The new DVD releases include 12, Grey Gardens and The Haunting in Connecticut. You can also take a look at additional releases of interest and next week's movies on video/DVD.
July 14, 2009 - New DVD and Video Releases:
'12' DVD
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.
'Grey Gardens' DVD
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.
'The Haunting in Connecticut' DVD
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.




