A Christmas Tale, Four Christmases among new DVD reviews 

A CHRISTMAS TALE (2008). If the Hollywood hit Four Christmases (reviewed below) takes family dysfunction to its comic extremes, writer-director Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale plays it closer to real life, finding both humor and heartbreak as it focuses on the members of the Vuillard clan gathering over the holidays. The most recognizable names (or, for those not versed in French cinema, most recognizable faces) are those of international superstar Catherine Deneuve, still lovely after all these decades, and Mathieu Amalric, who was briefly all over the place thanks also to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Quantum of Solace (in which he portrayed Bond's nemesis). She plays Junon, the matriarch faced with fatal illness; he plays oldest son Henri, who doesn't get along with either his mother or his sister (Anne Consigny). Their younger brother (Melvil Poupaud) also figures into the proceedings, as do various spouses, nephews and friends. The performances are uniformly fine, although it's the raspy-voiced Jean-Paul Roussillon who steals scenes as Junon's husband, the perpetually patient paterfamilias who serves as the eye of the hurricane in this tumultuous household.

Extras in Criterion's two-disc DVD edition include a 36-minute making-of piece featuring interviews with Desplechin, Deneuve and Amalric; the 66-minute L'aimee, Desplechin's documentary about the sale of his family home; and the film's French and American theatrical trailers.

Movie: ***

Extras: **

FOUR CHRISTMASES (2008). Upon its original theatrical release, the underrated Four Christmases promoted itself with a wretched trailer that focused almost exclusively on barf gags, pratfalls and other broad, physical comedy that probably drew the yahoo crowd but not necessarily anyone else. A more representative trailer, on the other hand, would have revealed a movie that's worth seeing – a smart, tart confection whose observations about family dysfunction will make viewers squirm on their couches even as the laughs tumble off the screen. Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon headline as Brad and Kate, a couple who always bypass their families at Christmastime in order to take overseas vacations. But complications force the pair to visit their relatives after all, and since both sets of parents (Robert Duvall and Sissy Spacek are his, Jon Voight and Mary Steenburgen are hers) are divorced, that means four familial gatherings in one day. It proves to be a grueling endurance test, as each is humiliated in turn by said folks, siblings and other assorted in-laws. Movies of this nature always follow the humor with an excruciating final half-hour of phony moralizing or cheap sentiment, so it's a credit that this one not only keeps this sober-minded portion of the film short but also makes it develop believably from the situations that have preceded it (in other words, the character evolution feels natural rather than the work of a hack screenwriter). But honestly, who's here for anything besides laughs? On that front, Four Christmases soundly delivers on the ho-ho-hos.

The only DVD extras are a few theatrical trailers.

Movie: ***

Extras: *

FUNNY PEOPLE (2009). What distinguished writer-director Judd Apatow's previous films (Knocked Up and especially The 40-Year-Old Virgin) from most of the doltish fanboy comedies hitting theaters and DVD shelves these days (The Hangover, for instance) is that he made sure to include genuine characters rather than stock types in his stories and further made us care enough about them to allow the movies to resonate beyond their nyuk content. Funny People is even more ambitious – it wants to make us laugh and cry and ruminate – but it never properly merges all of its disparate elements into an organic whole, resulting in viewer whiplash as it repeatedly starts and sputters. Adam Sandler is cast as George Simmons, a Hollywood star who's just been diagnosed with a potentially fatal strain of leukemia. After the obligatory bouts of self-pity, he tries to move ahead, first by hiring rising comic Ira Wright (Seth Rogen) to write material for him and then by trying to rekindle a romance with Laura (Leslie Mann, Apatow's real-life wife), an ex-fiancée now married to an Australian businessman (Eric Bana, stealing the show). Criminally overlong, this is so overstuffed with incidental material – Ira's thorny relationship with his two more successful roommates (Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman), his tentative wooing of a deadpan neighbor (Aubrey Plaza), George's schmoozing with countless celebrities playing themselves (Sarah Silverman, Paul Reiser, Eminem, etc.), an endless stream of dick jokes – that the George-Laura story line doesn't even materialize until the film's second hour. Apatow clearly meant to further his reputation with this ambitious effort, but the end result, sad to say, is no laughing matter.

The two-disc Collector's Edition DVD contains both the R-rated and unrated versions of the film. Extras include audio commentary by Apatow, Sandler and Rogen; 11 deleted scenes; a 65-minute making-of documentary; two gag reels; and archival footage of Sandler's first appearance on Letterman's show.

