No Impact Man
Rating: not rated
Length: 93 min.
Now available

Can anyone live without imported groceries? Without a car? Even without electricity? That’s what Colin Beavan decided to find out. In the fall of 2006, Beavan, his wife and his baby daughter began a year-long experiment to live off the grid in New York City. Beavan, who chronicled the year in a blog, runs a gamut of criticism and praise, with people calling him a charlatan and a hippie liberal. The film never comes across as a piece of environmental propaganda but instead is a study of a family and their dedication to an experiment. The interplay between Beavan and his wife Michelle, a latte addict and shopaholic, gives the film a romantic and humorous twist. The DVD comes with deleted scenes, and the Q&A session from Sundance with the Beavans and the directors of the documentary,provides a personal insight to the inception and making of the film.

— Nick Slayton

Che (The Criterion Collection)
Rating: R
Length: 134 min. and 145 min,
Now available

Steven Soderbergh’s four-and-a-half-hour-long cinematic epic centered around the life of Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara stars the ever-electrifying Benecio del Toro in the coveted title role. Soderbergh, the Academy Award-winning writer-director whose filmography bounces between introspective indie dramas and socially conscious biopics, chose to take an achronological approach when documenting Guevara’s involvement in the Cuban revolution and the thwarted insurgency in Bolivia, interspersing circuitous moments along the film’s overall timeline. Although Che, which was screened in theaters last January in two separate parts because of its length, gained favorable reviews from American film critics, the film was largely overlooked on the 2009 awards circuit. Del Toro, however, secured the Best Actor Award from the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. Both parts were released on bare-bones DVDs last year, but Soderbergh took his time retooling with deleted scenes and other extras for The Criterion Collection, which finds both two-hour parts released on a special 3-disc Blu-ray set.

— Lauren Barbato

Death in Love
Rating: R
Length: 97 min.
Now available

Writer-director Boaz Yakin’s Death in Love, an updated Holocaust drama, explores how a family’s tragic past carries over and impacts the relationships that develop in the future. The non-linear independent drama, which was released limitedly last July and received mixed reviews from critics, follows two wayward brothers — a sex-addicted con artist and a brilliant yet disturbed pianist — and their varied ways of coping with their Holocaust-survivor mother’s erratic behavior throughout their childhood. While exploring the family’s modern dynamic, the movie intercuts flashbacks of their mother’s scandalous relationship with a Nazi doctor. Death in Love stars acclaimed British actress Jacqueline Bisset as the emotionally tortured mother, and Josh Lucas and Lukas Haas as her slightly unhinged sons. The film is being released in DVD and Blu-ray format.

— Lauren Barbato

The Invention of Lying
Rating: PG-13
Length: 99 min.
Now available

Ricky Gervais’ most recent U.S. vehicle, The Invention of Lying, comes to DVD this week, with the host of last Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards playing the only man on Earth capable of deceit. Gervais, perhaps best known for his role in BBC’s original The Office, directs in addition to starring alongside Jennifer Garner and Rob Lowe. The movie drew criticism for relying on what was essentially one protracted joke — Mark Bellison (Gervais) says something crazy and the gullible citizens of the world believe that crazy something — but the concept behind the movie is sound. Bellison is a down-and-out writer who introduces the first falsehood into the world when he successfully withdraws $800 from an account containing only $300 (the bank teller dismisses the lower figure as a system error). Having discovered just how advantageous untruths can be, Bellison proceeds to exploit the naïvete of a world soft with gullibility. The jokes hinge mostly on the desperation of the average man to bed better-than-average-looking women, but, surprisingly, the gag doesn’t get unbearably stale.

— Louis Lucero II