Capsule reviews of the this week’s video releases, on DVD and Blu-ray, including special features:
• “Woman in Gold” (PG-13, 11o minutes, in English and German with subtitles, The Weinstein Co.): The film is based on the true story of Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren), an Austrian woman who fled the Holocaust and, many years later, sued the Austrian government for the return of family-owned artworks that had been looted by the Nazis. It takes its title from the informal name of a 1907 portrait of Maria’s aunt by the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt. Stirring at times, soggy and overly sentimental at others, the film moves surprisingly slowly, even though its action, which takes place over many years of legal maneuvering, has been condensed for narrative expediency.
• “Maggie” (PG-13, 95 minutes, Lionsgate): This unusual zombie drama starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a taciturn farmer is not your typical Hollywood blockbuster. If Schwarzenegger at first looks out of place in an indie arthouse film, he quickly settles nicely into the role of an introspective, tortured dad whose teenage daughter Maggie (Abigail Breslin) has been bitten but so far shows no symptoms. (Here, the transformation to flesh-eating ghoul takes place not in seconds or minutes, but in six to eight weeks.) Though Wade does dispatch a handful of zombies over the course of the film, “Maggie” is more of a family drama than an action film. Contains grisly images, scary sequences and some coarse language.
• ” ’71” (R, 99 minutes, Lionsgate): The early 1970s were bloody in Northern Ireland, building toward a fever pitch of bombings, riots and shootings. It makes for an explosive backdrop in ” ’71,” director Yann Demange’s gripping feature directorial debut about a British soldier who gets left behind by his unit in Belfast following a chaotic riot in 1971. Up-and-coming actor Jack O’Connell (“Unbroken”) plays the hero in peril, whose survival depends not just on his instincts, but on a complicated web of people, including two factions of the Irish Republican Army, British loyalists and undercover agents.
