If you're feeling sick (or otherwise un-SIFF-y,) here are the new releases you can pick up on the way home tonight.

Charles Mudede was not so crazy about Gran Torino:

The film is not bad, but I have no idea why Manohla Dargis (the critic at The New York Times) thinks it's the greatest thing to happen since Jesus was hanged on the cross. Gran Torino's plot is predictable, its political motives are dubious (if not outright offensive), and Eastwood again plays Eastwood.

In other news about movies starring old men, Mudede also didn't much like the Harrison Ford immigration drama Crossing Over:

The only productive way to think about Crossing Over is to see it as Blade Runner Part Two. To think of it in any other way (through the filter of films like Crash and Traffic, or as a 21st-century "problem film," or as a part of the emerging yet still-confused genre of global realism) will only bring destruction to this weak work of cinema. It has nothing going for it but its strange alignment with the universe of Deckard, Voight-Kampff tests, Nexus-6 replicants, and Tyrell Corporation and its postmodern Mayan temple—esque 700-story headquarters in the dead middle of downtown Los Angeles.

The Clive Owen banking conspiracy thriller dud from earlier this year, The International, is out on DVD today too. I gave this a miss in the theater, but three things (The fact that it's directed by Tom Tykwer, a couple of allegedly good action scenes, and Naomi Watts's presence) will lead me to watch it on DVD, if only with my finger on the 'skip scene' button.

And that's about it for major movies. Other releases include Heather Graham and Jerry O'Connell in Baby on Board, a romcom about procreation, and the Nelson Mandela documentary Mandela.

TV-based new DVD entertainment includes the final season of The Shield, the first season of an awful reality/music/comedy series about rockers in New York who also play childrens' birthday parties called Z Rock (I saw the first episode and, besides the breasts of a couple of actresses playing groupies who turned out to be moms, there was no reason to watch the first episode), and the first half of the fourth season of Perry Mason.

You can find a full list of offerings over here.