His soulful eyes will follow you around the room.  Especially if you are looking at this on a smartphone or tablet.

The Dark Knight Rises is out today on DVD and Blu-ray and nothing else matters. Still, I know most (all?) of you have seen it and might want to know what else has come out today, so I’m back, providing you with all you need to know when you ultimately decide to just watch Batman again anyway.  Other flicks you won’t actually be watching this week include new films from Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Hugh Jackman, and two films with Jennifer Garner.  We’ve got movies that will make you laugh (if Meryl Streep trying to fellate a banana is funny to you), movies that will make you cry (if you are a little kid) and Beasts Of The Southern Wild, a critical-darling  that Vince wasn’t very fond of.  There are films about butter and psycho Santas and professional athletes who believe in magic.  There’s super elves, some spooky VHS tapes, and even a Christmas movie with a talking dog!

The DVDs:
The Dark Knight Rises
Hope Springs
Butter
The Odd Life Of Timothy Green
Beasts Of The Southern Wild
Silent Night
Thunderstruck
Elf-Man
V/H/S
Hemingway
Alps
Last Ounce Of Courage
Reel Evil
12/12/12
A Vampire’s Tale
The Magic Of Christmas II

Streaming: Check out your choices here.

One of these flicks stars a dude from Jackass as a superhero.  The only way to find out which one it is is to continue reading. Another one of these movies has vampires in it.  You might assume it’s A Vampire’s Tale, but you can’t be sure unless you continue reading.  If you want to know which film makes little kids cry -you guessed it, continue reading.  If you want to make me cry, just skip all the DVDs and go right to the Netflix streaming suggestions.  There’s a link right above this paragraph, if that’s how you want to handle things.  For my money (literally), you’d be much better off just clicking the ‘Continue Reading’ link that’s just below this paragraph.  You’d get to the streaming suggestions eventually, and there’s no reason to rush.

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Every year, a handful of smaller films come out that rely on critical acclaim to find an audience. As a critic, you walk a fine line between trying to help those smaller, worthy films find an audience, and making sure the films you champion are worthy, to keep from burning your audience and becoming the boy who cried wolf, making film critics even more irrelevant than we already are. Beasts of the Southern Wild is a critic-bait film that’s already won a Camera D’or at Cannes, Best Narrative Film at the LA Film Festival, and been nominated for Best Film at the Independent Spirit Awards. Here’s why the critics whiffed on this one.

As an MGMT video, Beasts of the Southern Wild is pretty good. It’s got soaring music, pretty cinematography, fantastical imagery that borrows heavily from Where the Wild Things Are, an impossibly cute little girl, and deep south swamp locations exotic to urbanized yankees like me (“look, crawdaddies! Isn’t that a funny word, Brent? ‘Crawdaddies?’”). But if you can see past the craft, this tale of deep south swamp hobos and feral children that eat cat food has all the depth of one of those Levis slam poetry commercials. I thought we weren’t supposed to fall for the Magic Negro and the Noble Savage anymore? Yet here it is, a whole movie full of them, plus folksy Cajuns who can’t open their mouths without homespun crypticisms aw shucksing their way out.

“Hushpuppy” (yes, the main character’s name is Hushpuppy) is the adorable little black girl in question (it really cannot be overstated how cute she is), played by spell-check nightmare Quvenzhané Wallis when she was just five years old (an impressive performance, to be sure). Hushpuppy lives with her daddy beyond the levees in a swampy section of rural Louisiana called “The Bathtub.” Or as Hushpuppy narrates it to us, “I’m recording it for the scientists in the future. In a million years, when kids go to school, they gonna know that once there was a Hushpuppy and she lived with her daddy in The Bathtub.”

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If the Matthew McConaughey hype train makes it all the way to Oscar town, let it be said that we were there to tearfully bid it bon voyage as it left the station. Today it made an important refueling stop on its journey, in Independent Spirit Awardville (it’s a terrible town name, no one’s arguing that), where McConaughey was nominated both as a supporting actor or his FilmDrunk-approved role in Magic Mike, AND as best lead actor in Killer Joe. I don’t know how he celebrated, but ten bucks says it was shirtless.

Here’s the full list of Nominees:

Best Feature
“Beasts of the Southern Wild”
“Bernie”
“Keep the Lights On”
“Moonrise Kingdom” (our review)
“Silver Linings Playbook” (our review)

Best Director
Benh Zeitlin, “Beasts of the Southern Wild”
Ira Sachs, “Keep the Lights On”
Julia Loktev, “The Loneliest Planet”
Wes Anderson, “Moonrise Kingdom”
David O. Russell, “Silver Linings Playbook”

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