It’s Christmas, so what do we get from the DVD gods? Why, films focusing on murder and mayhem, of course.

There’s more mayhem than murder in Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt, an unsettling account of a man whose life is destroyed by false accusations in one of the films on Oscar’s short list for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film award, but murder does crop up. There’s the murder of the protagonist’s beloved dog and the attempted murder of the protagonist himself, an accomplished deed in the alternate ending on the Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Mads Mikkelsen turns in an excellent performance as the melancholy, recently divorced 42 year-old kindergarten teacher who, while fighting his ex-wife for more time with his son, spends most of his free time with his childhood friend and his family. The friend’s five year-old daughter is one of his pupils. Goaded by her older brother, she tells the head kindergarten teacher that Lucas (Mikkelsen) exposed himself to her. Instead of handling the situation rationally, the older woman spreads the rumor, first to the girl’s mother, then to the other parents of the kindergarten students. The hysteria escalates but even after Lucas is cleared, the witch hunt continues, keeping him in danger.

Vinterberg, best known for the 1998 Danish film, The Celebration in which similar allegations prove true, the director who alternates between English and Danish films, once again delivers an outstanding film in his native tongue.

Denis Villenueve, the French Canadian director whose 2009 film, Incendies was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, won much critical acclaim for Prisoners, his first Hollywood film. The film is showing up on some of this year’s critics’ top ten lists. Whether you’ll join in the acclaim or dismiss it depends on your tolerance for sustained violence.

The film begins on Thanksgiving Day as two families, one white, one black, come together for the holiday. During the course of the day, the two six year-old girls, one from each family, go outside to play and disappear. A suspect is found and questioned by the police, but let go for lack of evidence. The parents, especially the white father (Hugh Jackman), believe the boy with the I.Q. of a ten year-old (Paul Dano) is guilty and takes matters into his own hands.

Even the most casual of film enthusiasts will intuit that the boy is innocent and the torture that Jackman submits him to over a period of days is pointless, but not the characters in the film. The other father (Terrence Howard) and his wife (Viola Davis) reluctantly, but righteously, go along with him while his own wife (Maria Bello) is confined to her house, unable to cope with the situation. Only Jake Gyllenhaal as a detective who resorts to a little violence of his own comes across as a reasonably rational human being. Melissa Leo as Dano’s caretaker who doesn’t seem concerned by his appearance is another hard to fathom character.

The film ends in an unnecessary cliffhanger. Will the character who is buried alive be found or die trying to make his presence known?

Prisoners is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Another film that the critics loved, but I didn’t is David Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. Lowery, who got his start as an editor, fashions his film in the style of Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us and Terrence Malick’s Badlands of forty years ago, but unlike those groundbreaking films, he doesn’t give us much of a story.

The film starts out with a shootout by cornered outlaw Casey Affleck and the local sheriff and his men in 1970s hill country Texas. His pregnant wife (Rooney Mara) shoots a deputy (Ben Foster), but Allfleck takes the rap. Mara, after serving a brief sentence, gives birth to a daughter who is four years old when Affleck escapes. In the meantime Mara and the recovered Foster have developed a relationship, It doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to discern that it’s going to end badly for Affleck, and it does.

The bigger problem for me is that the three lead actors seem to be in a contest to see who can give the most laid-back performance. Affleck, Mara and Foster mope and mumble their way through the film. Only Keith Carradine as Affleck’s father provides anything resembling an energetic performance.

Lowery’s first feature, St. Nick, which has nothing to do with Santa Claus, is provided as an extra on both the Blu-ray and standard VD. It’s about a boy called “the boy” and his sister called “the girl” who run away from home and live in a series of abandoned houses. It’s all very precocious but goes nowhere.

Neill Blomkamp is the South African writer and director whose 2009 science fiction film, District 9, was nominated for four Oscars including Best Picture and one for Blomkamp for his screenplay. His highly anticipated follow-up film, Elysiumdrew mixed reviews from the critics. While not as good as the engaging District 9, it is in my opinion a lot better than most of the apocalyptic garbage polluting theatres and DVD collections these days.

The film never seems to be taking itself too seriously as it deals with serious matters, which is a good thing when approaching such heavy subjects as the future of the world and the imminent death of the film’s hero, a very good Matt Damon.

In the mid-22nd Century, Earth has become over-populated and over-polluted. The wealthy live in a controlled environment on a man-made satellite called Elysium. The riffraff are forbidden to go there. Damon and friends infiltrate. Damon’s mission is to re-set the satellite’s computer so that the satellite’s regenerating atom chambers can be dispatched to Earth to save the lives of people with cancer and other diseases. One such patient is Damon’s childhood friend Alice Braga’s daughter. Will he succeed? Of course he will, but will he save himself or die of radiation poisoning? Jodie Foster co-stars as an evil Big Sister.

Elysium is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

The critics were none too kind to Luc Besson’s The Family, a black comedy about a former Mafia don, his wife and now teenage son and daughter who have been in the witness protection program for ten years. The film begins with the murder of a man and his family who are mistaken for the don and his. The family is quickly moved from their life of leisure on the French Riviera to a not-so-easy life in Normandy. What they’re doing in France is never explained, but it’s beside the point. Between the initial trouble and the slam bang climax, there’s plenty of comic book style violence, much of it involving the family’s fish out of water presence, to keep the paying customers happy.

Robert De Niro, who has been sleepwalking through many of his recent films, actually turns in a credible performance here spoofing his own career. Michelle Pfeiffer, who hasn’t had an interesting role in a long time, is hilarious as the Mafia mama and Dianna Agron and JohnD’Leo do well as the children in the crossfire. Only Tommy Lee Jones is under-utilized as the family’s government contact.

The Family is available on Bue-ray and standard DVD.

This week’s new releases include Insidious: Chapter 2 and Una Noche.