New movies to be released tomorrow on DVD

The Cove (2009) ****½ When the director Louie Psihoyos slipped into the little coastal town of Taiji, Japan, it was under cover of documenting the degradation of ocean reefs. Once there, however, he proceeded to mount one of the most audacious and perilous operations in the history of the conservation movement. The Cove is much more than just a record of that adventure. Like the director’s cover story, the movie is a Trojan horse: an exceptionally well-made documentary that unfolds like a spy thriller, complete with bugged hotel rooms, clandestine derring-do and mysterious men in gray flannel suits. Those men — perhaps cops, perhaps worse — tail Mr. Psihoyos and his crew unrelentingly, determined to prevent anyone from filming the enormously lucrative dolphin capture and slaughter that support the town’s economy and employ its fishermen. This killing may be legal — dolphins and other small marine mammals are not protected by the ban on commercial whaling — but, as we shall see, the methods used are so nonchalantly brutal and gut-churningly primitive that Taiji officials are understandably publicity-shy. (And, we learn later, there are other secrets lurking beneath the town’s thriving tourist industry and cute, dolphin-shape pleasure boats.) Consequently, anyone straying too close to the kill zone — a secluded lagoon protected by steep cliffs, manned tunnels and razor-wire gates — is violently harassed by videocam-wielding fishermen hoping to record an imprisonable offense. None of which fazes Mr. Psihoyos, an urbane eco-warrior who pops up periodically to provide context and clarification. His soothing tones, however, can’t disguise a relish for the fray: beneath the silver-fox exterior beats a rabble-rousing heart. That heart invigorates every frame of The Cove, as does Mr. Psihoyos’s eye for a powerful image (his photographs have graced many an issue of National Geographic) and savvy narrative style: this is no angry enviro-rant but a living, breathing movie whose horrifying disclosures feel fully earned.

The First Saturday in May (2008) ** There are a lot of horses but absolutely no sense in The First Saturday in May, a glib, lazy documentary about six trainers on the proverbial road to the 2006 Kentucky Derby. This is, after all, a movie about horse trainers that tells you next to nothing about what horse trainers do besides stand around paddocks, issuing vague instructions to the grooms or staring nervously, wistfully and stoically at the racetrack. Do the trainers determine a horse’s feed or its racing schedule? Do they choose the drugs that are regularly pumped into these magnificent animals? Or do the owners make those calls? Don’t look here for answers.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) *** Are we there yet? Well, not quite. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the latest big-screen iteration of the global phenomenon, is merely the sixth chapter in a now eight-part series that, much like its young hero, played by Daniel Radcliffe, has begun to show signs of stress around the edges, a bit of fatigue, or maybe that’s just my gnawing impatience. Not that the director David Yates doesn’t keep things moving and flying and soaring, his cameras slashing through the gloom that has settled onto this epic endeavor like a damp, enveloping fog and at times threatened to snuff out its joy as terminally as a soul-sucking Dementor. That any sense of play and pleasure remains amid all the doom and the dust, the poisonous potions and murderous sentiments, is partly a testament to the remarkable sturdiness of this movie franchise, which has transformed in subtle and obvious fashion, changing in tandem with the sprouting bodies and slowly evolving performances of its young, now-teenaged characters.

Julie & Julia (2009) **** In an understated but nonetheless climactic scene in Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia, Julia Child (Meryl Streep) and her editor, Judith Jones (Erin Dilly), struggle to come up with a title for the culinary doorstopper Julia has spent the past eight years composing. It’s not an especially suspenseful moment — pretty much anyone who has cooked an omelet knows what the book is called — but it gives Ms. Ephron and the audience a chance to savor the precise nature of Julia Child’s achievement. The book is Mastering the Art of French Cooking — not How To or Made Easy or For Dummies, but Mastering the Art. In other words, cooking that omelet is part of a demanding, exalted discipline not to be entered into frivolously or casually. But at the same time: You can do it. It is a matter of technique, of know-how, of practice. The impact of that first volume of Mastering the Art, and of Child’s subsequent television career (which is mostly tangential to the movie’s concerns), is hard to overstate. The book stands with a few other postwar touchstones — including Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care, the Kinsey Report and Dr. Suess’s Cat in the Hat — as a publication that fundamentally altered the way a basic human activity was perceived and pursued. Not that Ms. Ephron’s breezy, busy movie traffics in such sweeping historical ideas, except occasionally by implication. Nor does she infuse the happy, well-fed life of her Julia (the main source for which is a memoir Child wrote with her great nephew Alex Prud’homme) with too much grand drama. Julie & Julia proceeds with such ease and charm that its audacity — a no-nonsense, plucky self-confidence embodied by the indomitable Julia herself — is easy to miss.

Public Enemies (2009) ****½ Michael Mann’s Public Enemies is a grave and beautiful work of art. Shot in high-definition digital by a filmmaker who’s helping change the way movies look, it revisits with meticulous detail and convulsions of violence a short, frantic period in the life and bank-robbing times of John Dillinger, an Indiana farm boy turned Depression outlaw, played by a low-voltage Johnny Depp. Much of what makes the movie pleasurable is the vigor with which it restages our familiar romance with period criminals, a perennial affair. But what also makes it more than the sum of its spectacular shootouts is the ambivalence about this romance that seeps into the filmmaking, steadily darkening the skies and draining the story of easy thrills.