Flick Picks 3/25/14: The Wolf of Wall Street, The Great Beauty

New on DVD at the Library This Week

ENTERTAINMENT: Another Oscar-nominated film rolls out this week as Martin Scorcese's exhilerating The Wolf of Wall Street hits our shelves on DVD and Blu-ray. This film, based on Jordan Belfort's memoir, features Leonardo DiCaprio as Belfort, who ran a corrupt investment firm in the 1990s. Jonah Hill, Kyle Chandler and the surging Matthew McConaughey are also among the cast. Also this week, Vince Vaughn delivers us the comedy Delivery Man, based on the Canadian hit Starbuck about a man who fathers 533 surrogate children.

SUBTITLED: The first Italian film to win an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film since 1999 is The Great Beauty, a gorgeous look at a journalist as he journeys through Rome, reflecting on his life.

SERIES: There are two new subtitled series worth checking out this week. Based on a Henning Mankell novel, Kennedy's Brain follows a Swedish archaeologist as she tries to find out what really happened to her son who supposedly committed suicide. The Spider follows a crime writer in post-Nazi-occupied Denmark as he tries to get to the bottom of an organized crime ring. Also this week, season two of the Julia Louis-Dreyfus political comedy Veep and a 6th season of David Duchovny's Californication arrive.

DOCUMENTARIES: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu takes a journalist (and viewers) around his country in Israel: The Royal Tour, a PBS documentary.

All of our new and upcoming DVDs are available in Bibliocommons.

YA Movie Marathon
We will be hosting an epic film screening for 6th to 12th graders on March 31st from 1:30 to 7:30. We'll start with Warm Bodies, followed by The Way Way Back at 3:30 and Gravity at 6:00. Popcorn will be on hand for all showings. Kids can show up for their favorite movie or stay for all three! All of the movies are rated PG-13

Get Mad With Basketball on DVD!

March Madness is on and you probably need something to watch in-between games. Make it a DVD about basketball and you're sure to be pleased!

• Gene Hackman leads his little town's basketball team to victory in the classic sports film Hoosiers. 
• Texas Western University's coach starts the best players that he can find and it ends up being the first NCAA all-black lineup in Glory Road.
• Coach Carter features Samuel L. Jackson as the title character, who teaches his high school basketball team that there's more to life than sports.
• Hoop Dreams is the classic documentary about two Chicago high school basketball players pursuing a big season and a future as a professional.
• A professional basketball floater learns about what life is really like in Iran when he gets picked up by an Iranian team in the recent documentary The Iran Job. 
• More Than a Game follows Akron's St.Vincent-St. Mary's high school team, which featured five future NBA-ers, including LeBron James.

Flick Picks 3/18/14: Frozen, American Hustle, Saving Mr. Banks

New on DVD at the Library This Week

ENTERTAINMENT: Don't let Frozen go...get your holds on it right away! Not only did this film win an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, it is one of those animated films like Little Mermaid that ends up being loved by everyone in the family. Even if you haven't already seen it (multiple times) then you've probably heard the Oscar-winning soundtrack. The film is about a woman and her snowman companion fighting to save their kingdom from eternal winter. We have it on DVD and Blu-ray. American Hustle was shut out at the Oscars but it's one of last year's audience favorites, and it's easy to see why when it sports a crowd-pleasing cast of Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. The late-70s action involves a con man who ends up being enlisted by the FBI. It's availalbe on DVD and Blu-ray.

Tom Hanks gives us yet another incredible performance and Emma Thompson is no slouch either in Saving Mr. Banks, the story of the quest to bring Mary Poppins to the big screen. You can also get this one on either DVD or Blu-ray. The amazing Idris Elba portrays South African President Nelson Mandela in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, which follows his youth, life in prison and eventual political success. A sensitive family drama about bullying produced by wrestling marketers World Wide Entertainment? Sure enough, that's what we get with That's What I Am, which stars Ed Harris as a popular teacher who helps a teased child overcome his fears.

