DVD & Blu-ray

The sci-fi thriller In Time takes place in a world in which the wealthy can extend their lives indefinitely and the rest of the population is programmed to die young.

On the elevator leading to the parking lot after a preview screening of The Big Year, a woman asked me what I thought of the movie.

In Time is like a cheap Rolex picked up in Battery Park. Don’t count on it working for more than a few minutes.

It’s okay, kids. Get fat and out of shape. In the future, sports will be contested by robots anyway.

In Real Steel — a movie about boxing robots — Hugh Jackman looks as if he’s about to jump out of his skin. Forced to compete with tons of clanging heavy metal, an amped-up Jackman always seems to be trying for a knockout as a former boxer who now competes in the world of robot pugilism. The sport, if that’s what it is, looks like a cross between cage fighting and professional wrestling.

Politics is a dirty game. You can’t play and remain clean.

If that sounds a little cynical, then perhaps The Ides of March is not for you.

Here’s some shocking news: Politics can be a dirty business — full of betrayals, double dealing and unholy bargains. If that comes as a surprise to you, you’ve probably never read an American newspaper, but this widely held and fashionably jaundiced view permeates George Clooney’s The Ides of March, a story about a governor who’s trying to win an Ohio presidential primary.

If anyone has the qualifications to make a creepy, resonant horror film it’s Guillermo del Toro, the director whose Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) took an eerie and compelling look at the way the imaginative world of a child can blend with harsh realities.

It was a good day for writer/director John Michael McDonagh when the Mismatched Buddy-Cop Random Cast-O-Mizer 9000 landed on the names of Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle. The pairing seems almost too random, but if you make Gleeson an Irish small-town cop and Cheadle an FBI agent looking for drug smugglers on the coast, it’s almost plausible. Steal a little from In the Heat of the Night and you have yourself a movie.

The impeccable cast alone makes this version of The Tempest a pleasure well worth watching.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters should set up a projector and have an outdoor screening of Margin Call. It’s a movie for our times — it’s about the beginning of the recession in 2008. The fictionalized account condenses events to a single day and night whereas the recession took weeks or months to unfold. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting interpretation of what went wrong.

Warrior works as an engaging drama centered on the vicious world of mixed martial arts, but it ultimately taps out in the final round.

These days, Woody Allen seems to miss as often as he hits, but on occasion, he still connects. That’s the case with Midnight in Paris, Allen’s 41st film, a slender but entertaining amusement starring Owen Wilson as a Hollywood writer whose most ardent wish is granted: He gets to meet the inspiring artistic heroes who populated Paris during the 1920s.

In Woody Allen’s latest movie, he offers some advice probably intended for himself: don’t live in the past, man up, and don’t be so wishy-washy. Of course, it sounds better coming from Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.

I don’t know many pop-culture lovers who aren’t fans of the original Planet of the Apes.