‘AVENGERS: ENDGAME’ IS A MARVEL OF A SERIES FINALE
New on Blu-ray Avengers: Endgame Marvel/Disney Blu-ray, $24.96; 4K, $29.96; also available on VOD
The highest-grossing film of all time is also one of 2019’s best. After roughly half of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s super team was eliminated in an epic battle with the alien tyrant Thanos in “Avengers: Infinity War,” the saga’s conclusion sees the surviving heroes engineering a time-hopping heist that could potentially bring their friends back to life and save the universe. The larger, multipart story that began with 2008’s “Iron Man” reaches a satisfying conclusion here in a film loaded with the small, charming character moments that have helped make the Marvel pictures so popular in the
VOD Driven Now available
Strong performances and a fascinating story fuel this film based on a real-life scandal that brought down the innovative, fastliving American automobile magnate John DeLorean. Lee Pace plays DeLorean, who projects an image of opulent wealth and unparalleled genius even as his company is struggling to survive. Jason Sudeikis plays Jim Hoffman, a sleazy pilot and smuggler — and secret FBI informant — who becomes DeLorean’s neighbor right when the automaker is in need of the kind of quick cash that Hoffman’s drug-dealing contacts can provide. Director Nick Hamm and screenwriters Colin Bateman and Alejandro Carpio don’t aim for a hard-hitting true-crime story here. This is more of a breezy buddy comedy about two desperate guys, who in the process of giving each other a helping hand end up pushing themselves to the brink of catastrophe.
TV set of the week Riverdale: The Complete Third Season Warner Archive DVD, $39.99; Blu-ray, $47.99
Luke Perry. On-screen, this last year brought a creative resurgence to the series, thanks to a new mystery with spooky supernatural undertones — involving a “Dungeons & Dragons”-like role-playing game and the decades-old misadventures of the Riverdale gang’s parents. Though the series’ earlier episodes were plenty eccentric, the 22 on this set reach new heights of looniness.
From the archives Blackmail KL Studio Classics Blu-ray, $29.95 Murder! KL Studio Classics Blu-ray, $29.95
Alfred Hitchcock’s silent films in the late 1920s introduced some of the visual panache that he’d perfect in his thrillers of the ’40s and ’50s. And even in his earliest sound pictures — like 1929’s “Blackmail” and 1930’s “Murder!” — Hitchcock was already thinking about how to unnerve audiences and to convey important plot information with clever staging and effects.
Both films use sound and imagery artfully, intending to make the viewer feel like the movie’s characters: anxious, paranoid and plagued by guilt.