Chris Barsanti has been a Filmcritic reviewer since 2002. So there.Brave chameleons and wily lawyers: a heroic lizard (Johnny Depp) fights to save a town in the animated Western Rango, while Matthew McConaughey does the legal profession proud in The Lincoln Lawyer; these and other films both worthwhile (Insidious, Arthur, a Blu-ray of Brazil) and not ([REC] 2) are coming this week to DVD and Blu-ray. Rango 
Since apparently Johnny Depp and director Gore Verbinski had so much fun playing pirates in the Caribbean, it made sense for them to team up for this in-jokey animated film about a hapless chameleon (looking a lot like the late Hunter S. Thompson) who becomes a reluctant hero when his adopted town is threatened. "Rango is an absolutely wonderful film that almost inexplicably blends adventure with introspection," our critic wrote, calling it "a sumptuous Western with surrealist tendencies about the infuriating but ultimately rewarding quest for identity." On sale July 15.
The Lincoln Lawyer 
Matthew McConaughey plays the Lincoln-chauffeured lawyer of the title in this by-the-numbers legal drama (based on a Michael Connelly novel) wherein the cool and detached attorney takes the case of a spoiled, rich murder suspect -- a case that quickly upends his cozy life. "This is a film that occasionally approaches the gritty, profane, and darkly wise legal thriller that it wants to be," our writer said, "but never quite knows how to get there."
Insidious An old-fashioned scary movie from the makers of the Saw franchise, this horrorshow about two parents who are told by a psychic that their son (whom they think is in a coma) is actually being attacked by evil spirits, is, according to our writer, "the most delightful celluloid dark ride of this or any other year" and "a classic just waiting to be confirmed."
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
A critically-ill man returns to his family farm in this surreal and mystical Thai film where all manner of supernatural beings and events occur in the dark jungles surrounding the farm, very few of which are explained (including ghost monkeys, strangely romantic fish, and visions of reincarnation). We called this moody, spiritual story "humorous, delicate and oddly moving."
Arthur 
Russell Brand's no Dudley Moore, you say? True, but then this isn't 1981, when the original Arthur was released, and this one has Helen Mirren, so that should count for something. The story, if you need to be enlightened, follows the titular spoiled man-child (Brand) who's resisting an arranged marriage to a woman he doesn't love (Jennifer Garner), falling instead for a goofy and unapproved dame (Greta Gerwig) and thus threatening his inheritance. Mirren plays the disapproving nanny/butler in a remake that our critic found surprisingly good and well-acted, praising the filmmakers for giving "this latest Arthur a likable life of its own." On sale July 15.
Miral
This sprawling work by artist-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) takes on a large cast of characters and casts its story-net over some 60 years of history, starting with the 1948 founding of Israel. Hiam Abbass and Slumdog Millionaire's Frieda Pinto star in a film that our critic thought was ambitious and brave enough to deserve "being applauded," but whose lack of a solid dramatic core ensures that it ultimately "misses the mark."
[REC] 2 
Since there's yet to be a smart, scary, innovative horror film (like, say, 2007's [REC]) that producers didn't want to mangle with an uninspired sequel, [REC] 2 - which picks up right where the first one left off -- with a SWAT team trapped inside an apartment building full of flesh-eating zombies -- was perhaps inevitable. Our writer thought that the ending tries to make up for the film's many failings, "but ends up rehashing the first film's night vision climax and failing to muster even half of the original's breath-holding horror."
Brazil 
When Terry Gilliam's sci-fi Orwellian comedy-nightmare freakout opened in 1985, it was considered by some (particularly the people who paid for it) a confusing downer whose more outré elements (the torture-happy police state, especially) seemed a bit far-fetched. These days, it's still a downer, but an exhilarating one that looks more and more prophetic. "Visionary? Timeless? Indulgent?" Our critic wrote, "Call it what you will, Brazil had its fingers firmly on the pulse ... long before the War on Terror." Now available on Blu-ray.
The story told in James Marsh's new documentary Project Nim is essentially an outsider's tale, with the typical character of the socially awkward genius or abandoned gentle-heart replaced here by the eponymous chimpanzee, yanked from his mother's arms and tossed almost immediately into the home of a family of New York progressives. Named in honor of the famous philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky, Nim Chimpsky was the hopeful key to the future of communication in the 1970s, and his tale, as Marsh tells it, begins with ponderous notions on how we become civilized, how we are understood, and just how many evolutionary tip-toes we are away from our primal beastliness, or, more pointedly, how different primates are from us. And yet, Project Nim essentially hinges on a simplistic structure of a young, gifted child, led away from his primal instincts and into the choleric cobweb of human intellectual endeavors. 
Bill Gibron is a veteran film critic from Tampa, Florida.Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 is not for the novice. As a matter of fact, to get the full dramatic and emotional benefit of this final chapter in the literary phenomenon's translation to the silver screen, you had better be heavily invested in the series. You need to know the Order of the Phoenix from the Sorcerer's Stone, the Chamber of Secrets from the Goblet of Fire. If you don't know who the Prisoner of Azkaban or the Half-Blood Prince are, now is too late. Director David Yates and franchise screenwriter Steve Kloves are not in the business of bringing you up to speed. Instead, they've got a whole lot of ground to cover and they want to make sure the faithful are happy, all newbies and Potter pretenders be (politely) damned. 
