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On Demand movie picks

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 10, 2012

MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA ★★

(Comcast Movie Collections: Black Cinema) Spike Lee’s first film about WWII and the African-American men who fought in it is a Hollywood war picture that, at some variously inopportune moments, is also a bunch of other things - a police procedural, a docu-drama, a courtroom drama, a nighttime soap (in broad, fraught daylight), a small-Italian-village fable. It’s “Of Mice and Men’’ and “Saving Private Ryan’’ and occasionally Spike Lee. This is an oddly impersonal movie. Not a work of anger or joy, it’s a work of obligation. This feels like a movie Lee made in order to say he did it. (R; runs through Feb. 29) WESLEY MORRIS

BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE ★★★ ½

(Comcast Movie Collections: Oscar Films [Past Winners]) At two mentally and emotionally exhausting hours, Michael Moore’s documentary has the heft of a saga. The film attempts to understand why America is such a uniquely violent country, and it’s an enthralling mess of hypotheses, accusations, and head-scratching flights of folly. (R; runs through March 13) WESLEY MORRIS

CAPOTE ★★★ ½

(Comcast Movie Collections: Oscar Films [Past Winners]) In an eerily well-realized performance, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Truman Capote as a diminutive, wickedly sharp genius freak who has triumphed over the beautiful people and wants more. As Capote researches and writes his 1966 “nonfiction novel,’’ “In Cold Blood,’’ director Bennett Miller shows us what happens when journalism gets seduced by art. With Catherine Keener as Harper Lee. (R; runs through March 13) TY BURR