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LITTLE ROCK — Recent DVD releases:

Evening Primrose (Not rated, 50 minutes) - Stephen Sondheim’s “lost” TV musical aired only once, in November 1966 on the series ABC Stage 67. Based on a short story by John Collier, it stars Anthony Perkins as a poet who withdraws from the world and takes up residence in a department store. There he uncovers a secret community of fellow recluses. A bizarre curiosity that was originally broadcast in color, it survives only in black-and-white prints and is only being covered in this column because of the relative lack of new movies released to DVD this week.

Grade: 86

The Girl Who Played With Fire (Not rated, 126 minutes) - Like the first film in the series - The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo - there is a lot of enjoyable art (and artiness) applied to what is essentially pulp fiction. The villains in this Scandinavian noir are Bond-film cartoonish, and it was more fun to see Mikael (Michael Nyqvist) and Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) work together in the first movie than it is to watch them slowly converge in this one, which sets the stage for the final installment of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy.

Grade: 86

Nice Guy Johnny (Not rated, 126 minutes) - Edward Burns wrote, directed and co-stars as the raffish Uncle Terry, not-so-sage adviser to nephew Johnny (Matt Bush) who’s all set to give up his dream for the woman he loves. Bland, predictable but likable in a lightweight way.It has been 15 years since The Brothers McMullen, but Burns still seems like a filmmaker with potential.

Grade: 82

Sex and the City 2 (R, 146) - Michael Patrick King exhausts all of the good will our heroines (Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, Cynthia Nixon) built up over the course of the long-running HBO series. It just makes us tired.

Grade: 79

Wild Grass (PG, 104 minutes) - Ultimately frustrating, but lovely in a momentto-moment, frame-by-frame way. As a fan of director Alain Renais, I like it, but I don’t expect many others will cotton to this movie about the unlikeliness of everything, especially love, the impossible odds against any of us ever brushing up against another and recognizing a bit of ourselves in the other. The French title, Les herbes folles, literally translates as “weeds,” but it connotes a plant that thrivesin an unlikely place - like grass forcing up through a crack in the sidewalk or on a wall.

Grade: 85

Winter’s Bone (R, 104 minutes) - Possibly the most jury-decorated and critically acclaimed movie to emerge in 2010, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone may also be the year’s best film. It’s a tough, unstinting rural noir set in the Ozark Mountains of southwest Missouri, not far from the Arkansas line. Seventeenyear-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) plans to escape the squalor of her desperately poor home life by joining the Army, but her plans are derailed when her crystal methamphetamine-cooking father, Jessup, skips out on a court appearance after putting the family’s house and timber woods up for bond. Like Mattie Ross, the young girl at the center of Charles Portis’ True Grit, Ree is forced to take on adult challenges - a journeyimperiled by the rural omerta observed by her criminal kinfolk and associates of her father. (Original grade: 88)

Revised grade: 90

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For more DVD reviews, see blooddirtandangels.com.

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