DREAMSVILLE’S WEEK IN DVD
“Jack Reacher”: Fans of Lee Child’s wildly popular series of novels about ex-military investigator-turned avenging angel Jack Reacher blanched when they heard that Tom Cruise was going to play the lead in the film adaptation of the author’s “One Shot.” Reacher, after all, is a 6-foot 5-inch 250 pound blond haired bruiser; Cruise is 5-foot 7-inches, dark-haired and pretty-faced. It’ll never work, they said. But, surprisingly, it works: Cruise channels the impulse — if not the physicalness — of Reacher, and comes across as a witty, sharp, intelligent and violent-if-need-be
One of the year’s most talked about independent films since its award-winning premiere at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, director Shane Carruth’s “Upstream Color” (2012) has been described as baffling and enigmatic … and that it is. But it’s also so very boring. The sci-fi-mystery-romance revolves around a woman (Amy Seimetz) who is abducted and hypnotized with a “psychedelic” worm by a crook who depletes her life savings and causes her to lose her job and way in life. When she falls for a man (Carruth), the two come to realize he may also have been subjected to the same process, and they search for a way to talk to each other about their wounds and look for safety in each other’s arms. As the barriers between them break down, they uncover the plot that wrecked their lives, which also involves a pig farmer who makes music with found noise and who uses the pigs to keep track of the victims. If you can wade through the tedium, there’s immersive music and on-the-edge acting. Co-stars Andrew Sensenig and Thiago Martins. Available as a DVD and a Blu-ray/DVD combo in a beautiful package from Cinedigm.
Four years after “Breathless,” Jean-Luc Godard reimagined the gangster film even more radically with “Band of Outsiders” (1964), about two restless young men (Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur) who enlist the object of both of their fancies (Anna Karina) to help them commit a robbery — Âin her own home. This audacious and wildly entertaining French New Wave gem is at once sentimental and