Drama
Phil Bacharach
In an age of cinema jammed with reboots, remakes and raunch, it's a welcome revelation to come across the heartfelt Your Sister's Sister on Blu-ray and DVD, in which low-budget indie meets comedy of manners.

Drama
Rod Lott
Mathieu Demy's Americano opens with a little death, followed immediately by a big one, as Frenchmen Martin (Demy) receives one of those middle-of-the-night phone calls that deliver the worst of bad news: His mother has died.

Drama
Phil Bacharach
Nothing can bring out one’s inner Richard Nixon like a flight of baby-boomer whimsy that rubs your nose in 1960s nostalgia. Peace, Love & Misunderstanding, a gentle-minded paean to the Woodstock generation, might just make you want to punch a hippie.

Drama
Rod Lott
Life can change in the blink of an eye, according to the opening minute of the turgid romance The Lucky One. It's the kind of empty observation that has become such a cliché, it no longer holds weight. But somehow, against God and every force of nature, grotesquely arrogant novelist Nicholas Sparks has built a lucrative career stringing such things together.

Drama
Rod Lott
When Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam film, Full Metal Jacket, hit theaters in the summer of 1987, I was all of 16 years old. Even I could tell it was far better than Oliver Stone’s Platoon, which by then had won four Academy Awards; by comparison, Jacket would be nominated for one, Best Adapted Screenplay, and lose it to The Last Emperor.

Drama
Rod Lott
Judging by the 1962 portrayed by The Chapman Report, everybody smoked cigarettes, LPs of poetry readings were a hot commodity, and the female orgasm had yet to be invented. While this film from legendary old-Hollywood director George Cukor (My Fair Lady) was determined to be earnest and serious in its time, it's quite a hoot today.

Drama
Rod Lott
My wife barely can stand — and sometimes refuses — to watch TV shows like The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm because they make her too nervous. Therefore, she would hate Michael and Silver Tongues, two new-to-DVD entries in discomfort cinema. I recommend them both, while acknowledging they are far from the easiest of watches.

Drama
Rod Lott
Strangely, the biggest shock surrounding Best Laid Plans isn't that someone thought to redo John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men in the world of underground mixed martial arts, but that it works as well as it does — or hell, that it works at all.

Drama
Rod Lott
Composer Jack McKenzie (David Arquette, Scream 4) is not at his best. His career has tanked due to sobriety issues stemming from an auto accident that killed one of his two children with his now ex-wife. To clear his mind and pay the bills, he takes a gig as a limo driver.

Drama
Rod Lott
Don’t confuse last year’s drama The Deep Blue Sea with Deep Blue Sea, the 1999 action movie about sharks. Based on a stage play, this is the one that could use some sharks.

Drama
Rod Lott
Whereas the 2010 documentary Inside Job gave a big-picture view at how Wall Street nearly eroded the American economy, the HBO telefilm Too Big to Fail dramatizes the behind-the-scenes dealings.

Drama
Rod Lott
Forgive the bland title; The Hunter stands tall as a terrific thriller from Down Under, arguably three-fourths excellent.

Drama
Rod Lott
One of this year's Academy Award nominees for Best Foreign Language Film, the Belgian drama Bullhead does nothing to change the public perception that the category's entrants wear perpetual frowns. After all, its protagonist so clearly, so early, states his life's motto: "You're always fucked."

Drama
Rod Lott
I have fond memories of seeing John Ritter in Blake Edwards’ 1989 sex comedy, Skin Deep, in theaters ... because right after it was over, two friends and I snuck into the movie we really wanted to see: another newcomer, New York Stories.

Drama
Rod Lott
Coming presumably from the deepest, darkest, dankest corner of Warner Archives’ basement, right by the leaky pipe from which hangs an opossum about to give birth, comes a true obscurity: Crime Does Not Pay: The Complete Shorts Collection (1935-1947).