Dolphin Tale (2011)

Inspired by a true story, Dolphin Tale is about courage, ingenuity, and never giving up. Sawyer (Nathan Gamble) is a young boy who’s struggling with school and doesn’t have many friends other than his cousin Kyle (Austin Stowell). When Kyle, a star swimmer, joins the army to earn money for college and is called to active duty, it looks like Sawyer is destined to spend his summer alone tinkering in the garage and attending summer school. Sawyer stumbles upon a dolphin that’s been severely injured, becomes fascinated by dolphins, and is suddenly intellectually engaged like never before. In spite of his shyness, he forms a friendship with marine rescue doctor Clay (Harry Connick Jr.) and his daughter Hazel (Cozi Zuehlsdorff) and, more importantly, a special and very powerful bond with the rescued dolphin, who’s dubbed Winter. As the newly formed team struggles to save Winter’s life and ensure her continued safety, financial concerns, an accident that leaves Kyle crippled for life, and a hurricane all seem to join forces against them. In the end, it is Sawyer’s determination, coupled with a little bit of luck and a lot of ingenuity from an army doctor (Morgan Freeman) who specializes in prosthetics, that helps make each member of the team, including Kyle and Winter, whole again. The talented cast does a great job of creating completely believable characters, but Gamble, Zuehlsdorff, Connick, Freeman, Stowell, and of course Winter, who plays herself, all deserve special mention. While the story of an injured animal rescued and rehabilitated has certainly been told before, this film is emotionally powerful and will absolutely captivate children and adults alike. (Ages 5 and older) –Tami Horiuchi

Adele Live At The Royal Albert Hall (2011)

Live At The Royal Albert Hall was recorded on September 22 at the height of what has been an amazing year for Adele. Available on DVD and Blu-ray, “Live At The Royal Albert Hall” features the full 90 minute concert performance, plus special behind the scenes footage shot throughout the day leading up to the concert.
The package also includes an exclusive live CD of the entire show. This is the first time all of Adele’s hits and best loved songs will be on one CD plus her stunning covers of Bonnie Raitt’s “If I Can’t Make You Love Me” and The Steeldrivers “If It Hadn’t Been For Love”
This version contains mature language. This release is also available as a DVD/CD.

Track Listing:
1.Hometown Glory
2.I ll Be Waiting
3.Don t You Remember
4.Turning Tables
5.Set Fire To The Rain
6.If It Hadn t Been For Love
7.My Same
8.Take It All
9.Rumour Has It
10.Right As Rain
11.One & Only
12.Lovesong
13.Chasing Pavements
14.I Can t Make You Love Me
15.Make You Feel My Love
16.Someone Like You
17.Rolling In The Deep

Green Lantern (2011)

As far as superheroes go, Green Lantern may lack the clean, iconic lines of his more respectable DC counterparts Superman and Batman, but the very wonkiness of the premise (earthling joins elite force of space cops) lends itself to a pulpy, operatic, not-entirely-serious approach. (One of his teammates is a talking carrot, after all.) Capitalizing on a charming performance by Ryan Reynolds, the feature-film adaptation is a big, messy movie that, at its best, generates a feeling of aw-shucks wonder. Much like Thor, it isn’t afraid to loosen up on the inner turmoil of its hero and go macro. Based on comic writer Geoff Johns’s retrofitting of the title character, the story follows Hal Jordan (Reynolds), an impulsive test pilot whose encounter with a dying alien leaves him with an energy ring capable of weaponizing his imagination. While struggling to master his will-based powers, he must deal with threats both earthbound (a hilariously nebbishy Peter Saarsgard, who may be the first supervillain to rock a hoodie) and galactic. Martin Campbell, a director who specializes in more down-to-earth heroics (Casino Royale,The Mask of Zorro), brings a pleasing matter-of-fact baseline to the proceedings, an approach that makes the increasingly outlandish effects truly feel special when they occur. Green Lantern has its debits, certainly–the lack of a memorable theme, a second act that hems and haws before getting to the action, the standard origin story shoehorning in too many secondary plots–but its final scenes succeed on a Gigantor, cosmic level where most superhero movies fear to tread. The bigger it goes, the more goofily enjoyable it gets. –Andrew Wright

Planet Earth (Six-Disc Special Edition)

As of its release in early 2007, Planet Earth is quite simply the greatest nature/wildlife series ever produced. Following the similarly monumental achievement of The Blue Planet: Seas of Life, this astonishing 11-part BBC series is brilliantly narrated by Sir David Attenborough and sensibly organized so that each 50-minute episode covers a specific geographical region and/or wildlife habitat (mountains, caves, deserts, shallow seas, seasonal forests, etc.) until the entire planet has been magnificently represented by the most astonishing sights and sounds you’ll ever experience from the comforts of home. The premiere episode, “From Pole to Pole,” serves as a primer for things to come, placing the entire series in proper context and giving a general overview of what to expect from each individual episode. Without being overtly political, the series maintains a consistent and subtle emphasis on the urgent need for ongoing conservation, best illustrated by the plight of polar bears whose very behavior is changing (to accommodate life-threatening changes in their fast-melting habitat) in the wake of global warming–a phenomenon that this series appropriately presents as scientific fact. With this harsh reality as subtext, the series proceeds to accentuate the positive, delivering a seemingly endless variety of natural wonders, from the spectacular mating displays of New Guinea’s various birds of paradise to a rare encounter with Siberia’s nearly-extinct Amur Leopards, of which only 30 remain in the wild.

That’s just a hint of the marvels on display. Accompanied by majestic orchestral scores by George Fenton, every episode is packed with images so beautiful or so forcefully impressive (and so perfectly photographed by the BBC’s tenacious high-definition camera crews) that you’ll be rendered speechless by the splendor of it all. You’ll see a seal struggling to out-maneuver a Great White Shark; swimming macaques in the Ganges delta; massive flocks of snow geese numbering in the hundreds of thousands; an awesome night-vision sequence of lions attacking an elephant; the Colugo (or “flying lemur”–not really a lemur!) of the Philippines; a hunting alliance of fish and snakes on Indonesia’s magnificent coral reef; the bioluminescent “vampire squid” of the deep oceans… these are just a few of countless highlights, masterfully filmed from every conceivable angle, with frequent use of super-slow-motion and amazing motion-controlled time-lapse cinematography, and narrated by Attenborough with his trademark combination of observational wit and informative authority. The result is a hugely entertaining series that doesn’t flinch from the predatory realities of nature (death is a constant presence, without being off-putting). At a time when the multiple threats of global warming should be obvious to all, let’s give Sir David the last word, from the closing of Planet Earth‘s final episode: “We can now destroy or we can cherish–the choice is ours.” –Jeff Shannon