There is nothing new in this debate, which frames many of the themes McCarthy explores in his novels as a meeting of diametrically opposed perspectives on life, and at times it borders on the didactic. But it’s a civil debate between strangers who respect one another, McCarthy’s language is marvelous (both highly symbolic and down to earth) and the performances are engaging: Jones calmly resigned to a dark nihilism, Jackson meeting the professor’s bleak philosophical pronouncements with jailhouse stories, Bible lessons and folk wisdom, all delivered  with a smile. Jones tries to create a sense of movement with his camerawork but it is very much a photographed play with two powerhouse actors lobbing meaty dialogue back and forth with such command they make it look easy.

Blu-ray and DVD, with commentary by director/executive producer/actor Tommy Lee Jones, writer Cormac McCarthy, and actor Samuel L. Jackson, and a brief featurette.

More TV on DVD at Videodrone

A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas (New Line) gets the “truth in advertising” award for 2011 releases. It was actually originally titled A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas and that’s what the credits read on the DVD and Blu-ray, even though only the Blu-ray 3D edition (which, of course, only plays on 3D compatible Blu-ray players and monitors) features the added dimension. And yet the blatant way the film throws anything and everything at the screen is almost funnier in 2D, as the pure visual exploitation is even more obvious.

3D aside, this Christmas stoner odyssey is, as the title promises, very Harold and Kumar (as embodied by John Cho and Kal Penn). Which means there is copious smoking, an insane amount of other illegal substances (some of them directed to a toddler who takes on almost superhuman powers between giggling fits), rampant racial jokes, a clay animation interlude, and Neil Patrick Harris back in action as a sleazy, sex-addicted, crack-smoking miscreant – and that’s after his big song and dance number!

The DVD features three minutes of deleted scenes and an Ultraviolet digital copy, for download and instant streaming. The standard Blu-ray features the R-rated theatrical version plus an extended “Extra Dope Edition” that runs six minutes longer, a short featurette on the Claymation sequence and a collection of comic featurettes with Tom Lennon, plus a bonus DVD version. The Blu-ray 3D Combo Pack is a three disc set with all the above plus the 3D version in a separate disc.

More New Releases at Videodrone

Downton Abbey: Season 2 (PBS) offers the entire second series of the British costume drama that has addicted so many American viewers in its “Masterpiece Classic” showings that it’s been nicknamed “Edwardian Crack.” Yeah, it’s a crude American remark about a classy British production, but it’s oddly appropriate. “Downton Abbey” is an elegantly-mounted production with the look and lavish detail of a feature film, but it is also an unabashed soap opera with pure melodrama under the social register credentials. Which is part of the fun.

Creator / writer Julian Fellowes (Oscar winner for his “Gosford Park” screenplay) marries the “Upstairs Downstairs” template of that film with the stately style of recent British literary telefilms and miniseries, dropping into the Edwardian era of the 1910s, to chronicle the last generation of this kind of class society, where the servants – at least those born to the service career – are as invested in the social culture of manners and conventions as the aristocrats they serve.

This series is even more eventful than the first, what with World War I adding to the romantic complications, scandals, and power plays on both sides of the class divide. Even turning the manor house into a military hospital doesn’t ruffle their decorum (though it does upend their daily routine). Through it all, Lady Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery) and heir apparent Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) continue dancing around their mutual attraction even as they get engaged to others, Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) tries to find some kind of purpose while younger men fight overseas, Mr. Carson (Jim Carter) strives to run a tight household on limited staff and the Dowager Countess of Grantham (Maggie Smith) grouses over every break with tradition and the proper respect that she feels must always be given to the aristocracy.

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Martin Scorsese’s Hugo will be released on Blu-ray and DVD on February 28.

To tide you over until its release, here’s a short featurette on the making of the film (expect it on the disc).

11 sassy, sexy and sometimes stiff early sound pictures with attitude from the Warner Archive.

When Hollywood was trying to find its way in the early sound era, learning to work around the sudden production constrictions imposed by sound recording and editing while struggling to find its own distinctive voice and delivery, it was also getting downright racy. It flaunted the sexual play of unmarried couples (and worse, the affairs of married characters with other partners), the flagrant boozing at the height of prohibition, and the thrill of bad behavior, which it presented without the requisite lessons learned soon to be imposed on Hollywood productions by the Production Code, reluctantly accepted by the studios (the alternative was separate censorship boards in each state, a much more demanding and expensive proposition for the film industry to deal with).

