SHOTGUN STORIES (Liberation Entertainment) Bad blood boils over in Jeff Nichols’ impressively parched debut, which garnered good reviews on the festival circuit but never got a local release. Michael Shannon — the American actor of the moment — does typically intense work as the eldest of three small-town shit-kickers whose contempt for their late deadbeat dad has been transferred to the old man’s second family. It’s half-brother against half-brother, and if the underlying theme — that violence begets more violence and so on — isn’t exactly original, there’s a specificity of place (a dusty swath of Southern Arkansas) and tone (at once ambling and anxious) that sets the film apart from so many cut-and-dried revenge dramas. EXTRAS: none.
BABY, IT’S YOU (Legend Films) En route to becoming an Amer-indie avatar, John Sayles battled with Paramount over the final cut of this ’60s-set romance, and scored a pyrrhic victory: he got final cut but the 1983 film was barely promoted and never found an audience. The writer-director would go on to bigger things, of course, but Baby, It’s You is better than its rep: the young-love dialogue between Vincent Spano and Rosanna Arquette tends towards the tin-eared, but the actors are both appealing (as is an impossibly young Robert Downey Jr. in a small role) and the embedded class commentary plays to Sayles’ socially conscious strengths. EXTRAS: trailer.
Also this week
DRILLBIT TAYLOR (Paramount) I’d say that this film was just My Bodyguard minus Adam Baldwin and plus Owen Wilson, but Baldwin’s actually in here, too — and his affectionate cameo is the funniest moment in an otherwise rote, throwaway comedy. EXTRAS: director/actor commentary, making-of, additional scenes, gag reel.
SEX AND DEATH 101 (Starz/Anchor Bay) Daniel Waters’ cautionary farce about an alpha male (Simon Baker) who winds up dangling at the ends of his no-strings-attached ethos isn’t nearly so dark or clever as it thinks it is, but Winona Ryder proves unexpectedly affecting as a sad-eyed angel of (near)-death. EXTRAS: audio commentary by Waters, “101 Perversions,” trailer.
VANTAGE POINT (TWO-DISC SPECIAL EDITION) (Sony) This pseudo-cubist thriller, which replays a presidential assassination from a panoply of POVs, suggests 24 as directed by Costa-Gavras — and that’s not a good thing. EXTRAS: director commentary, interviews with the cast and crew, “Writing the Assasination of a President,” “Surveillance Tapes: Outtakes,” “Coordinating Chaos.”
Out July 8
Monk: Season Six, The Ruins, Stop-Loss, The Future is Unwritten, Superhero Movie and a Criterion edition of Mon Oncle Antoine, merely one of the greatest Canadian films of all time.