Flick Picks 12/16/14: This Is Where I Leave You, Magic in the Moonlight

New on DVD at the Library This Week

ENTERTAINMENT: It's hard to imagine that a better cast could have been assembled for the film adaptation of the Jonathan Tropper This is Where I Leave You. With the lead roles filled by Tina Fey, Jason Bateman and Jane Fonda you are guaranteed a good time even had the film been directed by insane goats. The story concerns a group of siblings and their assorted spouses who must spend a week under the same roof (their mother's) after the family's patriarch dies. We've got it on DVD and Blu-ray. Also this week, another year, another Woody Allen film, with Magic in the Moonlight falling towards the whimsical end of the spectrum of Allen's works. Emma Stone is the woman who claims to speak to the deceased while Colin Firth is the magician brought in to debunk her who eventually falls for her charms.

It merely seems that Kristen Wiig has been in every independent film of the year, when in fact she has only appeared in half of them. The morbid Skeleton Twins pairs her with Saturday Night Live colleague Bill Hader in the story of a pair of twins trying to repair their relationship. Finally, we've got a couple of big budget tween films for the family to enjoy. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot pairs "heroes on the half shell" with Megan Fox to battle Shredder and his feared Foot Clan. The bestselling young adult novel The Maze Runner also hits the screen, telling the story of teens who wake up in a strange community surrounded by an inescapable maze. Some might feel that the film serves as a metaphor for how one must pursue an unknown future in order to experience success while a young critic in my house simply thought it was "really, really cool". It's available on DVD and Blu-ray.

SERIES: There was quite a delay before wacky Arrested Development was brought back from the dead for a fourth season - and then it was only available to Netflix subscribers - but now you can take home the DVD! Also this week brings us season 2 of the domestic Cold War drama The Americans.

PERFORMING ARTS: Your dream of seeing Christopher Walken play Captain Hook live on TV has finally come true with Peter Pan Live!

Holiday Films Now Available
Time to get caught up on your holiday favorites and to maybe find a few new ones! Our holiday films are now on display in a cart in front of our classic films. We've got titles like Bill Murray's Scrooged, Adam Sandler's animated Hanukkah tale Eight Crazy Nights, 80s classic A Christmas Story, Oscar winner Miracle on 34th Street, TV mainstay It's a Wonderful Life and even our good friend Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. Here's a longer list for some more ideas.

Film Comment's Top Films of 2014

Every year, prestigious movie journal Film Comment solicits best-of lists from critics around the country in order to compile its own list of the year's best films. Their top 20 films of 2014 can be found here. Not everything is available on DVD yet but the titles that we own or have on order are:
#1 Boyhood (on order)
#3 The Grand Budapest Hotel
#4 Ida
#5 Under the Skin
#12 Only Lovers Left Alive
#15 Norte, The End of History (on order)
#19 Manakmana
#20 Snowpiercer