Dorothy Mackaill in 'Safe in Hell'

Not all the pre-code movies took that attitude, of course, but a couple of decades ago a handful of sauciest of these otherwise forgotten films were branded with the promise of “Forbidden Hollywood” for a retrospective that led to a line of VHS releases, followed by laserdisc and, finally, DVD. And while most of the best of these films have already been resurrected and released – I’m talking about Night Nurse, Baby Face, Heroes For Sale, Wild Boys of the Road, Murder at the Vanities, Three on a Match, not to mention Scarface and Bride of Frankenstein (this attitude is not limited to any one genre) to name just a few – there are still films to discovered and savored, in some cases for just a scene, in other for a full length appreciation.

All of which is introduction to a wealth of pre-code titles recently made available via manufacture-on-demand DVD-R from the Warner Archive. It’s a mixed collection, by which I mean there are some real discoveries here along with some misfires, and Safe in Hell (1931), a kind of B-movie riff on Sadie Thompson (the original bad girl in the tropics melodrama) directed with a brutally by William Wellman, and its star Dorothy Mackaill are the most exciting of said discoveries.

Continune reading on Parallax View

New Releases:

“Drive” (Sony), the sleek pulp crime cool-meets-art-house​ style thriller starring Ryan Gosling as a taciturn getaway driver, was an Oscar favorite when it debuted in the fall. Why it was left in the dust is something of a mystery, even with the critical backlash against its neon noir stylings and romanticized gangster movie tropes (see Glenn Kenny’s review on MSN). And almost everyone agrees that Albert Brooks was criminally overlooked by the Academy for his superb creation of a genially ruthless L.A. mobster. Director Nicolas Winding Refn embraces the genre with all his love of underworld tragedy and Gosling gives his unnamed hero an enigmatic chivalry. On Blu-ray, DVD, digital download and OnDemand. Videodrone’s review is here.

“In Time” (Fox) is a science fiction thriller where life energy has become a commodity and Justin Timberlake becomes a kind of “time bandit” and the future of class warfare. But according to MSN film critic Kat Murphy, the film from writer/director Andrew Niccol is “short on substance and style.” Amanda Seyfried and Cillian Murphy co-star. MSN has an exclusive deleted scene here. “The Thing” (2011) (Universal), a prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 modern classic, combines horror and science fiction in a lukewarm attempt to create chills from an alien invasion thriller. Both on Blu-ray, DVD, digital download and OnDemand.

Steve Martin, Owen Wilson and Jack Black are bird watchers in the comedy “The Big Year” (Fox), which MSN film critic Glenn Kenny recommends, and Richard Gere and Topher Grace star in the spy thriller “The Double” (Image).

“The Mill and the Cross” (Kino Lorber), a thoughtful and visually inventive drama about the story behind Peiter Bruegel’s legendary painting “The Way to Calvary,” is Videodrone’s indie pick of the week (Blu-ray and DVD), while MSN film critic James Rocchi recommends the upbeat music documentary “Thunder Soul” (Lionsgate).

Also new this week: the haunted house story “Dream House” (Universal) with Daniel Craig and Naomi Watts, the drama “Janie Jones” (Tribeca/New Video) with Abigail Breslin and Alessandro Nivola, the crime thriller “Texas Killing Fields” (Anchor Bay) with Sam Worthington, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Jessica Chastain, the documentaries “The Other F Word” (Oscilloscope) and “Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles” (eOne), and Takeshi Kitano’s mob-war action film “Outrage: Way of the Yakuza” (Magnolia) from Japan.

Browse the complete New Release Rack here

TV on DVD:

“Star Trek: The Next Generation – The Next Level” (Paramount) is essentially a Blu-ray sampler, a single-disc featuring three episodes of the show remastered from the original 35mm film elements for Blu-ray, including enhanced special effects from the original elements. Features the double-length pilot, plus “Sins of the Father” (Season Three, Worf visit the Klingon high command) and “The Inner Light”  (Season Five, Picard lives a lifetime in an instant). Blu-ray only, no supplements. Videodrone’s review is here.

