Home Video Picks & Passes 11.16.14

Million Dollar Arm (2014) — PICK
My Darling Clementine (1946) — PICK
X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) — PICK

 

Recent home-video releases include a trio of movies that are all in one way or another about American identity.

One of the summer’s best action movies, X-Men: Days of Future Past brings together the cast of the original X-Men trilogy with the prequel cast of X-Men: First Class for an ambitious time-bending saga with Hugh Jackman’s mutant superhero Wolverine traveling from a dystopian future to 1973 to prevent a fateful assassination and hopefully change the course of history.

Ultimately, it’s about the struggle for hope: Will Charles Xavier, crippled in the last film, succumb to despair and apathy? Will Mystique give in to hatred and violence? Or will they hope for and work for something better? If only more superhero movies were like this.

On a gentler note, there’s Million Dollar Arm, a fact-based Disney sports film in the tradition of The Rookie and Miracle. Jon Hamm plays J.B. Bernstein, a self-absorbed sports agent with a stalled career and a great idea for a reality show: He’ll stage a contest in India to find anyone who can pitch well enough for Major League Baseball. Of course, he succeeds, but he has to fail first, learning in the process to value people more than things.

From Criterion, the classic John Ford Western My Darling Clementine, starring Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp, arrives on Blu-ray. Key to the film is the casting of Ford and the unconventional title, which mentions neither Earp nor the O.K. Corral, focusing instead on Cathy Downs’ schoolmarm. Here, the iconic shootout isn’t the defining moment of Earp’s life, only a necessary bit of business; the Sunday-morning dance on the floor of the unfinished church — a celebration of joie de vivre, community and civilization in the rough and faith and church as social institutions — is the real high point.

 

Caveat Spectator: Million Dollar Arm: Implied sexual encounters; limited bad language. My Darling Clementine: Frontier violence and gunplay; romantic complications. X-Men: Days of Future Past: Much intense comic-book violence; brief, disturbing images; an implied sexual encounter and brief rear nudity; stylized quasi-nudity; some bad language. All three films are fine for teens and up.