Recently Released DVDs

The following is a list of recently released DVDs. All capsule reviews have been taken from The Washington Post's Weekend section.

November 3

"Aliens in the Attic" (PG, 86 minutes): An extended family gathers in a big Victorian rental home in the country. There's Tom, the "Math-lete" (Carter Jenkins), Jake the alpha male (Austin Butler), Tom's dating-a-college-guy sister (Ashley Tisdale), baby sister Hannah (Ashley Boettcher) and the Twins (Henri and Regan Young). They're the ones who stumble across four diminutive aliens (animated) who have landed in the attic at the vanguard of a Zirconian invasion force. The adults (Doris Roberts, Kevin Nealon and Andy Richter among them) are out of the loop. So is the sheriff (Tim Meadows). It's up to the kids -- who can resist the alien mind-and-body control ray that turns select adults into zombie puppets to save the Earth. Stupid movie, right? But kid-friendly, as the children work out weapons to fight with and ways to fend off the beasties (Thomas Haden Church, Josh Peck and J.K. Simmons do voices). Contains action violence, some suggestive humor and language.

"Food, Inc." (PG, 94 minutes): This absorbing look behind the curtain of the cynical and often sickening workings of the modern industrial food system does a superb job of making its case that our current food ways are drastically out of whack. Starting with the chicken and beef industries, the filmmakers trace how fast-food culture created the corporate concentration of agricultural production and the disappearance of the traditional family farm. With damning hidden-camera footage and interviews with such pioneering journalists as Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan, the film deftly demonstrates how issues such as illegal immigration, public health and intellectual property law intersect at the largely hidden nexus of Big Meat. See the film after dinner, but see it. Contains thematic material and disturbing images.

"G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra" (PG-13, 118 minutes): Stephen Sommers's film, based on the line of Hasbro action figures you melted in the microwave during elementary school, is the loudest, flashiest, silliest and longest blockbuster in a summer full of long, silly, flashy, loud blockbusters. As far as plot goes, the crack commando team of G.I. Joes encounter an evil weapons dealer, a mad scientist, nanobots with a taste for 19th-century Parisian landmarks, a funny black guy, a couple of unconvincing romances, and a girl who's been brainwashed into becoming a lethal killing machine. Mixed in with such hard bodies as Channing Tatum and Sienna Miller are real actors, terrific actors like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Christopher Eccleston. Overall, the film is great at what it does, which is pummel the audience into submission. Contains strong sequences of action violence and mayhem throughout.

"I Love You, Beth Cooper" (PG-13, 101 minutes): The story begins on graduation day at Buffalo Grove High School, where one nerdtastic Denis Cooverman (Paul Rust) is delivering the valedictory address. After Denis declares his long-harbored love for blond it-girl Beth Cooper (Hayden Panettiere), he returns home with his token gay-ish friend (Jack T. Carpenter) for a post-grad soiree. The boys' night of raucous adventuring kicks off when Beth and her two girlfriends show up, with Beth's truly terrifying boyfriend in hot, homicidal pursuit. It's teen-movie business as usual: Girls are never intentionally funny, and the boy will get the hottie if he can (respectfully) convince her that she shouldn't sleep with people who don't respect her. Perhaps the best thing that can be said about this film is that the title is correctly punctuated. Contains crude and sexual content and language, teen drinking and drug references, and brief violence.

"The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3" (R, 106 minutes): Director Tony Scott's remake of the gritty and da rkly comic 1974 film starring Walter Matthau, is about the controlled chaos of a city that barely works. As the lead hijacker of a subway train that left the Pelham station at 1:23 p.m., John Travolta is in high manic mode, seething and unpredictable, violent and charismatic. The best moments of the film are his conversations with Denzel Washington, who plays the Matthau role, as disgraced subway official Walter Garber, who is accidentally thrust into a leading role. If the film stayed there and focused on the psychology of an ordinary guy with a blot on his record and a crazy man who sees his own darkness in everyone, it might have been a good film. But this is a Scott film, which means it is animated by an absurd need for excess, and manic, dizzying camera work. You end up asking yourself, how do the few fun bits of the film manage to survive in the midst of so much lousy filmmaking? Contains violence and pervasive language.

Also on DVD on Nov. 3: "The Claudette Colbert Collection," "The Dead," "North by Northwest: 50th Anniversary Edition," "Star Wars: The Clone Wars -- Complete Season One," "Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut," "Wings of Desire: Criterion Collection."

October 27

"Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" (PG, 87 minutes): I like Scrat. You like Scrat. But no one likes the saber-toothed cartoon squirrel who made only brief appearances in both of the first two "Ice Age" films enough to want to watch a whole movie about him. Nevertheless, there he is, popping up every few minutes in the third and barely-more-than-middling-funny installment in the series of animated features about the prehistoric adventures of Manny (voice of Ray Romano), Diego (Denis Leary) and Sid (John Leguizamo), all a woolly mammoth, saber-toothed tiger and ground sloth stuck in a snow-bound world. Simon Pegg makes a nice acerbic addition to the cast as Buck, a one-eyed weasel who carries a sharpened dino tooth for a dagger and acts as a guide when our heroes discover a tropical world of dinosaurs under all that ice. But the movie feels manufactured, a product not of evolution -- or even intelligent design -- but of cynical, soulless opportunism. Contains cartoon violence and toilet humor.

"Il Divo" (Unrated, 110 minutes): This Godfather-ish drama about Italy's big Mafia trials of the 1990s -- court cases that implicated the very top of the Italian government, the Vatican and the Masons in mob activity -- won a jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year. This must have been a communist jury that enjoys reading its movies. It's not the subtitles that make this Italian stream-of-non-sequitors maddening. It's the endless cascade of names and events printed on screen, the blur of people and events that swirl around the inscrutable "villain" at the heart of the drama -- Giulio Andreotti, capo di capi of the Italian Christian Democratic Party, played as an inscrutable, gnome-shaped sphinx by Toni Servillo. Il Divo is like watching your first cricket match. You don't know the players, the rules or the history of the nation that invented it. But it's all here for you in one confusing parade. Contains violence.

"Nothing Like the Holidays" (PG-13, 99 minutes): Lifting several pages from the Tyler Perry playbook, the film tells a familiar story of a Puerto Rican American family in Chicago that sorts out domestic problems over Christmas. Anna (Elizabeth Peña) and Edy Rodriguez (Alfred Molina) are ready to welcome their three grown children home. Jesse (Freddy Rodríguez) is coming back from a tour of duty in Iraq. Mauricio (John Leguizamo) and his wife, Sarah (Debra Messing), are in from their high-powered New York jobs. Rox (Vanessa Ferlito) is a struggling actress in Los Angeles. The script by Rick Najera and Alison Swan is unfocused and flabby with several relatively pointless scenes that are ended by convenient cellphone calls. The ensemble cast boasts some of the finest actors in the business. They do their best to breathe life into the stereotypes, but they simply don't have enough to work with. Contains language and adult subject matter.