Peanuts, Macbeth, a big whale and an evil car hit home entertainment

Entertainment: @home releases for March 8

Embrace the joy of Snoopy or explore the many faces of man-made evil as Michael Fassbender cuts to the bone in Macbeth, James McAvoy breathes life into Frankenstein and James Brolin tries to stop a killer car

By Katherine Monk

We love you, Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie (4/5)

Snoopy and Charlie Brown have a moment.

The hand-drawn essence of Charles Schulz’s iconic comic strip comes through with flying colors in this gentle transition to digital from Ice Age director Steve Martino. Martino and the animators realized they didn’t need to reinvent the characters for a modern audience by making Charlie Brown look like a human kid, or turn Snoopy into a drooling lump of pixelated fur.

They went for the feel of the source material: ever roving between pre-teen daydream, birthday party bliss and existential angst – with an emphasis on the latter, because it’s that quiet ache of looming adulthood that makes Peanuts the pop culture monolith it is.

Charlie Brown may be eleven years old, but grown-ups and kids alike will recognize his dilemmas, whether it’s trying to pitch a winning game or wooing the little redheaded girl.

This feature-length film includes all of the above as it rotates between a few different storylines to introduce the various characters, from Charlie Brown’s stunted romance with the girl next door to Snoopy’s dogfights with the Red Baron.

For fans of the seasonal TV specials and the strip, Martino makes sure he includes touchstones such as the Vince Guaraldi dance number, Lucy’s desire to dominate the pack, Linus’s quiet wisdom and Schroeder’s musical genius.

They are small beats, but they stitch together naturally as little vignettes that form the larger storyline – much like the comic strip. There is no grand epic, no need for Chuck and the gang to save the world from villainy.

The movie knows where it lives: as a precious piece of nostalgia in the minds of grown-ups who cuddled up to Snoopy as kids, and in the optic nerve of the next generation that craves visual candy and cute characters who can solve problems.

The Peanuts Movie succeeds at all of the above, and while it still looks a little too clean and bright for those of us used to the degraded cells and depressive tone of A Charlie Brown Christmas, we can take comfort in the fact Martino didn’t destroy the textures or underlying ideals of the original.

DVD/Blu-ray features: High-definition transfer, Snoopy Snippets, You Never Grow Up Charlie Brown documentary on Charlie’s history, Snoopy’s Sibling Salute (meet Olaf, Spike, Andy, Belle and Marbles), Learn to Draw the characters, Get Down with Snoopy and Woodstock Music Video, Behind the Scenes of Meghan Trainor’s Better When I’m Dancin,’ Snoopy’s Playlist and more.

Buffing up a cult classic: The Car (3/5)

Road Rage: The Car’s main star is a black sedan without a driver

In 1977, six years after Steven Spielberg made his first TV movie called Duel – which featured a man chased by a semi trailer — Cat Ballou director Elliot Silverstein decided to follow in Spielberg’s skid marks and make The Car. A villainous version of Knight Rider that may have done some body work on Christine, The Car doesn’t like human beings. It runs them over at will, without purpose, and without much in the way of motive. The car idles, revs and accelerates. Those are its emotions, which means there isn’t all that much drama in this Car-as-Jaws cheese-fest. But we do get James Brolin as the courageous police officer trying to save his small town from The Car’s wrath.

If you’re looking for some social message contained in the silliness, you may be able to salvage something by looking at the car as a symbol of the accelerating industrialized economy and its propensity to mow down the lowly working man, as well as the occasional cyclist and hippie.

Perhaps the car is like a corporation, given it has the grille of a Rolls Royce. The car has no feelings, no weaknesses and no fear. It drives wherever it pleases and takes as many lives as it can.

It doesn’t even need to fill up on gas.

How on earth will anyone be able to escape The Car? Getting off the road would help, maybe even climbing a few stairs… but the citizens of this berg prefer to run away from the car on paved roads, which proves a poor escape strategy.

Fortunately, the smart police chief realizes wheeled vehicles can’t fly – but I don’t want to take away any of the suspense here. The Car takes its toll on your patience and willful suspension of disbelief, but it’s a cult classic, and as a vehicle of social criticism, it still makes a dent.

DVD/Blu-ray features: Available for the first time on Blu-Ray, The Car features new interviews with director Elliott Silverstein, actors Melody Thomas Scott and Geraldine Keams, trailer, TV Spot, still gallery.

Whale Watching: In the Heart of the Sea (3/5)

Briny! Chris Hemsworth weathers the storm in In The Heart of the Sea

You’re going to root for the whale. That’s how much things have changed since the turn of the previous century, when the largest mammals on earth were harvested to keep street lamps glowing. To Ron Howard’s credit, he understands we don’t look at whales the same way as Herman Melville did – so he gives his seminal Moby-Dick story a 21st century sensibility.

