Characters’ complex chemistry
As the Oscars approach, some of this year’s big contenders are starting to show up on home video, including this best picture nominee based on the true story of self-medicating Texas AIDS patient Ron Woodroof, who started slinging drugs not approved by the Food and Drug Administration to people who were similarly suffering. As both a drama and a period piece (set in the mid-1980s), “Dallas Buyers Club” tries too hard to be a crowd-pleaser, to make the audience feel superior to the doctors and bigots who stood in the way of Ron and his customers. But Oscar nominee Matthew McConaughey is riveting as the bone-skinny, homophobic rodeo rider Ron, and Oscar nominee Jared Leto is just as memorable as a pre-operative transsexual who teaches Ron compassion. Their chemistry is complex and personal and defies the clichés that litter the rest of the film. The DVD and Blu-ray add deleted scenes and a brief featurette.
A nominee for foreign language film at this year’s Academy Awards, Felix van Groeningen’s Belgian melodrama stars Johan Heldenbergh and Veerle Baetens as folk musicians who fall in love, have a child and then have trouble sustaining their relationship when the child is diagnosed with a terminal disease. The film adapts a song cycle that Heldenbergh had conceived with Mieke Dobbels, and though Van Groeningen builds it out into a sprawling saga that jumps around the timeline — contrasting the couple’s happier times with their misery — the core of the project remains the bluegrass-inf lected score, which ties the problems of two lovers to a long tradition of hard times.
Outside of “The Act of Killing,” the most unusual documentary Oscar nominee this year would have to be Zachary Heinzerling’s film about the troubled but enduring relationship between avant-garde painter Ushio Shinohara and his wife, Noriko, whose career is beginning to eclipse his. A sensitive, provocative look at the creative process and how some people are bound by more than romantic love, “Cutie and the Boxer” introduces two colorful, memorable characters and then deepens our understanding of who they are. The DVD and Blu-ray go further via deleted scenes and more indepth looks at Ushio Shinohara’s art.
Those who know Danai Gurira only as the bladewielding zombie-killer Michonne on “The Walking Dead” might be surprised by her performance in this arty indie drama, in which she plays a Nigerian immigrant dealing with the difficulties of running a Brooklyn restaurant alongside her husband (Isaach de Bankolé), while the two keep failing to conceive a child. Director Andrew Dosunmu and cinematographer Bradford Young render Darci Picoult’s script with more visual abstraction than the story requires, but Gurira holds down the center of the film, revealing her character’s stresses and aspirations often through facial expressions and posture alone. The DVD and Blu-ray add deleted scenes, featurettes and a commentary track.