Avatar
(20th Century Fox, $30)
James Cameron’s sci-fi epic remains “quite the spectacle,” even on your home TV, said the Chicago Tribune. While slicker, 3-D editions are sure to come, this first edition still offers “interplanetary landscapes that look like Yes album covers and an ecology-minded plot that’s as rousingas it is corny.”
Crazy Heart
(20th Century Fox, $29)
Crazy Heart may be a “run-of-the-mill redemption movie,” said the Lincoln, Neb., Journal Star. But it features Jeff Bridges’ Oscar-winning performance as an aging, down-on-his-luck country singer, as well as an “endless stream of music” handpicked by T Bone Burnett. So “who cares if it’s a little cliché?”
Summer Hours
(Criterion, $40)
This “gracefully observed, gorgeously shot” work was one of the best foreign films of 2009, said The Washington Post. French director Olivier Assayas “unflinchingly and compellingly confronts” the family drama following a mother’s death, as her children sort through her estate and sift through their own pasts.
