Thriller
Rod Lott
File Compliance under “stranger than fiction.” Although not a documentary, it is based on a true story, and one so utterly outrageous that many will refuse to believe it anyway.

Sci-Fi
Rod Lott
When I first saw Holy Motors, it was in a way that would make director Leos Carax cry, “Mon dieu!”: on a small window on my computer screen. That’s hardly the proper showcase for a film that set Cannes all abuzz, especially for courting year-end votes from critics’ groups.

Drama
Rod Lott
It’s curious that the Internet Movie Database (among other sources) has classified The Loneliest Planet as a “thriller,” since the film forgoes not just all that genre’s trappings, but narrative altogether.

Drama
Rod Lott
In a short career largely dominated with genre films — from Final Destination 3 to this past summer’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter — Mary Elizabeth Winstead always has exuded a certain something. But nothing that ever suggested the level of performance she delivers in Smashed.

Drama
Rod Lott
With magic-themed movies The Incredible Burt Wonderstone and Now You See Me on the way, Hollywood is all about the abracadabra these days. If that exposes more eyeballs to 2011’s The Great Magician, good.

Drama
Phil Bacharach
Don’t trust the viewers.

Trusting them appears to be the cardinal sin of Zero Dark Thirty, a masterful, absorbing film dramatizing the CIA's 10-year hunt for Osama bin Laden. It has been at the center of controversy for its depiction of U.S. intelligence agents using “enhanced interrogation techniques,” otherwise known as torture.

Thriller
Rod Lott
It’s not difficult to see what Martin Scorsese saw in Easy Money to lend his name to it as presenter to American audiences: a lot of himself. The 2010 Swedish film is a crime epic cast in the mold of Goodfellas or Casino, yet still its own thing. A smash as Snabba Cash in its native land, where it’s already spawned two sequels, the movie now arrives on DVD.

Television series
Rod Lott
Earlier this week, HBO announced the cancellation of Enlightened, which just completed its second season. It’s a damn shame, because in her four-decade career as an actress, Laura Dern never has been better.

Drama
Rod Lott
How weird that K-11 is attracting more attention for who the director is (the mother of Twilight starlet Kristen Stewart) than for its outlandish subject matter (transgendered inmates). That oversight is as insane as this movie, new to VOD.

Action
Rod Lott
Not only is The Sweeney one of the best TV-to-film adaptations in history, but quite possibly the best adaptation of a TV series you’ve never heard of ... unless you’re British.