Movie: **

Extras: **1/2

TERMINATOR SALVATION (2009). Make no mistake: Terminator Salvation is nowhere in the same league as James Cameron's 1984 classic The Terminator or his pull-out-all-the-stops 1991 sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But it's a step up from the belated (and Cameron-less) 2003 entry Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which surprisingly preserved the integrity of the narrative throughline but otherwise spun its wheels in regards to its characterizations and action set-pieces. In much the same way, this one (set in 2018) doesn't especially deepen our understanding of the apocalyptic future world first glimpsed in Cameron's original movie, and to say that it fails to flesh out the character of John Connor is an understatement. But it's entertaining nonetheless, as Connor (Christian Bale) tries to save the teenage Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) while also trying to ascertain whether a stranger (Sam Worthington) is a friend or foe. Complaints upon its theatrical release that the film was too bleak are ludicrous, and while the charges can't be denied that Bale's John Connor is rather humorless and one-note, what else are we to expect from a character who has spent his entire life burdened not only by the fact that the future is crappy but that he's somehow expected to fix it all? At any rate, the movie itself isn't completely devoid of humor, as witnessed by a few knowing winks at fans of the first films (including a cameo-of-sorts by a certain superstar). Terminator Salvation is, to borrow from Macbeth, full of sound and fury, but whether it's a tale told by an idiot (certainly, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle earned director McG a battalion of haters) and signifying nothing will largely be determined by viewer preconceptions and a subsequent willingness to go with the flow. This isn't a classic Terminator model, but as the fourth line in a brand that was created a quarter-century ago, it serves its purpose nicely.

Surprisingly, there are no extras on the DVD except for a couple of promos.

Movie: ***

Extras: *

THEY WON'T FORGET (1937) / BERLIN EXPRESS (1948) / THE SEARCH (1948) / RANCHO NOTORIOUS (1952). Selected titles from recent batches of films available only through the Warner Archives label (www.warnerarchive.com) include two dramas set in post-WWII Germany as well as respective movies about Southern justice and Western justice.

In a small Southern town, a pretty young girl (16-year-old Lana Turner in her breakthrough role) is murdered, leading to the arrest of the principal suspect: the student's Northern teacher (Edward Norris). Is he guilty? It doesn't matter to most of the characters in the riveting They Won't Forget, from the prosecuting attorney (Claude Rains) hoping to catapult himself into higher office to the crafty newspaper reporter (Allyn Joslyn) seeking to make a name for himself to the town rednecks still miffed that they lost the Civil War in the previous century. The hard-hitting script (based on a true incident that occurred in Atlanta from 1913-1915) never shies away from showing the insidiousness of media manipulation, political posturing and misplaced communal pride, and the superbly staged climax still has the power to shock.

Notable as the first Hollywood movie to be shot in Berlin following World War II, Berlin Express finds five representatives from four different nations – an American (Robert Ryan), an Englishman (Robert Coote), a Russian (Roman Toporow), a Frenchman (Charles Korvin) and a Frenchwoman (Merle Oberon) – pooling their resources to help protect and, after he's kidnapped, find a German professor (Paul Lukas) whose peaceful proposals are not shared by those still operating under Nazi principles. Sporting a fine cast, an accomplished director (Cat People's Jacques Tourneur), an ace scripter (The Wolf Man's Curt Siodmak) and a crackerjack premise, this sounds like it can't miss, but some flabby plotting and thin characterizations keep it from reaching its full potential.

The Search centers on the plight of small European children who find themselves alone after World War II and the efforts to reunite them with any surviving relatives. The focus is little Karel Malik (Ivan Jandl), a Czech whose ordeal in Auschwitz has left him an amnesiac. As the boy's mother (Jarmila Novotna) tirelessly searches for him at displaced-children's camps across Germany, an American G.I. (Montgomery Clift) stumbles across the kid and takes him under his wing. Clift's breezy performance adds a welcome lift to an otherwise somber drama that doesn't flinch at examining the horrors endured by children caught in an unfortunate time and place in world history. Nominated for four Academy Awards (including a Best Actor bid for Clift in his first year in film), this won for Best Motion Picture Story and also earned Jandl a special prize for "the outstanding juvenile performance of 1948."

The great director Fritz Lang (Metropolis, The Big Heat) here combines the German Expressionism of his earlier years with the film noir style of his American run to produce the offbeat Western Rancho Notorious. Unjustly forgotten Arthur Kennedy, one of the best actors of the 1950s (five Oscar nominations in a 10-year span), stars as Vern Haskell, an honest rancher whose mind turns only to revenge after his fiancee is raped and murdered by an outlaw named Kinch (Lloyd Gough). With only one clue to guide him, Haskell eventually ends up at the criminal hideout run by former showgirl Altar Keane (Marlene Dietrich), where he tries to figure out if the killer is Altar's charismatic lover Frenchy Fairmont (Mel Ferrer), oily ladies' man Wilson (George Reeves) or one of the other varmints on hand. Ken Darby's heavy-handed theme song is a distraction, but the film itself is lean and mean.

There are no extras except for a theatrical trailer on They Won't Forget.

They Won't Forget: ****

Berlin Express: **1/2

The Search: ***

Rancho Notorious: ***

Extras: *