Today's New DVDs- 7/6/10

A Single Man: Tom Ford's debut film as writer/director is an astonishingly assured and confident character portrait, beautifully understated and dizzyingly well-made. It's a little slight, but that's kind of the point--it spends a few vital hours with one man and, in the process, paints a specific and tangible portrait of a particular time and place.

Brooklyn's Finest:  First-time screenwriter Michael C. Martin's screenplay sometimes grinds the gears, and relies (particularly in its opening scenes) on a pretty heavy artilery of stock situations and characters. But once director Antoine Fuqua finds the story's groove, he lets the cross-temporal story structure give the film a fierce, smoking momentum. It's not as great a film as it wants to be, but it's still pretty damned good.