No Country for Old Men
(Miramax, $30)
“It’s a stroke of marketing genius” that the big winner at this year’s Oscars is already on DVD, said Peter Brown in the San Francisco Examiner. A “modern Western,” the film seems just as captivating the second time around. The DVD’s extras are weak, however: Wait for a collector’s edition.
Five Days
(Velocity, ThinkFilm, $28)
This HBO-BBC miniseries is “like a deluxe installment of Without a Trace,” said Matthew Gilbert in The Boston Globe. Each episode of the chilling missing-persons story is set during a different 24-hour period, which gives it “all the detail, all the character depth that an hour-long TV procedural can’t possibly muster.”
August Rush
(Warner, $20)
This modern-day fairy tale “plays more to the gag reflex than to the heart,” said Desson Thomson in The Washington Post. Freddie Highmore is an orphan who “starts playing the guitar like a virtuoso after what seems like a three-minute tutorial.” The film is maudlin from beginning to end, but the extras are even more emotionally excessive.
