NEW ON VIDEO \ This week’s DVD releases
“Battle In Seattle” (R, 100 minutes): Stuart Townsend’s portrayal of that city’s 1999 World Trade Organization protests suffers greatly — as do we — from an overdose of noblesse oblige. Woody Harrelson, Charlize Theron, Ray Liotta and Connie Nielsen are among the bigger names involved, and their characters all inhabit a world in which people are wellsprings of righteous indignation, as well as oratorical flourish. Townsend’s heroes are the hard-core protesters themselves. The film presents itself as character-driven drama, and this is false advertising. There are too many characters to get a firm grasp on any of them, and there’s little motivation to want to do so anyway. Contains vulgarity and violence.
“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” (PG-13, 93 minutes): The Berlin of director Mark Herman’s film unrolls as an as-yet-unbombed ’40s stronghold of Teutonic family values, blinkered Germans and plummy-accented, English-speaking Nazis. Few characters in film have been as relatively privileged, as morally conflicted and as willing to ignore it as Father (David Thewlis), the SS officer whose promotion will relocate him and his family from cosmopolitan Germany to the stark deathscape of a Nazi work camp. Bruno (Asa Butterfield), the young son of this benighted family, will befriend an inmate his age named Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), hence the title and leaden symbolism of this adaptation of John Boyne’s novel. The film asks the metaphysical question of what life would be like for the family of a concentration camp commandant.
“Cadillac Records” (R, 109 minutes): There’s a teeny little hole in the middle of this film, and it’s right where you’ll find Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody). As the founder of Chess Records, he champions the work of guitarist Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright), singer Etta James (Beyonc Knowles), harmonica player Little Walter (Columbus Short), growling vocalist Howlin’ Wolf (Eamonn Walker), the duckwalking Chuck Berry (Mos Def) and others, creating previously unheard-of opportunities for black artists. But we’re never given much insight into who Chess really is or why we should care about him. History is propelled forward by the film’s over-reliance on such now-stale staples of musical biopics as the montage of nightclub marquees and ka-ching-ing cash registers, leaving little time in this speeding, noisy, overcrowded vehicle to take in anything other than the milestones that go whizzing past. Contains profanity, racial epithets, sex scenes, partial nudity, violence and alcohol and drug abuse.
“Happy-Go-Lucky” (R, 118 minutes): The British actress Sally Hawkins delivers a nervy, utterly captivating tour de force performance in Mike Leigh’s transporting new film. Hawkins plays Poppy, a London schoolteacher with an indomitable spirit and persistently cheerful outlook on life, even when the bowl of cherries winds up being full of pits. Here, Leigh follows Poppy from the flat she shares with her beloved roommate, Zoe (the remarkable Alexis Zegerman), and driving lessons with a cranky conspiracy theorist (a brilliant Eddie Marsan) to a chance encounter with a street tramp and a flamenco class with a fiery teacher (the scene-stealing Karina Fernandez). Contains profanity.
“Let The Right One In” (R, 114 minutes): This Swedish drama lurks in a cold, dark, brooding territory, inhabited by people both haunting and terrified: tweens. Chief among them: Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), the pink-skinned, white-blond, Billy Budd-ish child of a single mother, a loner and a target, whose days are tormented by a trio of very devoted schoolyard bullies. The other is Eli (Lina Leandersson), the dark-eyed waif who moves into Oskar’s apartment block, goes barefoot in the snow and gives Oskar something to live for. Even though she is technically dead. Or, rather, undead. Yep: Eli is a vampire, and the film is, in the basest of terms, a horror flick, toying with the audience’s existing vampire knowledge. Contains bloody violence, including disturbing images, brief nudity and profanity. In Swedish with subtitles.
“Milk” (R, 128 minutes): Gus Van Sant has painted a vivid, affecting portrait of Harvey Milk, who in 1978 joined the San Francisco Board of Supervisors as the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States. Sean Penn virtually disappears into his character, burying any trace of native mannerism or accent and emerging as a wholly convincing New York Jewish boy made good. What makes the film extraordinary isn’t just that it’s a nuanced, stirring portrait of one of the 20th century’s most pivotal figures but that it’s also a nuanced, stirring portrait of the thousands of people he energized. Contains profanity, sexual content and brief violence.
“Rachel Getting Married” (R, 113 minutes): The bravura way director Jonathan Demme juggles the hurly-burly of an upscale wedding — made hurlier and burlier by the arrival, straight from rehab, of the title character’s (Rosemarie DeWitt) high-maintenance sister Kym (Anne Hathaway, like you’ve never seen her) — harks back to the darkness and emotional complexity of “The Silence of the Lambs,” and the madcap energy of “Something Wild.” There’s a dark secret, too, but its lurking presence never feels cheap or forced. Contains strong language and a brief sex scene.
“Role Models” (R, 99 minutes): Danny and Wheeler tool around Los Angeles, in a monster truck that snorts fire, peddling an energy drink called Minotaur to schoolkids, as if it’s an anti-drug alternative. Danny, bored with it all and losing his girlfriend, drives the truck into a statue of a horse. Such is the beginning of the film in which Danny (Paul Rudd) and Wheeler (Seann William Scott) are ordered to complete 150 hours of community service mentoring troubled teens — or go to jail. Contains crude and sexual content, strong language and nudity.
“Synecdoche, New York” (R, 124 minutes): Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is the emotional void at the center of this astonishingly good film written and directed by Charlie Kaufman. Cotard, a theater director wasting his talents in Schenectady, N.Y., is given a “genius grant” that enables him to do something big, something grand and honest. He moves to New York City, where he re-creates the daily disappointments of his existence inside a giant warehouse. As the years slip by and he fails to find lasting love or happiness in his personal life, Cotard’s ever-larger, ever-more-complex theatrical version of his own existence also refuses him wisdom, consolation or perspective. Contains strong language, sexual content and nudity.
“Transporter 3” (PG-13, 103 minutes): Once again, our hero is Frank Martin (Jason Statham), the gruff, taciturn, really ripped driver who always delivers his cargo. The plot has something to do with a shipload of lethal toxic waste and nasty American millionaire Johnson (Robert Knepper) who wants to get rid of it. Contains violence, sexual material, language and drug use.
Also: “Ben X,” “Brokeback Mountain” (Blu-ray), “Family Ties: Season 5,” “Get Smart: Season 2,” “Groom Lake,” “Howard the Duck: Special Edition,” “Seven” (Blu-ray), and “South Park: Season 12.”
—Washington Post