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— Recent DVD releases:

Ondine (PG-13, 111 minutes) - Having lost his family - not through drinking but by refusing to continue to drink - fisherman Syracuse (Colin Farrell) works the gray sea off the southern coast of Ireland and lives only for his frail daughter Annie (Alison Barry), one of those movie kids who are cast to make insightful commentary on the folly of adults. One day he hauls up his nets and finds a woman inside, a half-drowned beauty who calls herself Ondine (Alicja Bachleda). In his simple way, Syracuse doesn’t press her on her enigmatic answers, and the script suggests the possibility of magic - is Ondine a Selkie (a mythic creature who vacillates from human to seal form) or something like a mermaid?

One of those lovely things that dissolves beneath too intent a gaze. Shot by the remarkable Christopher Doyle, Ondine is a visual poem that is perhaps best glimpsed sideways while in a mood receptive to magic. Looking hard will surely break its spell.

Grade: 88

Princess Kaiulani (PG, 97 minutes) - Q’orianka Kilcher stars as the titular Hawaiian princess in this movie based on a true story about the teenage princess who’s shipped off to England to receive a proper education. There she meets and falls in love withClive Davies (Shaun Evans). Meanwhile, back home, the royal Hawaiian government is threatened by U.S. annexation. A tottering would-be epic bio-pic is fortified by a strong lead role and production values, and undermined by an overly sedate script.

Grade: 82

The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (PG-13, 103 minutes) - Jake Gyllenhaal is Prince Dustan. The rest makes no sense but involves lots of leaping around and swordplay.

Grade: 78

Robin Hood (PG-13, 140 minutes) - Ridley Scott’s $200 million epic, set in 12th-century Britain, is probably the most period-correct depiction of medieval life ever committed to film, though Russell Crowe’s brooding Robin Longstride and Kate Blanchett’s Marion possess modern sensibilities anachronistically planted in the past. Still, this is a film that plays better onDVD than it did in theaters and the bonus material is especially well done. (And then there’s the director’s cut, with an extra 15 minutes of footage.)

Grade: 84

The Secret in Their Eyes (R, 127 minutes) - This Oscarwinning Argentine film is something like a romantic procedural, in which two old friends who could have - and maybe should have - been more to each other reunite to reconsider a mystery they thought they’d solved some 25 years before, in the bad old days of the “Dirty War” of government oppression.

Grade: 88

(Untitled) (R, 96 minutes) - Witty and genuinely sophisticated satire of the contemporary art world stars Adam Goldberg as an avant-garde musician. Includes a wicked takedown of British conceptualist Damian Hirst by Vinne Jones. Full of nasty in-jokes.

Grade: 89

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 09/24/2010

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