Flick Picks 9/30/14: Chef, Transformers: Age of Extinction

What's New on DVD at the Library This Week?

ENTERTAINMENT: Jon Favreau gets fed up with his restaurant job and decides to go food truckin' in the feel-good comedy Chef. Favreau also wrote and directed the film and went through his rolodex to fill a cast with names such as Dustin Hoffman, Iron Man costars Scarlett Johansson and Robert Downey Jr., Sofia Vergara, John Leguizamo and Oliver Platt. Also this week, those toys turned movie stars are back in another epic adventure with Transformers: Age of Extinction. Their human colleagues are played by Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci and Kelsey Grammer and we've got it on DVD and Blu-ray.

Crash director Paul Haggis returns with Third Person, another film featuring intertwining stories, this time focusing on three couples in Rome, Paris and New York. Liam Neeson, Mila Kunis, Maria Bello, Kim Basinger and Adrien Brody are all on board. Up-and-coming director Jim Mickle serves up the seedy thriller Cold in July, about a man (Dexter's Michael C. Hall) who gets involved with some very dangerous people while trying to protect his family. Sam Shepard and Don Johnson co-star. Toni Collette is a journalist who teams with documentary filmmaker Thomas Haden Church in order to find out what happened to her rock star ex-boyfriend in Lucky Them. Finally, Decoding Annie Parker features Samantha Morton as the cancer surviving title character and Helen Hunt in the true story of the doctor who discovered the breast cancer BRCA gene mutation.

SERIES: Jack Bauer proves that you can't keep a good man (or series) down in 24: Live Another Day. New this week is the BBC's set-in-Glasgow crime drama The Field of Blood, about a young female reporter investigating murders. Also this week is season 4 of the Melissa McCarthy showcase Mike and Molly.

DOCUMENTARIES: Soaring student loan debt is getting to be a major problem and Ivory Tower studies this problem while questioning how higher education can be improved. Doc Martin is nowhere in sight in exotic animal series Martin Clune's Wild Life.

Check out Enterprise for all of our new DVDs.

The Road to Us

Wondering about how we got where we are as a society or species? We have all the answers in our informational and documentary DVD collections! Try these on for size...

• Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson updates Carl Sagan's classic series with Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.
• Your Inner Fish is a PBS documentary showing how we descending from the oceans.
• Bryan Cranston narrates Big History, a series that looks at how seemingly dissimilar historical events are connected.
• One evening is all you need to learn 13.7 billions years worth of our planet's past in History of the World in Two Hours.
• How did our ancestors become us? Watch The Incredible Human Journey and find out!
• The history of currency is the focus of The Ascent of Money: Boom and Bust.
• If you'd like to speculate on our future check out Life After People or Collapse to look at some possible scenarios!