PERFORMING ARTS: Did you catch The Dukes of September (Donald Fagen, Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs) when they played Ravinia a couple of years ago? Relive that tour with The Dukes of September Live, which features a rocking set list that includes hits like The Lido Shuffle, Peg and Takin' it to the Streets.

You can find all of our new and upcoming films in Bibliocommons.

St. Patrick's Day Films

There is something about Ireland that is so appealing to watch on film, even when not celebrating your Irish heritage. However, St. Patrick's Day gives you an extra impetus to check one of these Irish-set films out from your library!

• Amy Adams travels to Dublin to propose to her boyfriend on February 29th because Irish tradition says that he must accept in Leap Year.
• Academy Award winner Steve McQueen's first film is Hunger, which follows Michael Fassbender as an imprisoned member of the IRA who launches a hunger strike.
• An Irish fisherman (Colin Farrell) finds a woman in his net who he believes is a mythical selkie in Ondine. 
• The darkly comic The Guard features Brendan Gleeson as an Irish cop who teams up with an FBI agent (Don Cheadle) in order to investigate drug smugglers.
• A woman (Glenn Close) poses as a man in order to find work at an Irish hotel in Albert Nobbs.
• In Bloody Sunday, Captain Phillips director Paul Greengrass gives us a dramatic reconstruction of January 30, 1972, when British troops fired upon unarmed Irish protesters.
• The beautifully animated The Secret of Kells tells the story of a young boy who must pursue a quest in order to complete a magical book.

Flick Picks 3/11/14: Inside Llewyn Davis, The Book Thief

New on DVD at the Library This Week

ENTERTAINMENT: The Coen brothers bring their unique visual style and storytelling flair to the Greenwich Village folk scene in their latest film Inside Llewyn Davis. Like most of their movies it is funny, moving and atmospheric as it presents one week in 1961 in which struggling folk singer Davis (who is loosely based on Dave Van Ronk) wanders through a cold New York City with guitar in hand. The film features a colorful lineup of Justin Timberlake, Carey Mulligan, F. Murray Abraham and John Goodman and is available on DVD and Blu-ray. Also this week, Emily Watson and Geoffrey Rush star in the big screen adaptation of Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief, about a girl living with foster parents in Germany during the rise of the Nazis. A great cast of Christian Bale, Casey Affleck, Forest Whitaker, Willem Dafoe and Zoe Saldana is featured in Out of the Furnace, which follows a steel worker (Bale) who takes justice into his own hands as he tries to find what happened to his missing brother. If you're still itching for action, ex-DEA agent Jason Stratham moves to a small town with his daughter where he faces off with meth dealer James Franco in Homefront. Sylvester Stallone's screenplay makes this movie feel like a flashback to some of his classic 80s hits.

SERIES: A professor is found dead and his daughter enrolls at the university in order to discover the truth behind what happened to him in the suspenseful and funny British import Trinity.

SUBTITLED: Like chocolate and peanut butter, bluegrass music and Belgian culture make a perfect pair in The Broken Circle Breakdown, which is about a couple whose relationship is tested by tragedy. The Algerian import The Patience Stone is set in an unnamed wartorn Middle Eastern country where a Muslim woman starts to open up to her comatose husband and discovers herself.

DOCUMENTARIES: Bryan Cranston narrates The History Channel's Big History, which attempts to show how everything in time and space is connected. Believe it or not baseball is right around the corner, which gives you the perfect excuse to celebrate 100 Years of Wrigley.

All of our new and upcoming DVDs are available through Bibliocommons.

Monday at the Movies
Our next Monday at the Movies program All Is Lost in which Robert Redford plays a man sailing alone across the Indian Ocean. Beset by damage to his boat and a violent storm, he must depend upon his ingenuity and resilience to survive. The film will be screened on Monday, March 17 at 1:00 and 7:00 at the Glencoe Woman's Club at 325 Tudor Ct. All of our programs are free and open to everyone.

