When I sat down to watch Fury, I thought of it as Brad Pitt’s World War II movie. I didn’t pay attention to the director. Even after the credits rolled, the name David Ayer didn’t mean anything to me. It was only when I checked his credits on IMDb that I realized why I found the film’s patent nastiness vaguely familiar. Ayer was the same guy who wrote the morally reprehensible Training Day, and wrote and directed the nauseating End of Watch.

Like Training Day, Fury takes place within 24 hours and like that film, this one is about a rookie whose eyes are opened to things he never would have imagined by a seasoned veteran. This time, however, Ayer is not skewering the Los Angeles police department. He goes after a much bigger target, the “greatest generation” of World War II.

It’s April, 1945 and the war is coming to an end. Soldiers on both sides have turned into total animals, or so he would have us believe.

Pitt is the grizzled veteran appropriately nicknamed “Wardaddy”. Logan Lerman is the clerk-typist sent to Pitt as replacement for his Sherman tank’s second gunner. His first assignment is to clean up his predecessor’s blood and brains inside the tank. His baptism under fire comes when he is forced by Pitt to shoot a kneeling POW in the back. When he refuses, Pitt tells him that either he will kill the POW or Pitt will kill him. When Lerman begs Pitt to kill him, he wrestles him to the ground, holds his hand and pulls the trigger that kills the POW.

The film’s only lull from the horrors of war comes when Pitt and Lerman enter an apartment in an otherwise vacated building. There they have a brief interlude with two women who feed them. They are joined by the tank squad’s other members, Shia “Bible” LeBeouf, Michael “Gordo” Pena and the repugnant Jon “Coon-Ass” Bernthal who soon turn the brief encounter into something unpleasant. When they leave, the building is destroyed and the two women are senselessly killed. From then on, I couldn’t wait for the rabid Coon-Ass to be put out of his misery, which doesn’t come any too soon.

The film is well acted, especially by Pitt and Lerman, but the whole thing left a very bad taste in my mouth.

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

Comedy director David Dobkin (Wedding Crashers) seems like an odd choice to helm the courtroom drama, The Judge, but he does fine with the heavy drama. Where he falls short is in the lighter scenes involving Vera Farmiga as a restaurant owner, Leighten Meester as her bartender daughter, and precocious Emma Tremblay as Robert Downey Jr.’s daughter. The two-hour twenty-one minute running time could have been nicely trimmed by excising most of the distracting scenes involving those three poorly written subsidiary characters.

The central drama in which slick lawyer Downey Jr. defends his estranged jurist father Robert Duvall on a murder charge is well done even if there is nothing surprising in the way it plays out. The underlying domestic drama involving the two, along with Vincent D’Onofrio as Downey Jr.’s failed athletic older brother and Jeremy Strong as his mentally challenged younger brother, may be the best part of the film. Duvall’s note-perfect portrayal of the memory-impaired curmudgeonly old man earned the actor his seventh Oscar nomination. At 84, he is the oldest male actor yet nominated. Emmanuelle Riva, 85 when she was nominated for Amour, holds the overall record among thespians.

The Judge is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

The Guillermo del Toro-produced animated feature, The Book of Life, features some good life lessons for youngsters, but I found it to be slow-moving, repetitive and most unforgiveable of all, poorly drawn. Despite the best efforts of voice actors Diego Luna, Zoe Saldana, Channing Tatum, Ron Perlman, Christina Applegate, Ice Cube and Hector Elizondo, the whole thing just falls flat. My recommendation is to re-watch The Lego Movie or The Boxtrolls instead.

The Book of Life is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Playwright Israel Horowitz finally made his big screen directorial debut with the film version of his play My Old Lady starring Kevin Kline as a 57-year-old man who inherits a Paris apartment from his father only to discover that a 92-year-old woman comes with it.

Sold as a comedy, the film is more a drama with comic elements. A life estate or “viager,” as it is known in France, is the result of a real estate law in which a person may sell property but retains the right to live in that property until death. The film makes excellent use of its non-touristy Parisian locations and the talents of its three stars. The old lady is played by Maggie Smith at her twinkly best; and her 57-year-old daughter, who may or may not be Kline’s half-sister, is played by Kristin Scott Thomas.

The three actors’ reasons for making the film, though, hardly come through as ringing endorsements. Kline made the film because the 67-year-old actor thought it would be his last chance to play a role in which he gets the girl. Scott Thomas agreed to do it because the filming location was only four blocks from her home. Smith chose the project from amongst all the scripts on offer because it was the only one in which she didn’t have to die at the end.

My Old Lady is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Maggie Smith is on hand as well in Downton Abbey Season 5. The British series faltered a bit in Season 4, but is back on track in the latest season with all the characters both above and below stairs given their moment to shine in this one. Smith’s dowager, who seemed to be on the brink of death last season, is back to zinging bon mots with the best of them while maneuvering an unlikely late-life suitor into a reunion with his estranged wife. The season includes a wedding, a broken engagement, another near-engagement and the departure of several characters. It ends with yet another engagement, one you may or may not see coming.
Downton Abbey Season 5 is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

This week’s new releases include The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby and the Blu-ray upgrade of Lust for Life.