Recently released DVDs

"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.

"Orphan" (R, 123 minutes): It's hard to know where to begin when assessing the depraved, worthless piece of filth that is this high-gloss horror show about a well-meaning couple who bring home a 9-year-old girl to join their family, only to discover, way too late, that she's a homicidal psychopath. Surely writers David Leslie Johnson and Alex Mace deserve their own circle of hell for thinking up the story, which moves with breathtaking cynicism from disturbing to grotesque to perverse to ludicrous. Both Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga are apparently in desperate need of a paycheck -- otherwise how to explain lending their considerable talents to such rank exploitation? Oh, and what have we here: None other than Leonardo DiCaprio is listed as a producer, proving that his concern for the environment clearly doesn't extend to poisoning the culture. Shame on them all, every single one. Contains disturbing content, sexuality and profanity.

"Whatever Works" (PG-13, 92 minutes): This toxic, contemptuous, unforgivably unfunny bagatelle finds Woody Allen at his most misanthropically one-note. Larry David plays Allen's alter ego as a grumpy, growling Boris Yellnikoff, a self-described genius who has been living on Manhattan's Lower East Side since trying to escape his first wife by jumping out a window. One night he finds a runaway named Melodie St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), who has fled her life in Mississippi and takes up residence in Boris's loft. Eventually, Melodie's painfully stereotyped evangelical parents arrive on the scene, played by Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley Jr. with as much dignity as they can muster. With its preposterous, self-serving climax, the film plays like a warped kind of summa of Allen's tortured relationship with women. Contains profanity, sexuality and brief nudity.

Also on DVD Oct. 27: "Adult Swim in a Box," "Battlestar Galactica: The Plan," "The Guardian: The First Season," "Night of the Creeps," "On the Road With Charles Kuralt: Set 1," "The Prisoner: Complete Series (Blu-ray)," "The Samuel Fuller Collection," "Stan Helsing," "Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure" and "Z."

October 20

"Cheri" (R, 100 minutes): A radiant Michelle Pfeiffer is Lea, a courtesan well schooled in pleasure and the politics of the personal, who is approaching that point where she will age out of her profession (any parallels to Hollywood are no doubt intentional). With Kathy Bates, playing Lea's friend and colleague Madame Peloux, Pfeiffer wends her way through screenwriter Christopher Hampton's insouciant banter with decadent assurance and an eye on the clock, which may be why Lea adopts as her project, and her lover, Cheri (Rupert Friend), Madame Peloux's son and a candidate for early debauchery. What begins as a lark turns into love. And what began as a frothy period piece becomes a meditation on age, passion and the tyranny of the typical. Yet, the movie bogs down by going nowhere other than inside its characters, who are intensely passionate but of an era more curious than emotionally relevant. Contains sexual content and drug use.

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" (PG-13, 150 minutes): There's so much swirling, relentless action, indistinct robot characterizations and over-caffeinated techies loose on the special-effects machines that the film, in mere seconds, achieves incoherence. Since the absence of the "Allspark" life force has made the Autobots' planet uninhabitable, they've moved in with us like unemployed relatives and have been working with the U.S. military to find rogue Decepticons and to keep the world safe. But not for long: The ancient origins of the Autobots and evil Decepticons will come to the fore. Shia LaBeouf (Sam) and Megan Fox (Mikaela) are back, of course, but director Michael Bay, executive producer Steven Spielberg and the rest of their co-conspirators have relegated humans to the props department. To suppose that there is an artistic philosophy behind this film or even an intelligence, is to suppose a lot. Contains sexual content, vulgarity, intense action, crude humor and drug content.