This week's DVD releases

Silver Linings Playbook ***** Silver Linings Playbook is rich in life’s complications. It will make you laugh, but don’t expect it to fit in any snug genre pigeonhole. Dramatic, emotional, even heartbreaking, as well as wickedly funny, it has the gift of going its own way, a complete success from a singular talent. For all its high-flying zaniness the movie has the sting of life, and its humor feels dredged up from the same dark, boggy place from which Samuel Beckett extracted his yuks.

Broken City **½ To put it as positively as possible, there’s never a dull moment in this flick — and that’s not something you can take for granted at this time of the year. At the same time, though, there’s rarely a believable moment in the script.

The Guilt Trip **½ There is something promising about the match-up of an old-school show-biz kid like Barbra Streisand with the modern, anxiously self-aware Seth Rogen, but what could have been the multigenerational Thunderdome of Jewish Humor instead turns out bloodlessly disappointing.

The Details *** Top-shelf cast, headed by Tobey Maguire, slips into familiar grooves of adultery, lies, blackmail, and pet poisoning. It’s the spectacular blow-ups and dressing-downs that make this such a nervy pleasure.

Not Fade Away **** By focusing on musicians who are talented but finally not good or persistent enough to succeed in the big time, Not Fade Away offers a poignant, alternative, antiheroic history of the big beat. It’s a small gem with a killer rock soundtrack, well worth seeking out.

Neighboring Sounds ****½ With his sound designer, Pablo Lamar, director Kleber Mendonça Filho has created the aural landscape of a horror movie. And, for much of its running time, a thriller without a plot. Filho’s mastery of pacing, theme and stylistic eccentricity throughout is so assured as to be breathtaking.

Tchoupitoulas ****½ A jewel-bright whoosh of a ride through nighttime New Orleans. Bill and Turner Ross — the directors, producers, camera operators, and troublemakers behind Tchoupitoulas — could do posterity a service if they simply resigned themselves to replicating this one-night-in–New Orleans documentary for each of the world’s great cities. It explores the border between innocence and experience. It is alive with the risk and curiosity of youth, and unapologetic in insisting that the pursuit of fun can be a profound and transformative experience.

Only the Young **½ Rarely coalesces into anything more meaningful than a casual collection of moments. Maybe that’s the point.

Crazy Wisdom: The Life and Times of Chogyam Trungpa **½ Part of the issue here may be the nature of the talking heads themselves, most of whom are culled from Trungpa’s inner circle and lack the objectivity needed to properly judge his philosophy or make it accessible. The movie goes mushy when it should be critical, and leaves you with questions that it’s not prepared to answer.