Sean is a senior critic for Filmcritic.com.
It's an overstatement to say Salvation Boulevard, which finds its core in the ironic notion that beneath every pearly-toothed Bible thumper lurks the soul of a bad, bad man, is milking an old joke dry. After all, the real-life instances in which purportedly moral men turn out to be sinners - Anthony Weiner; John Edwards; the recent, sad history of the Catholic Church - have grown so rapidly over the past few years that it's barely even good joke fodder anymore; milking the premise for laughs has become kind of a tricky subject for a movie to navigate. As one character says late in the film, "if you follow a preacher, you're always gonna find something interesting." The line is played (successfully) for yuks, but they are, for better or worse, the kind that stick in your throat.There's something to be said, though, for the fact that Salvation Boulevard, in which the sinner is a gaudy Christian preacher (Pierce Brosnan) and his sin the accidental, nonfatal shooting of a scruffy, agnostic-ish academic (a funny Ed Harris) -- did I mention this is a comedy? -- doesn't necessarily try to tiptoe around this obstacle as mow it down with a bulldozer. The film is long on chutzpah (to evoke a different denomination) but as a result short on finesse. From the outset, everything is laid out painfully clear: the rich, ostentatious preacher is actually a villain (because he turns his flock's blind devotion into awesome power), and the godless hippie is really a good guy (because despite his past hedonism, he wants peace and quiet above all else and doesn't bother anyone). People are who they are and they cannot, and will not, change, just put on a show. It is what it is, take it or leave it.Bold statement, but there isn't a single fully developed character in the whole damn thing. Perhaps it's fitting that a film satirizing religion deals entirely in archetypes and, if done correctly, this type of movie can be pretty fun for what it is, but rarely is it ever the kind of witty satire Salvation Boulevard seems to be marketing itself as. The characters themselves aren't terribly un-interesting on paper (think regular folks who only came with a single, albeit extremely noticeable, defective personality trait), but rather, the actors just seem bored.Our hero is Carl Vandermeer (Kinnear), whose story at least has an interesting beginning. Carl is a Deadhead gone straight-edge after experiencing a come-to-Jesus moment some years prior that landed him, to his lingering confusion, in the megachurch congregation of Pastor Dan Day (Brosnan). Carl's also trapped in a passionless marriage to a holy-rolling painter named Gwen (Jennifer Connelly) who shares a mutual, if extremely awkward - both in presentation and execution - attraction with the good Pastor.Kinnear is admirably discombobulated throughout, like Carl has been waiting some twenty years to make his exit without offending anyone (Kinnear himself seems similarly confused as to how he ended up in this movie). This serves him well in the name of comedy after the fateful shooting and subsequent frame job, wherein Carl becomes Dan's unwitting patsy. Plus, as The Dude showed us, there's not much funnier than a pothead on the run. But Carl's a D-list Dude wannabe, right down to the wrongfully-accused bit. He throws in "dude" and "man" at the end of every other sentence to remind the audience that, yes, he used to be a stoner, but as admirably frazzled as Kinnear is, it's still only half a character, and not one who elicits much in the way of sympathy.Again, maybe that's the point when dealing with characters like these, but almost everyone else suffers a similar case of one-note development. Absent redeeming qualities in their roles, all that's left for the actors to do is run around and make lots of noise. So Connelly bounces off the walls in a performance that shows the strain of effort but reaps almost no benefits. Marisa Tomei and Yul Vasquez are also around for some reason; she doesn't do a thing and actually vanishes halfway through the movie, but at least Vasquez figures into the plot and is funny. Drawing the shortest stick is Ciarán Hinds as Gwen's father, whose sleuthing is set up as something of a major plot point, but who literally has no hand in the film's resolution.The one saving grace, as it were, is Brosnan, who hems and haws so mightily as Pastor Dan that the movie literally lights up everytime he's onscreen. If there is a soul to be found in this charlatan-in-clergyman's-clothing, he certainly gets close to digging it up, raising the idea during the rare quiet moment that the preacher man is, at his core, more terrified than anything of what awaits him on the other side. Brosnan's a hambone, for sure, but seems to be one of the few concerned with overcompensating for the script with gimmicks. He just plays it for maximum volume but seems to be winking the entire time (in contrast, Connelly works very, very hard to make Gwen more than she is on paper, but all it ends up feeling is forced). Then again, maybe it's just that Pastor Dan is the movie's best-written character, and Brosnan simply does a good job playing him. Maybe it's just because a guy like Pastor Dan is the easiest one to play. It's honestly hard to tell.The movie is based on a novel, which makes you feel like there might have been more to work with here at some point. But the script (by Doug Max Stone and director George Ratliff) is shockingly thin: plot contrivances pop up unannounced, characters come and go, and promising subplots (a mysterious caller adds a fun supernatural kink to the plot) are dropped in favor of watching Kinnear yell "hey, man!" some more. When actual divine intervention rears its head in the closing minutes, it barely elicits a reaction. Carl's the good guy. He always had God on his side, it's not like we needed a reminder. Still, the movie feels like we do. It is what it is, man.