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The 80s
Set In the summer of 1987, Jesse Eisenberg (The Education of Charlie Banks, The Squid and the Whale) stars as a college graduate who, instead of touring Europe before grad school, has to find a summer job to make ends meet in Adventureland. When the only job he can land is running games at the local amusement park, he finds his days taken up by a twitchy park manager (Bill Hader: Pineapple Express, Hot Rod), a sarcastic intellectual coworker (Martin Starr: Knocked Up, Cheats), and the suave maintenance man (Ryan Reynolds: Just Friends, Smokin' Aces)... but the park becomes a brighter place when he meets Em (Kristen Stewart: Twilight, The Cake Eaters). The social circle of the amusement park world is stranger than he figured, and even if he's met the girl of his dreams, their world might be more complicated than he thought. On DVD and Blu-Ray.
Based on the novel by Brett Easton Ellis (The Rules of Attraction, Less than Zero), The Informers is an overlapping collage of stories of the yuppie elite during the Regan era, including a movie executive (Billy Bob Thornton: Mr. Woodcock, The Alamo), his mistress (Winona Ryder: Heathers, A Scanner Darkly) and his separated wife (Kim Basinger: The Sentinel, Cool World), their privileged son (Jon Foster: Stay Alive, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh) and his promiscuous girlfriend (Amber Heard: Never Back Down, Friday Night Lights). Their tale of existential crises overlaps with a rugged outlaw (Mickey Rourke: The Wrestler, Spun) with his own agenda.
A different kind of spy
A former MI6 operative (Clive Owen: Children of Men, The International) and an ex-CIA agent (Julia Roberts: Charlie Wilson's War, The Mexican) find themselves working together stealing corporate secrets in Duplicity. Unbeknownst to their employer, the two have a tangled romantic history, and as they try to steal a secret innovation from one company head (Tom Wilkinson: Michael Clayton, Valkyrie) to deliver it to his bitter rival (Paul Giamatti: Shoot 'Em Up, Cinderella Man), the secrets of their history together slowly come to light. Mixing elements of a spy thriller, a caper picture, and a Thin Man style romance, the film focuses as much on the tension and interplay between Roberts and Owen as it does on high tech gadgetry and double crosses. On DVD and Blu-Ray.
Brothers and Sisters
Amy Adams (Doubt, Junebug) is a single mother with a complicated life in Sunshine Cleaning. Working as a housekeeper and low on money, she is secretly dating a married police officer 
(Steve Zahn: Shattered Glass, Night Train) who mentions how much money people pay for crime scene clean-up. Partnering up with her sister (Emily Blunt: The Great Buck Howard, The Jane Austen Book Club), and with the help of a specialist (Clifton Collins Jr: Capote, Mindhunters) and support of their father (Alan Arkin: Little Miss Sunshine, Gattaca), the two sisters start Sunshine Cleaning, a crime scene cleanup business, and begin to take control of their lives. On DVD and Blu-Ray.
Rudo y Cursi reunites the leads of Y tu Mama Tambien as two brothers discovered in a small town to become Soccer stars. On rival teams, one brother's (Diego Luna: Milk, Open Range) fame leads him to a dark world of gambling and drugs, while the other brother (Gael Garcia Bernal: Blindness, The Science of Sleep) uses his star power to chase fast cars, beautiful women, and the dreams of pop stardom. As their competing teams approach an career making/breaking game, the brothers are forced to deal with their successes, failures, and question the value of their superstar lifestyles.
Drama, Magic, and Docs
When a Senegalese cab driver named Solo, working to provide for his family, gets a large one-way fare to a mountain from a despondent older man (Red West: Natural Born Killers, Glory Road), he assumes he is driving the man to commit suicide in Goodbye Solo. Solo takes it 
upon himself to befriend the man and hopefully change his life, as they journey to Blowing Rock in North Carolina, where objects thrown off the peak blow upwards instead of falling down, and the two friends decide their fate.
James Callis (Battlestar Galactica, Bridget Jones Diary) stars as Merlin in Merlin and the Book of Beasts, a fantasy epic that shows the wizard in decline, long after the fall of King Arthur. When a rogue wizard tries to overtake the land, the remnants of Camelot seek out the once great magician with the hope that, even with his legacy fading, the great Merlin can save their kingdom. With Laura Harris (Suicide Kings, Severance).
The two documentaries this week are Trouble the Water, a first person account of Hurricane Katrina by young artist with a Hi-8 video camera trapped in New Orleans with no means to evacuate, as she documents the disaster as it unfolds around her. Harvard Beats Yale is a documentary of the 1968 football game as the underdog Harvard team rises to victory, but also the social climate of the 60s, and college life under president Nixon during the Viet Nam War.
New this week to Reckless Video's TV New Releases are the 8th seasons of the popular doctor comedy Scrubs and the pre-Superman superhero show Smallville. We also have season 5 of the medical procedural House and season 6 of NCIS. The second seasons of both the crime drama Life and the dark comedy Californication are both new to DVD this week, as well as the debut season of Lie to Me and the first season of the BBC's original Life on Mars.
