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.

Based on the Japanese manga series, this live-action movie is a martial-arts fantasy. On his 18th birthday, the film's hero, Goku (Justin Chatwin), is given a Dragonball, a mystical shiny sphere, by his grandfather. Whoever unites this Dragonball with six others will be granted a wish. It turns out the evil Lord Piccolo (James Marsters) is trying to obtain all seven spheres and destroy the world. The only way to stop Piccolo is to get the Dragonballs before a solar eclipse, and Goku sets out on that quest, assisted by characters played by Chow-Yun Fat and Emmy Rossum.

This actioner is the follow-up to The Fast and the Furious (2001), 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006), and Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster reprise their characters from the initial movie. The 2009 film opens with Dom (Diesel) and Letty (Rodriguez), still a couple, hijacking a huge truck in the Dominican Republic. Then Dom heads back to L.A., where he reunites with Brian (Walker), now an FBI agent trying to bring down a drug kingpin. Soon the romance between Brian and Dom's sister Mia (Brewster) gets rekindled.

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.

Nicholas Cage stars in this sci-fi actioner directed by Alex Proyas (Dark City, I, Robot). Cage portrays John Koestler, an atheistic MIT astrophysicist whose son shows him a piece of paper filled with seemingly random numbers. The paper came out of a time capsule created 50 years earlier. Koestler figures out that the numbers specify the dates and locations of major disasters which have occurred in the past and seem to predict others in the future. Accompanied by an attractive woman (Rose Byrne), Koestler tries to prevent more destruction, but are events predetermined?

The Whitest Kids U'Know is a sketch comedy troupe, and two of its members, Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore, wrote, directed and star in this movie. Eugene (Cregger) is a high school student preparing to consummate his relationship with his good-looking girlfriend when there's an accident and he goes into a coma. Four years later he regains consciousness to find she has become a Playboy Playmate. He and his best friend Tucker (Moore) go on a road trip to the Playboy Mansion, having adventures along the way. There's lots of scatology and Hugh Hefner appears in a cameo.

This convoluted paranormal actioner centers on people who have special powers, for example, "movers" (who are telekinetic), "watchers" (who can look into the future), "pushers" (who can implant thoughts in other people's minds), etc. A government agency called the Division is trying to use the paranormals as warriors, but some resist. Mover Nick (Chris Evans) is in hiding when watcher Cassie (Dakota Fanning) seeks his help in finding a pusher (Camilla Belle). But Nick and Cassie must elude Division Agent Carver (Djimon Hounsou), leading to hyperkinetic action.

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.

Some years back a real-life family by the name of Snedeker reported eerie goings-on at a Southington, Connecticut, house where they lived, resulting in news stories, a Discovery Channel TV program and Ray Garton's book In a Dark Place. That background was the inspiration for this movie, in which Sara Campbell (Virginia Madsen) has a teenage son Matt (Kyle Gallner) who must undergo a lengthy series of cancer treatments with severe side effects. To be closer to Matt's medical facility, she moves the family into a creepy old house, where they have encounters with ghostly apparitions.

This horror film is inspired by the dybbuk legend. In Jewish folklore, the dybbuk is the demonic spirit of a dead person that can inhabit the bodies of living people. The movie's protagonist is Casey (Odette Yustman), a college student who has nightmares and is haunted by a malevolent spirit. Investigation leads to a Holocaust survivor (Jane Alexander) and a clue involving Nazi experimentation on twins. Casey seeks help from a rabbi (Gary Oldman), and he decides to attempt an exorcism. The film has impressive special effects and the dialogue "Jumby wants to be born now."

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.