DVDs of the week

Rocky Mountain News

Originally published 12:00 a.m., May 12, 2008
Updated 06:03 p.m., May 12, 2008

Denzel Washington in The Great Debaters

The Great Debaters

Rated: PG-13, 124 minutes, $29.95, Genius Products

Grade: B-

Director and star Denzel Washington manages to keep this true story of a black debate team in the 1930s segregated South from becoming overly sentimental by understating parts that could have been over the top.

Washington plays the coach of the debate team at a tiny, all-black college that defeats several mostly white powerhouse schools. He "draws effortless performances from his young actors," says Associated Press critic Christy Lemire, "which go a long way in making The Great Debaters more enjoyable than you might expect."

Mad Money

Rated: PG-13, 103 minutes, $29.97, Anchor Bay

Grade: D+

Wealthy suburbanite Bridget Cardigan (Diane Keaton), forced to take a janitor's job at the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City when her husband loses his position, conspires with co-workers Nina (Queen Latifah) and Jackie (Katie Holmes) to rob the Fed in this rip-off of 1980's How To Beat the High Cost of Living.

Viewers never develop much sympathy for the mostly well-off characters, says Lemire, and the movie strains for laughs as well as believability. Adds Lemire: "While Keaton has long done zany well, and she and Latifah make an interesting contrast, Holmes' presence feels like an afterthought."

* Untraceable: A Web site lets viewers watch people get killed - the more viewers the faster - while an FBI agent tries to stop the madness in what Lemire calls a "deplorably gratuitous" movie.

* Youth Without Youth: An aging professor struck by lightning becomes younger, smarter in "an incomprehensible, pretentious, meandering mess" of a movie, Lemire says.

* In stores next week: National Treasure: Book of Secrets; Strange Wilderness