DVD Release List – 12/29/09

By Noel Murray | December 29, 2009 | 1:00pm

Aux Features DVD

The other day, Scott Tobias and I were talking about inaugurating “The Diggstown Award,” to be given out each year to the solidly entertaining, small-scale genre piece that not enough people saw in theaters. The prime 2009 candidate? A Perfect Getaway, writer-director David Twohy’s taut, enjoyable thriller about the delicate dance of a serial killer couple and their latest prey on a remote Hawaiian beach. The story’s surprise twists may not be all that surprising, but the dialogue, characterization and suspense sequences are all spot-on, and Twohy strengthens the film considerably with an extended mid-film flashback that adds meaning to all the subsequent chases and gunplay. A Perfect Getaway is the kind of well-crafted entertainment that’s easy to like, easy to recommend.

Also worth digging out of the last new release pile of 2009: Shane Acker’s 9, a stunningly visualized animated feature that’s a little slight in its story on an automaton roaming through a post-apocalyptic landscape, but is definitely worth a rental, especially for fans of sci-fi and/or animation.