this week’s DVD releases

March 29, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Available Tuesday:

“Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel” (G, 88 minutes): This sequel to the 2007 feature about an animated trio of squeaky-voiced singing rodents is a far sight better than the original. As in the earlier film, they’re voiced by Justin Long, Jesse McCartney and Matthew Gray Gubler. Fortunately, there’s a bit more of an actual story here, with the introduction of three female chipmunks, voiced by talented comedians Christina Applegate, Amy Poehler and Anna Faris. Director Betty Thomas manages all this middlebrow mayhem with a suitably light touch. As talking animal movies go, this “squeakquel” squeaks by. Contains mild crude humor and slapstick violence. DVD extras: featurettes.

“An Education” (PG, 100 minutes): Sixteen-year-old Jenny (Carey Mulligan) lives in London with her anxious, ambitious parents, who are channeling all their postwar striving into aspirations for their bright, pretty daughter. Jenny is headed to Oxford and, presumably, better things when she crosses paths with David (Peter Sarsgaard), a handsome older man who takes her under his wing and shows her the finer things in life: art, music, good food and the silky, slippery slope of seduction. Screenwriter Nick Hornby and director Lone Scherfig have adapted Lynn Barber’s memoir to near-perfection. Contains mature themes involving sexual content and smoking. DVD extras: commentary; featurettes; deleted scenes.

“The Baader Meinhof Complex” (R, 150 minutes): This deeply unsettling account of a group of young German activists that morphed into a murderous gang of domestic terrorists opens in 1967, when journalist Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), like many Germans, is outraged at the killing of an unarmed demonstrator at a rally in Berlin. Several months later, activists Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) and Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) are arrested after firebombing a department store to protest the war in Vietnam. In 1970, after interviewing Ensslin, Meinhof agrees to help Baader escape from prison. For the next several years, their group, the Red Army Faction, would embark on a violent campaign that was initially greeted with the admiration accorded to folk heroes and outlaws but ultimately held the country in a murderous thrall. Contains strong, bloody violence, disturbing images, sexual content, graphic nudity and profanity. In German with subtitles.

“Sherlock Holmes” (PG-13, 125 minutes): Directed by Guy Ritchie (“RocknRolla”) and starring Robert Downey Jr., the newest contribution to the world of Arthur Conan Doyle spinoffs is less a product of genuinely Holmesian DNA than, say, “Se7en.” There’s black magic here, too; Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) — who has been going around London dispensing with people in ritualistic, occult executions — has apparently risen from the dead. In the plus column is Downey’s performance. Contains violence, intense action sequences and brief suggestive imagery. DVD extras: featurette.

Also: “The Killer,” “Steven Seagal: Lawman: The Complete Season One” and “Sports Night: The Complete First Season.”

Wire reports