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.