Canadian director Kari Skogland takes on both the murderous Irish Republican Army and the duplicitous British occupation force in 1980s Belfast in 50 Dead Men Walking, based on the true story of an Irish Catholic youth recruited by the British as a spy within the IRA. The title refers to the fifty men whose lives he saved.

Jim Sturgess is the young hero who is shot six times at close range by an IRA hit man “somewhere in Canada” in 1999 at the beginning of the film which then flashes back to 1988 when his story begins. Ben Kingsley is his controller, Kevin Zegers his best friend, Natalie Press his fiancé and Rose McGowan an Irish Mata Hari. Filled with murder, mayhem, explosions and betrayal on all sides, Skogland proves that Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) isn’t the only female action director operating at the top of her game in today’s cinema.

50 Dead Men Walking is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Whimsy is a very fragile thing. If you’re going to make a film built on it, you’d better make sure your vehicle can sustain it. I Married a Witch and Henry Koster’s The Luck of the Irish are examples of whimsical films that worked in classic Hollywood. More recent examples that worked include Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. Rian Johnson, who endeared himself in some quarters with his first film, the high school noir, Brick, goes in a different direction with his sophomore effort, The Brothers Bloom.

The film is about con artist brothers played by Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo who spout inane dialogue while travelling the world in search of their next con. Rachel Weisz is the object of Brody’s affection and the subject of Ruffalo’s latest con. I found it insufferable but others seem to like it.

The Brothers Bloom is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

A mild but pleasant and ultimately poignant study of Arab Christians in America, Cherian Dabis’ Amreeka features ingratiating performances by Nisreen Faour and Melkar Muallem as mother and son immigrants from Palestine living with Faour’s sister and her family in Minneapolis.

The always amazing Hiam Abbas is the sister, a woman who has been in this country for fifteen years but still finds it difficult to assimilate despite the fact that her husband is a successful doctor and her children were born here. The scene in which she finally tastes a hamburger serves as the climax of the film.

Amreeka is available on standard DVD only.

Michelle Monaghan gives one of the year’s best performances as the estranged mother of an eleven year old son in first time director James Mottern’s Trucker.

Although you can guess where the film is going from the moment her dying husband’s current girlfriend drops the kid off at her door, the fun is in getting there.

Jimmy Bennett, who played the young James Kirk in Star Trek is quite good as the boy as are Nathan Fillion as Monahgan’s drinking buddy and Benjamin Bratt as the dying ex-husband, but the film belongs to Monahgan who comes into her own as the hard drinking, sexually loose long haul trucker who is forced by circumstance to re-think choices she made long ago.

Trucker is available on standard DVD only.

The success of the Warner Archive collection in 2009 resulted in Universal releasing a handful of films from its vaults through Movies Unlimited and Amazon releasing a few films owned by MGM, all produced on demand in DVD-R format. Now Amazon and Universal have joined hands to release more than a dozen logn sought titles from the Universal vaults. Among the titles are Death Takes a Holiday; Ruggles of Red Gap; The Chalk Garden and Resurrection.

Originally released as bonus disc on the first pressings of the 1998 remake, Meet Joe Black, Mitchell Leisen’s original 1934 version of Death Takes a Holiday has long been out of print.

Leisen’s version of the 1929 play is a lively affair starring Fredric March at his most charismatic as Death who take on human form and falls in love. Both the 1971 made-for-TV remake with Monte Markham and the 1998 big screen remake with Brad Pitt suffer from heavy-handedness.

Evelyn Venable is March’s lovely leading lady and the supporting cast includes such stalwarts as Guy Standing, Henry Travers and Helen Westley, all of whom provide outstanding robust performances.

One of the best loved films of the 1930s, Leo Mc Carey’s Ruggles of Red Gap featured Charles Laughton in one of his signature roles as the English butler transported to the American West.

Charlie Ruggles, Mary Boland, ZaSu Pitts and Roland Young all turn in wonderful supporting performances, but it’s Laughton’s film all the way. His recitation of the Gettysburg Address is one of the decade’s highlights.

This was actually the third version of the story following two silent films. It was subsequently remade as Fancy Pants with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball and as a TV musical under its original title with Michael Redgrave and Jane Powell, both in the 1950s. None, however, hold a candle to McCarey’s 1935 masterwork. 

From the 1950s through the mid 1960s, it was routine to turn successful Broadway plays into movies. One of the meatiest plays of the era for women was Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden which Ronald Neame brought to the screen in 1964.

Bagnold was most famous for her 1935 short story, National Velvet which was turned into a smash hit movie in 1944 that made 12 year-old Elizabeth Taylor a star. Although The Chalk Garden features a major role for a young actress, in this case Hayley Mills, its central characters are the mysterious governess and imperious grandmother who battle for her soul. They are played by Deborah Kerr in her last significant screen role and Edith Evans in a grand Oscar nominated performance. Hayley’s real life father, John Mills, has the principal male role as Evans’ butler, but it’s the fireworks between Kerr and Evans that makes it something special.

Forget the heavy-handed mysticism and cheesy special effects in Daniel Petrie’s 1980 film, Resurrection and simply enjoy one of the most exquisitely acted films of all time. Ellen Burstyn is a joy to behold as a woman who awakens from a near-death experience with the ability to heal others and she is beautifully supported by Sam Shepard, Eva Le Gallienne, Roberts Blossom, Richard Farnsworth and others. Burstyn and Broadway legend Le Gallienne (as her grandmother) won richly deserved Oscar nominations.