“The Comic Strip Presents: The Complete Collection” (eOne) presents the entire run of the anarchic British comedy series of the eighties, starring many of the defining comic talents of the era (including Robbie Coltrane, Adrian Edmondson, Dawn French, Rik Mayall, Jennifer Saunders, and Alexei Sayle). 39 episodes on nine discs, plus the feature film “The Supergrass” (1988) and bonus featurettes.

“Agatha Christie’s Poirot: Series One” (Acorn) remasters the popular British mystery series starring David Suchet for Blu-ray and DVD and presents them in original U.K. Broadcast order, while “Poldark: The Complete Collection” (Acorn) simply boxes up the two previously release DVD sets.

Flip through the TV on DVD Channel Guide here

Cool, Classic and Cult:

“Transformers: Dark of the Moon – Blu-ray 3D Combo” (Universal) delivers the Blu-ray 3D debut of the film along with all the supplements you could want from a Michael Bay extravaganza, including a nearly two-hour documentary on the making of the film, plus bonus 2D Blu-ray and DVD copies of the film. Videodrone’s review is here.

“To Kill a Mockingbird: 50th Anniversary” (Universal) presents the beloved Oscar-winning drama, based on Harper Lee’s novel and starring Gregory Peck, in a newly-remastered edition for its Blu-ray debut. It features all the supplements of the earlier DVD special edition plus a bonus DVD and digital copy. Also available on DVD. Videodrone’s review is here.

“Australia After Dark” (Intervision) and “The ABCs of Love and Sex, Australia Style” (Intervision) are exploitation films from the wild days of Australian seventies filmmaking, and “Monsignor” (Shout! Factory) is a 1982 melodrama starring Christopher Reeve as a priest who breaks the commandments while serving the Pope.

All of the Cool, Classic and Cult here

Blu-ray Debuts:

“Fernando di Leo Crime Collection” (Raro) presents the Blu-ray debut of four Italian gangster movie classics from the seventies from the director that Quentin Tarantino called “the master” of the genre, and offers a sharper image and a more accurate preservation of the original film. Videodrone’s review is here.

You can tell it’s Oscar season when the studios pull past winners out of the vault for new home video editions. Debuting on Blu-ray this week are Oscar winners “Shakespeare in Love” (Lionsgate), “The English Patient” (Lionsgate), “The Piano” (Lionsgate), “Cold Mountain” (Lionsgate), and “Adaptation” (Image), and Oscar nominees “Frida” (Lionsgate) and “Malcolm X” (Warner). Meanwhile, the five-disc “Best Picture Academy Award Winners” (Lionsgate) includes the new “Shakespeare” and “English Patient” discs along with the previously released “Chicago,” “Crash,” and “No Country for Old Men.

Peruse all the new Blu-rays here

New on Netflix Instant:

The Oscar-nominated documentary “Hell and Back Again” (Docurama) has just been made available. More on Videodrone here.

Older titles debuting on the service include “Conspiracy Theory” (1997) with Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts, the warm, low-key drama “Breaking Away” (1979) with Dennis Christopher and Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern, Robert Aldrich’s satirical “The Longest Yard” (1974) with Burt Reynolds as a pro football bad boy behind bars, plus the more demanding 2006 drama “Babel” (2006) with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett and Martin Scorsese’s controversial “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988).

Shuffle through more Instant offerings here

Available from Redbox this week:

Day and date with video stores: “Drive,” “The Double,” and “Texas Killing Fields” (see above).

Also arriving in Redbox kiosks this week:

“Contagion” (Warner), Steven Soderbergh uses his camera lens as a kind of microscope to study the effects of a fictional pandemic. It’s an eerie medical thriller with a very different atmosphere than the usual disaster film.

“Shark Night” (Universal) sends seven comely college kids to Louisiana lake that is filled with sharks. What more do you need to know?

