This Week’s DVD Releases

The Impossible **½ An earnest, extremely grueling, prodigiously crafted true-life drama that takes one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history and reduces it to a bad day at Club Med.

Promised Land **½ There’s reason to worry when a simplistic movie like this one takes on an issue of overarching importance to the nation’s future. The challenges presented by fracking are immense, and Capra-esque nostalgia isn’t helpful.

Gangster Squad * Director Ruben Fleischer’s first feature, Zombieland, was a half-witty genre parody. This one might be described as genre zombie-ism: the hysterical, brainless animation of dead clichés reduced to purposeless, compulsive killing. Too self-serious to succeed as pastiche, it has no reason for being beyond the parasitic urge to feed on the memories of other, better movies.

A Haunted House (no stars) No-holds-barred comedy is one thing, hurtful thoughtlessness is something else entirely. An ostensible comedy shouldn’t have so many moments that feel so ugly.

The Central Park Five *** Measured in tone and outraged in its argument, it is an emotionally stirring, at times crushingly depressing cinematic call to witness. It’s also frustrating because while it re-examines the assault on the jogger and painstakingly walks you through what happened to the teenagers — from their arrest through their absolution — it fails to add anything substantively new.

Any Day Now *** An outraged, unblinking depiction of institutionalized homophobia three decades ago, when the prevailing court opinion in adoption cases was that exposing a child to a homosexual environment was harmful. Never mind that nobody else wants the child in question.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga *** There is indeed much beauty on display, from the icy Taiga landscape to the age-old trapping techniques passed on through generations. But this does feel like a lesser Werner Herzog project (he joined on after it was shot). For viewers who don’t share his awe, a short film probably would have sufficed.

Wuthering Heights **½ If you can handle the glacial pacing and lack of dialogue, there is a certain squirmy satisfaction to watching this well-worn story of love, cruelty and madness play out minus the long-winded speeches and romantic catharsis.

Family Weekend ** This belabored comedy, directed by Benjamin Epps, has a slick visual veneer and some capable performances, especially by Olesya Rulin and Joey King. But the script, by Matt K. Turner, is loaded with contradictions, its hollow flirtation with subversion amounts to airplane pablum.