Home Video Picks & Passes 10.05.14

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) -- PICK

Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella (1965) -- PICK

It would be easy to pit this week’s picks against each other as a “guy movie” and a “girl movie” — but, really, both of these movies are for pretty much everyone. Well, Captain America: The Winter Soldier might not be appropriate for the youngest kids, but everyone else. Cap’s second solo outing brings the World War II hero into the era of Zero Dark Thirty, Captain Phillips and Jason Bourne — of silent commandos rather than howling ones, of pre-emptive war, where good guys and bad guys can be hard to tell apart.

A step up from the latest Thor and Iron Man flicks, it’s a well-crafted serving of Marvel product, with a good mix of action, humor, some humanity and even a sprinkling of ideas around the perils of trading freedom for security. Marvel veterans Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson and Samuel L. Jackson are joined by Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson, also known as the high-flying Falcon, Marvel’s first African-American screen superhero.

In the end, my eyes glaze over as it slips into “Epically Epic Save the World” mode, the way it seems every Marvel movie must do. I prefer the human-scaled stuff: hand-to-hand combat, running on rooftops, Cap knocking Fury’s surveillance-state politics and Wilson and the wounded-warrior project. Why can’t superhero movies have more of this stuff?

Celebrating its 50th anniversary a year early with a new one-disc DVD edition, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella is a better take on the story than the classic Disney version. The songs, especially, are better and serve the story better. What finally nails this version, for me, as the definitive musical version of the Cinderella story is its fidelity to the climax of Charles Perrault’s tale, altered both in the Disney version (cleverly) and the 1957 version (misguidedly). We know how it’s supposed to go — but this is the version that actually goes that way.

Caveat Spectator: Captain America: The Winter Soldier: Much intense action violence, often deadly; limited profanity and crude language; brief sensuality. Fine for tweens and up. Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella: Nothing objectionable. Fine family viewing.