Recommended July DVD Releases

Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, this Russian drama is a remake of Sidney Lumet's 1957 classic 12 Angry Men. In 12 a jury must decide the fate of a Chechen teenager charged with the murder of his adoptive father, who was Russian. At first 11 jurors vote to find the defendant guilty, but one — the Henry Fonda character in the Lumet film — insists they reconsider. In the Russian movie, the jury is put inside a rundown high school gymnasium to do their deliberations, and at one point a sparrow flies in from outside and flutters about haplessly.

Based on Neil Gaiman's children's novel, this stop-motion animated fantasy film was shown in 3-D in its theatrical release. Coraline (voice of Dakota Fanning) is an 11-year-old who moves with her parents (voices of Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) to an apartment in a large Victorian house. She soon meets a boy, a cat, two retired actresses and a mouse-training acrobat. But most importantly, she discovers a door leading to a parallel world that is an alternate version of the real world where everything is much more interesting and the people have black buttons in place of eyes.

Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange star in this HBO docudrama that aired initially in April 2009. It's the story of an oddball socialite mother-daughter pair — relatives of Jackie Onassis — that came to public attention in the 1970s when they were found living in poverty and squalor in a dilapidated mansion in East Hampton, NY. In 1975 the Maysles brothers released an acclaimed documentary about them that eventually came out on a Criterion Collection DVD set. In the HBO movie Lange plays the mother and Barrymore the daughter over a period of four decades.

John Malkovich stars as the title character in this showbiz satire. Sean McGinly wrote and directed the movie based loosely on his real-life experiences working as an assistant to The Amazing Kreskin, a mind reader and hypnotist whose heyday was the 1970s, but who continued working well into the 21st century. In the film, mentalist Buck Howard has been on Johnny Carson's show 61 times, but his career is in decline, and he now plays mostly backwater auditoriums. Young Troy Gable (Colin Hanks, Tom Hanks' son) becomes Howard's road manager and tries to help him make a comeback.

This is a faithful adaptation of the acclaimed graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Set against the backdrop of the Cold War in an alternate 1985, the dense, complex story centers on a group of half a dozen costumed vigilantes who go by names like Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) and Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman). The film opens with the murder of one of the costumed vigilantes, and someone may be trying to kill all of them. Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) is the only character with superpowers, which he got because of a nuclear accident.