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— Recent DVD releases: Barking Dogs Never Bite (Not rated, 106 minutes) - The debut film of heralded South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho (The Host, Mother) is a slapstick horror film about a slacker grad student (Lee Sung-jae), who takes regrettably rash measures to deal with a yapping dog in his apartment complex. Those sensitive to faked scenes of robust animal mistreatment are hereby warned. (Available separately, or with the other two films in the 3-DVD boxed set “The Bong Joon-Ho Collection.”) Grade: 88 Cop Out (PG-13, 102 minutes) - Kevin Smith’s highest and best use is as a writer, so it’s understandable that his director-for-hire debut, a comedic mash-up of ’80s cop buddy films with Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis occupying what might have been the Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte roles, feels uninspired. But then, as Smith himself has pointed out, what do you expect from a movie called Cop Out? Seann William Scott is sporadically amusing in bits you probably remember from the trailer. Grade: 68Entre Nos (Not rated, 80 minutes) - (Mostly) Spanish language feature focusing on Colombian immigrants trying to make it in Queens, N.Y. Mariana arrives with her two children to reunite with her feckless husband, who promptly deserts her. Eventually (and predictably), the family winds up homeless. Inspired by the life story of co-director Paola Mendoza, whose mother recycled cans to feed her family, Entre Nos is a tribute film that occasionally hits on some powerfully affecting images of American poverty. Grade: 78 Huxley on Huxley (Not rated, 58 minutes) - Mary Ann Braubach’s documentary, narrated by Peter Coyote and featuring interviews with Walter Cronkite, Ram Dass, Nick Nolte and the Doors’ John Densmore among others, examines the relationship between Laura Huxley, the Italian-born teenage violin virtuoso who married Aldous Huxley and with him in the 1950s maintained in their Hollywood Hills home an experimental salon dedicated to the pursuit of higher consciousness (and the occasional psychotropic drug) frequented by the likes Igor Stravinsky, Orson Welles and Christopher Isherwood. Fascinating in a minor way. Grade: 83 I Do & I Don’t (R, 83 minutes) - Familiar-feeling, at times funny movie about, of all things, the requisites for marrying within the Catholic Church. Good cast - BryanCallen, Alexie Gilmore, Jane Lynch - and a quirky feel that might put you in mind of ’60s TV sitcoms. Grade: 83 Girl By the Lake (Not rated, 95 minutes) - Well-made Italian thriller based on Karin Fossum’s novel Don’t Look Back concerns the reappearance of a presumed kidnapped 6-year-old girl and the murder of a young woman in a quiet village in the Italian Alps.

Grade: 86 How to Make Love to a Woman (R, 95 minutes) - Crude formulaic sex comedy with Josh Meyers (That ’70s Show), Krysten Ritter (Breaking Bad), Ian Somerhalde (The Vampire Diaries) and porn star Jenna Jameson. Sigh. Grade: 71 The Losers (R, 95 minutes) - Much better than the notbad The A-Team, although almost entirely resistant to serious consideration. If you like straight-ahead action movies, have at it. Grade: 86 Mother (R, 95 minutes) - This strange and unsettling South Korean criminal procedural veers dangerously close to melodrama and slows to a crawl near the 50-minute mark. But it’s also one of the best films I’ve seen in a while, a beautiful and funny and oddly plausible sort-of horror movie about a woman who really loves her son. (Available separately, or with Barking Dogs Never Bite and The Host in the 3-DVD boxed set “The Bong Joon-Ho Collection.”) Grade: 89The Runaways (R, 109 min utes) - Disappointing blown chance that hits all the usual rock ’n’ roll bio-pic notes Shame they focused on Che rie Currie (Dakota Fanning rather than Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart). Not genuinely awful but .... Grade: 82 A Town Called Panic (Unrat ed, 75 minutes) - Stop-motion French/Belgian production released by Aardman Studios (producers of the Wallace & Gromit films), A Town Called Panic is a ruthless anarchic story of three co-habitating plastic toys named Cowboy Indian and Horse in a charm ing papier-mache village where Policeman enforces the law. When Cowboy and Indian attempt to surprise their bud dy Horse on his birthday by building a backyard barbecue pit, they accidentally order too many bricks, which sets off an insane chain of events that takes our heroes from the center of the earth to the tun dra of Antarctica where they encounter a snowball-tossing mechanical penguin. Com pletely and utterly nuts and absolutely delightful. Better than Toy Story 3? Maybe not but I loved it. Grade: 88

MovieStyle, Pages 33 on 07/23/2010

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