New on DVD: ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Music Box, $29.95; Blu-ray, $34.95

The late Stieg Larsson’s worldwide bestseller “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is now so popular that it’s going to be made into a Hollywood movie — even though a hit foreign-language film already exists. The Swedish version stars Michael Nyqvist as an investigative journalist looking into a decades-old missing-person case with the help of a brooding, punky computer whiz (played by Noomi Rapace). It’s a grim, foreboding piece of work, but faithful to the novel and effectively gripping. The DVD and Blu-ray include interviews with Rapace and director Niels Arden Oplev.

Brooklyn’s Finest

Overture/Anchor Bay, $29.98; Blu-ray, $39.98

Though a Sundance sensation in 2009, “Brooklyn’s Finest” came and went with little fanfare when it was finally released this year, which is a shame because it’s a solid little policier, if maybe a little over-familiar. Richard Gere stars as a burned-out alcoholic cop a week from retirement, Ethan Hawke plays a formerly upstanding vice squad officer who’s decided to feather his nest, and Don Cheadle is an ambitious detective who agrees to betray an old friend ( Wesley Snipes) for a chance to get transferred out of his old neighborhood. These intertwining stories might be better-suited to television, but the cast brings a lot of juice to them regardless. Director Antoine Fuqua provides a commentary track to the DVD and Blu-ray, both of which also include deleted scenes and featurettes.

A Single Man

Sony, $27.96; Blu-ray, $34.95

Fashion designer Tom Ford makes a stylish directorial debut with his adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s novel about a gay English professor who spends one day in November 1962 contemplating suicide in the wake of the death of his partner. Ford uses expressionistic imagery to evoke the grief of a closeted man who can’t explain why he’s so blue, and the Oscar-nominated Colin Firth does some remarkably subtle work as the melancholy prof. The movie’s a little too blunt in its tsk-tsk-ing at the past, but it looks so lush and dreamy that its sensual pleasures overcome any clunkiness. The DVD and Blu-ray add an earnest Ford commentary track and a short featurette.

Steamboat Bill Jr.

Kino, $29.95; Blu-ray, $34.95

Often cited as Buster Keaton’s finest feature film, “Steamboat Bill Jr.” sees the stone-faced silent comedian playing a hapless riverboat captain, although the movie’s most famous sequence takes place on land, where Keaton’s bumbling Bill gets caught in a whirlwind and sees an entire town fall down around him. Kino’s Blu-ray edition offers three optional scores and two different cuts of the film as well as a short documentary that explains the two versions. Kino is also now offering the DVD set “Lost Keaton: Sixteen Comedy Shorts 1934-37,” featuring two-reelers Keaton made in the sound era.

And...

“Bitten” (RHI, $19.93); “Chicago (1927)” (Flicker Alley, $39.95); “Eyeborgs” (Image, $27.98; Blu-ray, $29.98); “Love and Other Disasters” (Image Blu-ray, $17.98); “Return to Lonesome Dove” (RHI, $19.93); “Touching Evil: The Complete Collection” (Acorn, $79.99); “The Wind Journeys” (Film Movement, $24.98)

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