New movies to be released tomorrow on DVD

G-Force (2009) **½ G-Force — perhaps the most expensive 3-D house-pet action movie ever made and, I’m willing to concede, probably one of the best — is about an hour shorter than Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, half as pretentious and twice as witty. Call this faint praise, if you like. G-Force, as loud and enervating as the words "A Jerry Bruckheimer Production" might lead you to expect, can hardly be accused of modesty, but on the other hand no film full of talking guinea pigs would be so rash as to attempt the kind of lumbering gravitas that Michael Bay has seen fit to bestow on a bunch of toys. G-Force manages to be fairly entertaining in that exhausting, rackety, late-summer-kiddie-movie way.

The Girl From Monaco (2009) **½ I wonder if in France, where he’s better known, people speak of a "Fabrice Luchini type." Mr. Luchini, 57, who has appeared in dozens of movies, has over the years refined an adaptable persona that is recognizable across genres and periods. His startled-looking eyes, delicate chin and slight overbite convey a mixture of cynicism and cluelessness, as mature worldliness seems to do battle with childlike credulity. In The Girl From Monaco Mr. Luchini plays Bertrand Beauvois, an eminent Parisian lawyer who travels to that notorious principality on the Mediterranean to defend a 70-year-old woman (Stéphane Audran) implicated in a tawdry, tabloid-feeding murder. The case, however, proves to be something of a distraction, since Bertrand’s attention is quickly hijacked by Audrey Varella (Louise Bourgoin), a minor local celebrity — and major party girl — whose television weather report pretty much makes ordering soft-core pay-per-view on hotel-room cable redundant. If in the end The Girl From Monaco is neither a cogent psychological thriller nor an effervescent sex comedy, it does at least have an interesting sense of place.

The Hangover (2009) ***½ The immaturity of ostensibly grown-up American men is an inexhaustible subject, or at least one that has yet to exhaust American movie audiences and the well-paid guys who cater to their entertainment needs. Todd Phillips, the director of Old School, Road Trip and an HBO documentary called Frat House as well as a writer of Borat, has shown himself to be an adept and tireless connoisseur of male boorishness and stupidity, though the crude humor he dispenses is frequently leavened by nuggets of inventiveness and wit. So I should say up front that The Hangover, Mr. Phillips’s new movie (written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, who contributed to the shockingly nonterrible script of Four Christmases and wrote the less surprisingly dreadful script of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past) is often very funny. This is partly thanks to the three principal actors, Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis, who incarnate familiar masculine stereotypes in ways that manage to be moderately fresh as well as soothingly familiar.

Inglourious Basterds (2009) **½ From the moment the charming, smiling, laughing Nazi in Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s latest cinematic happening, sweeps onto the screen, he owns this film even more than its maker. Played by a little-known Austrian actor, Christoph Waltz, Col. Hans Landa is a vision of big-screen National Socialist villainy, from the smart cut of his SS coat to the soft gleam of his leather boots. There might be a fearsome skull (the death’s head, or totenkopf) grinning on his cap, but Colonel Landa has us at hallo. Inglourious Basterds, is Mr. Tarantino’s sixth feature. (The bifurcated Kill Bill is really one film.) In many respects it looks and, as important, sounds like a typical Tarantino production with its showboating performances, encyclopedic movie references and streams of self-conscious dialogue. As usual Mr. Tarantino gives you a lot to chew on, though there’s plenty to gag on as well. Much depends on whether you can just groove on his framing and staging, his swooping crane shots, postmodern flourishes (Samuel L. Jackson in voice-over explaining the combustibility of nitrate prints) and gorgeously saturated colors, one velvety red in particular. But too often in Inglourious Basterds the filmmaking falls short. Mr. Tarantino is a great writer and director of individual scenes, though he can have trouble putting those together, a difficulty that has sometimes been obscured by the clever temporal kinks in his earlier work.

The Other Man (2009) *½ There is an all-too-brief moment in The Other Man when this muddled little dud of a melodrama emits a dangerous charge. It arrives when Peter (Liam Neeson), a software designer who lives near Cambridge, England, discovers e-mail correspondence and pictures on the computer of his absent wife, Lisa (Laura Linney), that reveal her affair with another man. Peter, who has fancied himself happily married for 25 years, is seized with sexual jealousy that quakes from within and transforms him into an anguished, wild-eyed monster; you can see his blood boiling. Lisa, a high-end shoe designer, has mysteriously disappeared without leaving word of her whereabouts. Suspecting she has gone to meet her lover, Ralph (Antonio Banderas), whose name and address in Milan Peter uncovers through unscrupulous computer sleuthing, he flies to Italy, bent on murdering his rival. No sooner has he arrived and spotted his prey than the movie fizzles like a lighted firecracker dunked in ice water.

Taking Woodstock (2009) ***½ Don’t be misled by the title of Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock. This likable, humane movie is not an attempt to recreate the epochal Woodstock Music and Art Fair captured in Michael Wadleigh’s documentary Woodstock. It is essentially a small, intimate film into which is fitted a peripheral view of the landmark event that took place on Aug. 15 through 18, 1969, on a dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y., and has since been exalted ad nauseam for its good vibes. Most of the concert takes place out of sight of the camera. The movie’s primary focus is El Monaco, a shabby Catskills motel in White Lake, N.Y., not far from the site on which 32 acts, including Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Who and Jimi Hendrix, made rock music history. The little bit of the concert that is shown is a glowing, golden circle glimpsed in the far distance amid a throbbing acid haze outside the tent of a gentle hippie couple. The music heard during the trip scene, The Red Telephone by the Los Angeles band Love, emanates not from the stage but from speakers inside the tent, where the couple initiates a shy young stranger into the mysteries of LSD. Like Mr. Lee’s 1999 Civil War drama, Ride With the Devil, which was set on the war’s western fringe, Taking Woodstock operates on the principle that contemplation of historic events from the margins can be more revealing than from the hot center.