Art on DVD

Did you attend our recent program about how to understand contemporary art? If that had whet your appetite for learning more about your favorite art and artists (or about new ones) then have no fear - your library will provide!

• The wonderful Great Courses series offers up a number of DVD sets about art and artists including How to Look at and Understand Great Art, The World's Greatest Paintings and Great Artists of the Italian Renaissance.
• Curators, historians and restorers discuss works from five major artists in Understanding Art: Hidden Lives of Masterpieces.
• Simon Schama looks at eight major works of art in the context of the times in which they were created in Power of Art.
• Each set of the Landmarks of Western Art series features art historians looking at a different time period.

Flick Picks 3/4/14: 12 Years a Slave, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

New on DVD at the Library This Week

ENTERTAINMENT: 12 Years a Slave picked up some big awards at this year's Oscars, walking away with Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong'o) and Best Adapted Screenplay (John Ridley). It tells the true story of a free man in the mid-1800s who was kidnapped and made to work as a slave only to be freed years later. It's not an easy film to watch as it captures the brutal world that these slaves had to endure. It stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbinder and Brad Pitt and we've got it on DVD and Blu-ray. We move from the past to the future as the saga of Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) continues in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Following her big win in the previous film, Katniss goes on a victory tour only to learn that rebellion is in the air. It's available in DVD and Blu-ray. In Spike Lee's remake of the Korean film Oldboy, Josh Brolin is a man who was kidnapped and eventually set free after 20 years of confinement and tries to discover the reason for this predicament. Finally, the late Paul Walker tries to keep his ventilator-dependent newborn daughter alive during the horrors of Hurricane Katrina in the thriller Hours.

SERIES: It's both sad and exciting when we face a new Doctor Who regeneration. Doctor Who: Time of the Doctor gives us both an epic story and the end of the Matt Smith Doctor Who, while bringing the Peter Capaldi Doctor Who onboard. Mr. and Mrs. Murder is an Australian comedy about a pair of crime scene cleaners who decide to use their accumulated knowledge to investigate mysteries.

DOCUMENTARIES: Provocateur Oliver Stone offers up the companion to the recent book Untold History of the United States, which offers a critical examination of the United States' growth as a military power in the 20th Century. Anne Hathaway, Cate Blanchett and more contribute to Girl Rising, about the 10x10 organization that seeks equality in education for girls around the world. Learn about Iranian politics from the perspective of a journeyman basketball player in The Iran Job, which follows American Kevin Sheppard's acceptance of a contract with an Iranian basketball team. Reportero shows what life is like for the media in Tijuana, Mexico where many reporters have been killed or vanished in the wake of their drug wars.

You can find all of our new and upcoming DVDs in Bibliocommons.

Academy Award Winners

There was a great crop of movies nominated this year but unfortunately they couldn't all get the gold statuette. Here are this year's big winners, as well as those from the last few years for you to revisit!

Best Picture: 12 Years a Slave
Argo (2012)
The Artist (2011)
The King's Speech (2010)

Best Director: Alfonso Cuaron - Gravity
Ang Lee - Life of Pi (2012)
Michael Hazanavicius - The Artist (2011)
Tom Hooper - The King's Speech (2010)

Best Actor in a Leading Role: Matthew McConaughey - Dallas Buyers Club
Daniel Day-Lewis - Lincoln (2012)
Jean Dujardin - The Artist (2011)
Colin Firth - The King's Speech (2010)

Best Actress in a Leading Role: Cate Blanchett - Blue Jasmine
Jennifer Lawrence - Silver Linings Playbook (2012)
Meryl Streep - The Iron Lady (2011)
Natalie Portman - Black Swan (2010)

Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Jared Leto - Dallas Buyers Club
Christoph Waltz - Django Unchained (2012)
Christopher Plummer - Beginners (2011)
Christian Bale - The Fighter (2010)

Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Lupita Nyong'o - 12 Years a Slave
Anne Hathaway - Les Miserables (2012)
Octavia Spencer - The Help (2011)
Melissa Leo - The Fighter (2010)