DVD & Blu-ray

Warm Bodies is a smart, funny, and heartwarming romantic comedy... with zombies.

You know this drill. Zombie meets girl. Zombie loses girl. Zombie ...

OK, maybe you haven’t seen this scenario played out with a zombie, but you’ve followed similar patterns in a zillion other love-struck rom-coms.

A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth movie in the Die Hard series that kicked off with style and high tension in 1988, suggests that Bruce Willis — like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone — won’t surrender his action-movie cred without a fight — in fact without lots of fights.

A Good Day to Die Hard is a rough night at the movies.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s return to the big screen was less than triumphant when The Last Stand was released last month. Sylvester Stallone’s new one, Bullet to the Head, was received by a boisterous chorus of crickets.

The artistic imagination is such that it frequently wants to push into dark corners. It’s possible for a writer to wonder what it might be like to be accused of a terrible crime or how it might feel to inherit and then squander a fortune. Director Cate Shortland, working from the middle section of Rachel Seiffert’s 2002 novel The Dark Room, has taken such an unsettling journey. In her new movie Lore, Shortland tries to show us what it might have been like to be the child of an SS officer in the days just prior to the end of World war II.

One of the very best films I saw at Boulder’s International Film Festival was Lore, and it could have easily earned BIFF’s prize for best narrative feature.

Last year at about this time, Steven Soderbergh released Haywire, an unassuming, taut little action thriller that worked pretty well. This year, he goes for something weightier and with a bigger cast. Side Effects is not a failure, but it probably would have worked better with smaller ambitions.

Just when I thought things couldn’t possibly get worse or less funny, the abysmally contrived Identity Thief introduced a car chase, a move for which the phrase “insult to injury” surely was invented.

Somebody stole the funny out of this Identity Thief’s wallet.

Arnold Schwarzenegger continues his big-screen comeback with The Last Stand, a zealously violent and gleefully preposterous explosion of dramatic cliches and gun violence.

Director Steven Soderbergh has said that the thriller Side Effects will be his last big-screen venture. The 50-year-old, Academy Award-winning director recently told New York Magazine that he plans to spend much of his time painting. Soderbergh didn’t rule out theater or a television series, but said that he wouldn’t continue as a filmmaker while he felt as if he were “running in place.”

Putting Christopher Walken, Al Pacino and Alan Arkin into the same movie raises a large amount of justifiable expectation. None of these veterans have worked together before, and it’s reasonable to assume that the cumulative weight of their old-pro experience will deliver the big-screen goods.

Bless its bloody heart, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is a schlocky, gory, silly guilty pleasure. It earns a thumbs up... but they’re broken thumbs.

First, the good news: For a movie that’s two hours and 52 minutes long, Cloud Atlas does not present viewers with an endurance test. That’s no small accomplishment.

Writer/director David Chase — the estimable and obviously talented creator of HBO’s The Sopranos — returns to his native New Jersey to tell the story of a group of young men who form (what else?) a rock band.