new on home video This week’s DVD releases

Available Tuesday:

“Big Fan” (R, 86 minutes): Writer Robert Siegel (“The Wrestler”) again has created a closely observed, downbeat character study, this time with comedian Patton Oswalt starring in a breakout performance as an obsessive New York Giants fan. Thirty-six and still living with his mother in Staten Island, Paul Aufiero (Oswalt) occupies a world defined by the tiny booth where he works as a parking garage attendant, the bed where he makes late-night calls to a New York sports radio station and the Giants Stadium parking lot, where Paul and his best friend, Sal (Kevin Corrigan), faithfully root for their home team. Oswalt imbues Paul with enough gravitas — even a bent kind of dignity — to keep him from being pathetic. But by the movie’s strained, overheated climax, it’s clear that Siegel, in his directing debut, is less interested in his protagonist as a character capable of transformation than as a human petri dish of futility and pathology. (R, 86 minutes) Contains profanity and sexuality.

“The Brothers Bloom” (PG-13, 113 minutes): This screwball comedy for the New Depression, like most con-man movies, can’t be trusted. Everything is almost what it seems, even the dialogue by writer-director Rian Johnson. “He writes life the way dead Russians write novels,” says Bloom (Adrien Brody) of his brother, Stephen (Mark Ruffalo). The highly stagy intro to the mini-Blooms is probably the best set piece in the film, which is all archness and set pieces, leading to the brothers working their game on an heiress named Penelope (Rachel Weisz). It’s also a charmer, a witty sandbagging of one’s resistance to fairy tale and a movie afflicted with a kind of comic Tourette’s syndrome. Contains adult content and violence.

“The Burning Plain” (R, 111 minutes): Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (“Babel”) has written and directed a film with Charlize Theron as Sylvia, a seriously depressed woman who has never recovered from the tragic consequences of an adolescent decision. The movie toggles between Sylvia’s blue, despondent Oregon and the dusty, rusty border of Mexico and New Mexico, where an American family and a Mexican family spar over an extramarital affair. Gina (Kim Basinger) and Nick (Joaquim de Almeida) are middle-age parents and madly in love. Their families respond to this news with varying degrees of hostility, but Gina’s oldest daughter, Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence), has the strongest, most cataclysmic reaction. How and why Sylvia fits into this story is the crux of this plaintive, strangely unfeeling film. Contains sexuality, nudity and language.

“Departures” (PG-13, 130 minutes): Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) once dreamed of being a successful cellist, but now the sensitive young man has taken up a new line of work: preparing the dead for burial. This is a movie that could never be made in America. It doesn’t flirt with death as a plot twist or denouement but is thoroughly immersed in dying from beginning to end. Gentle comedy helps the full-immersion process. Daigo is apprenticed to an old master of the craft, and the men form an unlikely friendship. Contains adult themes.

“Fame” (PG, 105 minutes): The remake of the 1980 film does not shrink from the brutality of talent’s natural selection. Success takes work but is not guaranteed by work. Like the original, this version tracks a clot of students through four years at a rigorous performing-arts high school in Manhattan. All the parts are played engagingly by youthful unknowns who sidestep stereotype by virtue of their likability and the no-nonsense screenplay. It’s a harmless diversion and a more solid, nuanced, mature and bald-faced version of young ambition than fairy-tale characters such as Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers. Contains thematic material including teen drinking, a sexual situation and language.

“The Hurt Locker” (R, 130 minutes): Kathryn Bigelow’s captivating, completely immersive action thriller is set in Iraq in 2004, but it transcends time and place, and in the process attains something universal and enduring. Viewers are plunged into the disorienting world of the soldiers who disarm what Americans have come to know as IEDs, or roadside bombs, neither of which term does full justice to the carnage they inflict. The men leading the audience through those tense, tautly orchestrated encounters are the soldiers of Bravo Company. Spec. Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) is the bespectacled nice guy. Anthony Mackie plays Sgt. J.T. Sanborn, possessed of the somber, watchful demeanor of a professional, quietly observing protocol. The group’s leader is Staff Sgt. William James, an adrenaline junkie and alpha dog played in an astonishing breakout performance by Jeremy Renner. Contains war violence and profanity.

“In the Loop” (Unrated, 106 minutes): To American audiences, this hard-edged British political satire will feel like an evil version of “The West Wing,” with hyper-speed dialogue and Type-A sociopaths big-footing their way to the top over friend and foe. The film, an extension of the television comedy franchise “The Thick of It,” follows the run-up to a critical vote in the United Nations that will likely lead to a U.S.-led war in the Middle East. The parallels to the invasion of Iraq are obvious but implicit. David Rasche stars as Linton Barwick, a warmonger in the State Department, and James Gandolfini plays George Miller, an armchair general who opposes the conflict. Contains gratuitous adult language and sexual scenes.

“Moon” (R, 97 minutes): Sam Bell, an employee of Lunar Industries Ltd., is stationed on the moon to oversee the mining of clean energy from moon rocks. He has been there for three years, beaming power back to Earth. There are only two weeks before Sam’s contract is up. Then he finds something on the surface of the moon that throws everything into doubt — including, tragically, the film’s logic. The moody sci-fi morsel has the right look, the right sound and the right feel. Actor Sam Rockwell, as Sam, has the aw-shucks charisma to carry a movie on his own. But story-wise, the film fails to live up to the promise of its premise. Contains language.

“Post Grad” (PG-13, 89 minutes): An uneasy mix of family comedy, 20-something romance and recession horror zeitgeist, “Post Grad” explores the fate of the Class of 2009 — those fragile grads released into the harsh economy. Alexis Bledel plays Ryden Malby, a go-getter whose life plan seems on track when she snags an interview at a big publishing house. But when she doesn’t get the job, she’s forced to move back to the suburbs with her oddball family (played by world-class oddballs Michael Keaton, Jane Lynch and Carol Burnett). They do their best to inject life into the film’s unexceptional comic set pieces, vigorously shaking a few big laughs out of Kelly Fremon’s screenplay. Perhaps the most disappointing thing about “Post Grad” is it never quite succeeds in capturing a generation adrift. Contains sexual situations and brief strong language.

“Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself” (PG-13, 153 minutes): This latest comedy-laced morality tale from Tyler Perry feels even more formulaic than its predecessors. It is so predictable that the emotional punches land with a sermonizing thud. April (Taraji P. Henson) sings in a club, drinks a lot and has a married boyfriend, Randy (Brian J. White). When teenage niece Jennifer (Hope Olaide Wilson) and younger nephews try to rob Madea’s house, Madea (Perry) brings them to their aunt’s door. Wilma (Gladys Knight) and Pastor Brian (Marvin Winans) urge April to take in her kin, then they send over the handsome Sandino (Adam Rodriguez) to fix up her house. Sandino has an instant rapport with the kids, but Randy is trouble. Contains mature thematic material involving a sexual assault on a minor, violence, drug references and smoking.

—The Washington Post