Based on the actual events that inspired Melville to put pen to paper, Howard recreates a New England whaling town and introduces us to Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth), a veteran whaler looking for his first command. When he’s denied the promotion, and sent off to sea with a novice captain, the crew encounters a great white whale with a vindictive streak.

For the next two hours, it’s a standoff between the whale and the whalers, which means Howard has plenty of time and space to do what he does best – which is to create human characters in extraordinary situations, and then zoom in on the moments of indecision and pettiness to make it recognizable, and potentially heroic.

Hemsworth and the rest of the cast do exactly what they’re supposed to do in this film. They look desperate and hungry. They argue in manly tones and they react to the green screen villain with believable terror, but as fantastic as the visuals are, the movie doesn’t generate huge amounts of emotional grease because it’s the big white whale that wins us over. Still, for people fascinated by high seas adventure, it’s a satisfying yarn that offers an interesting window on a literary classic.

DVD/Blu-ray features: Chase and Pollard featurette contrasting the two leads, Commanding the Heart of the Sea (a look at special effects), Lightning Strikes Twice, the real life sequel to Moby-Dick and 20 scenes that were either cut or trimmed.

Monsters for young women: Victor Frankenstein: (3/5)

It’s our little secret: James McAvoy and Daniel Radcliffe star in Victor Frankenstein

Some movies only make sense if you’ve been a 13-year-old girl, and Victor Frankenstein is one of them. An action-adventure movie based on Mary Shelley’s Gothic classic about a handsome but mad scientist and the marauding creature he creates in his unholy laboratory, this latest take features James McAvoy as the titular man of intelligence and Daniel Radcliffe as the hunchback assistant, Igor.

We’ve seen other, more mature actors play these parts, but this youthful vision actually makes a lot of sense because the whole story is crafted to appeal to female sensibility. In Shelley’s suspenseful prose, we can feel a forbidden throb, a dark desire, the hard outline of a manly form without morality, which is where pubescent girls kind of live.

It’s why horror is actually a highly feminine genre, a fact that is too often misunderstood by male directors who simply go out and hack people limb from limb hoping to give us a thrill. The genre, particularly the Gothic variety, is rooted in a female knowledge of blood, and was crafted from a need to override the morality police by handing sexuality over to fictional demons.

This Frankenstein understands these core values and director Paul McGuigan brings a kinetic style that brings a picture-book quality to the mise-en-scene. For those who have never been a 13-year-old girl, the romantic part of the film will be the hardest to swallow as Igor and a young beautiful trapeze artist form a sexual liaison that feels entirely forced, but that’s only more proof this movie wasn’t made for grown-ups looking for big chills.

DVD/Blu-ray features: Deleted scenes, The Making of Victor Frankenstein, photo galleries, trailer.

The last king of Scotland gets real: Macbeth (3.5/5)

I don’t see any spots: Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth

The wind blows across the moors, and before the first word of legendary dialogue falls from the lips of our A-list players, a chill has already travelled the length of your spine.

It’s a perfectly bleak entry to the Scottish play, easily one of Shakespeare’s bloodiest epics that presses a blade to the jugular of personal morality, and slowly slices it open, forcing it to bleed out across five acts of unfathomable tragedy.

Director Justin Kurzel doesn’t try to clean it up. If anything, he goes out of his way to make it as dirty, muddy and caked in sin as he can. Blending a surreal cinematic style with blood and guts, this version of Macbeth owes something to both Julie Taymor’s Titus and Zack Snyder’s 300. He creates a visual ballet that dances across a wasteland of human flaws, and with Michael Fassbender playing the fallen lord of the dance and Marion Cotillard playing the scheming spouse, every scrap up ugliness is served with a flourish.

It’s satisfying if you’re in for the movie equivalent of mutton stew: a strong-tasting chew that sits like a lump in your guts for days. There’s so much to digest, not the least of which is the language. Every other line feels familiar, from “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” to “Out, out brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

It’s the stuff of legend, but Kurzel doesn’t always stick to the script. The text has been edited, and some liberties have been taken with locations and staging details. They’re forgivable changes if you’re not a purist because we get a good feel for the period, as though Stratford spent a day on the set of Game of Thrones. Yet, for all the extra effort, and for all of Fassbender and Cotillard’s shared charisma, the movie is so monotonously joyless, it’s hard to embrace on any emotional level.

The last act is where it all comes together, as Fassbender and Cotillard close out the drama in stellar form, finally pulling us close to their breast in their last gasps. It’s a long slog until this powerful finale, but with Fassbender holding a broadsword and leading the charge, you’ll be willing to walk through the cold mud – just to say you did.

DVD/Blu-ray features: Not available.

@katherinemonk