New This Week: 'Chloe,' 'The Bounty Hunter'

Also: 'Our Family Wedding' and 'White Collar: Season One'

July 11, 2010|By Noel Murray, Special to the Los Angeles Times


Sony, $27.96; Blu-ray, $34.95

The erotic thriller "Chloe" (based on Anne Fontaine's French film "Nathalie") is a decided change of pace for the usually chilly Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan. It's gloriously, deliriously overheated, like Hitchcock by way of De Palma. Julianne Moore plays a fussy gynecologist who suspects that her husband (Liam Neeson) is cheating on her, so she hires a prostitute (Amanda Seyfried to tempt him. From there, a series of misunderstandings leads to crazy plot twists. Played one way, "Chloe" could be farce, but Egoyan and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson aim more for shock and camp, and the results are good, trashy fun. The DVD and Blu-ray include deleted scenes, featurettes and an Egoyan commentary track.

The Bounty Hunter

Columbia, $28.95; Blu-ray, $38.96

Husky Australian Gerard Butler draws Jennifer Aniston into his black hole of smirk and mumble in "The Bounty Hunter," in which she plays his bail-jumping journalist ex-wife and he plays the guy assigned to haul her in. The premise is classic screwball comedy; the result is more like every other over-manic 21st century rom-com. Treat it the way you would a misbehaving toddler: isolate and ignore. The DVD and Blu-ray come with a few bland featurettes.

Our Family Wedding


A daring idea gets a witless run-through in "Our Family Wedding," a comedy about racial animosity between African Americans and Mexican Americans. Forest Whitaker and Carlos Mencia star as successful men who flip out when their respective offspring announce their engagement. The actual wedding part of "Our Family Wedding" is sweet and moving, but to get there, viewers will have to sit through 90 minutes of faux-edgy race-jokes that play like 1970s TV sitcom leftovers. The DVD and Blu-ray add more than 20 minutes of deleted material.

White Collar: Season One


The USA series "White Collar" stars Matt Bomer as a charming con artist with a wealth of criminal knowledge and Tim DeKay as an upstanding FBI agent who offers the con-man limited freedom in exchange for his expertise. The show's jazzy soundtrack and luminous colors recall Steven Soderbergh's "Ocean's" movies, but "White Collar" subtly, artfully plays up the contrasts between the cop's dogged sense of fairness and the crook's "take what you can" attitude. The DVD and Blu-ray include a gag reel, deleted scenes and featurettes.

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