Redbox DVD flashback this week is “Ghost Rider,” the comic-book movie flop with Nicolas Cage as a motorcycle stunt driver turned into “the Devil’s bounty hunter,” a demon rider with a flaming skull for a head. Can’t recommend this one, but with the sequel set for 2012 release, there is that impulse to catch up…

For calendar of upcoming releases, click here

Nine Oscars

You can tell it’s Oscar season when the studios pull past winners out of the vault for new home video editions. Leading the week’s debuts of Oscar winners on Blu-ray are The English Patient (Lionsgate), with nine Academy Awards (including Best Picture and Best Director), and Shakespeare in Love (Lionsgate), with seven wins (including Best Picture). These two films are testament to the ability of Harvey Weinstein to promote his classy fare into Oscar gold over the bigger-budgeted studio features and their better funded campaigns. Which is not to say it’s all about the race, mind you, just that industry politics have as much to do with votes as film quality.

The English Patient (1996) is a lushly romantic drama adapted from Michael Ondaatje’s novel by director Anthony Minghella. Set in the African desert for World War II and starring the intense Ralph Fienned, the elegant Kristin Scott Thomas and the angelic Juliette Binoche, it could be “Casablanca” for the nineties, delivering both romantic tragedy (the end of the old world of privilege) and rebirth (the beginning of a new egalitarian world) in an old fashioned/new-age romance with the most beautiful people and gorgeous costumes you ever saw survive a trek through the desert. Features two commentary tracks, the hour-long documentary “Black and White to Color: The Making of The English Patient,” interviews, deleted scenes and numerous production featurettes.

Shakespeare in Love (Lionsgate), John Madden’s love letter to the romance of art and the art of romance, is a fantasy of the Bard’s life as seen through the conventions of his own cross-dressing farces and refracted through a modern sensibility. Gwyneth Paltrow turns the role of her career into pure laughter and love (who would doubt this willowy goddess is Shakespeare’s muse?), Joseph Fiennes plays the young Shakespeare as a writer inspired by the rush of a secret affair, and Geoffrey Rush slurs the romantic mantra through his artistically rotted teeth: “Everything always works out in the end.” “How?” “I don’t know, it’s a mystery.” Features two commentary tracks (one by Madden, one by the cast and crew), deleted scenes and two featurettes.

More Blu-ray reviews at Videodrone

To Kill a Mockingbird: 50th Anniversary (Universal) presents the beloved Oscar-winning drama, based on Harper Lee’s novel and starring Gregory Peck, in a newly-remastered edition for its Blu-ray debut. The quiet, understated drama of this classic seems to actually improve with the years.

Peck, who won an Oscar for his portrayal, delivers what may be his career best performance as the single father who risks alienation within his community to defend a black man (Brock Peters) accused of raping a white woman in a small Southern town. Horton Foote adapts Lee’s novel with sensitivity and grace, capturing nuances and subtleties without letting us forget that we’re seeing this unfold from a child’s perspective. The film also marked Robert Duvall’s screen debut (who won his Oscar twenty years later in another film from a Horton Foote script: “Tender Mercies”). An unforgettable film that captures the sensations of summer, the imagination of childhood, the scary reality of the adult world just on the other side of adolescence, and one man’s struggle for justice in the face of hateful contempt.

The film has been remastered from original 35mm film elements as part of Universal’s “100th Anniversary Collector’s Series” for a new DVD edition and the film’s Blu-ray debut. Both versions feature the supplements from the previous two-disc DVD release. commentary by director Robert Mulligan and producer Alan Pakula, the feature-length 1999 documentary A Conversation with Gregory Peck (1999) by Oscar winning documentarian Barbara Kopple, the feature-length documentary Fearful Symmetry on the making of the film (featuring cast and crew interviews and a visit to author Harper Lee’s home town), Gregory Peck acceptance speech for his Academy Award for Best Actor and his speech accepting the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, his daughter Cecilia Peck’s speech at the Academy Award tribute to Gregory Peck, an interview with co-star Mary Badham (“Scout Remembers), and the trailer. New to the release is the featurette “100 Years of Universal: Restoring the Classics,” which looks at the film restoration process.

The Blu-ray release comes in an illustrated digibook case and features a picture-in-picture viewing mode with interviews, clips, stills and narration by Gregory Peck’s Family and the usual BD-Live supplements, plus a bonus DVD and digital copy.

More classic releases at Videodrone