“Big Fish: Special Edition”: From Tim Burton, tall tales about life and love in a special edition DVD. Albert Finney is Edward Bloom, a dying salesman whose charmed life, recounted from his deathbed, proves a colorful confection of bigger-than-life stories, some legitimately lived, others overtly embellished. A contemporary version of “The Odyssey,” the movie plays to Burton’s strengths as an auteur of fantasy colliding with reality. Its opening moments are a lark of human propulsion. With Ewan McGregor, Billy Crudup and Jessica Lane, “Big Fish” is expertly acted, but it doesn’t rise to the quirky greatness of Burton’s best films. It’s more measured, less daring, never as dark, eschewing an edge in favor of embracing a whimsical charm. Still, it’s consistently watchable, far better than the book about the movie that comes tucked within. Rated: PG-13. Grade: B

“Gus Van Sant’s Last Days”: Don’t send out the condolences just yet. The movie isn’t about the director’s death – if anything, it proves that Van Sant is very much alive. Instead, it’s slyly about the events leading up to Kurt Cobain’s death. Though the movie never says that Michael Pitt’s Blake, a disturbed rock star, is Cobain, it’s obvious what Van Sant is up to here. The movie exists in a haze, with time as fractured as Blake himself. Long stretches seem pointless, which is the point; Van Sant wants you to feel his character’s isolation and so he isolates us from him, him from us. Tricky business. This is not a movie for the masses, who might be put off by how aloof and meandering it is, or perhaps even for fans of Cobain, who likely would prefer more insight into the final days leading to his death. Instead, this is an experimental movie, not wholly successful, that reaches for its own nirvana – something new within the art of moviemaking. Rated: R. Grade: B-

“Madagascar”: It isn’t a lion, a zebra, a giraffe or even a hippo that should have been the focus of “Madagascar.” It should have been a herd of sheep, gently hopping from one little cloud to the next, quietly lulling you into the inevitable coma the movie induces. After the misbegotten “Shark Tale,” “Madagascar” is another misstep for DreamWorks. Not unlike “The Polar Express” or “Robots,” two great-looking films that were disappointing duds, “Madagascar” is so concerned with getting the incidentals right – the texture of a lion’s mane, the wiry fuzz of a coconut – that it forgoes what really matters, the characters and the story. For all of its easy jokes about poo and flatulence, the one stinking here is the movie itself. Rated: PG. Grade: D

“The Partridge Family: Complete Second Season”: Nearly 35 years after the series first premiered, there remains something comfortingly surreal about watching Shirley Jones riff out on an electric keyboard while her television family (David Cassidy, Susan Dey, Danny Bonaduce, that forgotten little blond girl) joins her on drums, guitars, tambourine and vocals. Better yet, there are those little family melodramas that pick away at the Partridges while they’re on tour. Here, we get 23 episodes, all remastered in high definition, thus allowing the viewer to fully delight in the complexity of the far-out print on all those Peter Pan collars. Highlights include Laurie (Dey) getting picked up by a biker and running off with him. I think I love it. Grade: B+

“Rize”: From David LaChapelle, a terrific documentary about a subset of hip-hop culture born out of the Rodney King riots of 1992. Set in present-day South Central Los Angeles, the movie exposes a thrilling, underground dance form called “krumping,” which finds its soul steeped in African dance, a clown act devised by Tommy Johnson, and the need for self-expression that uses the body as a weapon far deadlier (and sexier) than any gun. The movie and the young people within it are in the moment, with the latter pressing against their oppression by tapping into something akin to a religious experience. An unusual movie whose energy lingers. Rated: PG-13. Grade: A-

“The Skeleton Key”: Hoodoo, voodoo and cheap thrills set in a Louisiana backwater. Director Ian Softley plays the first half of this ripe Southern Gothic straight before smoking some homegrown hoodoo himself and delivering a final half that embraces its share of absurdity. The film finds Kate Hudson hopping the tracks into horror, which is a shrewd move for a woman whose career has become a horror. While the movie is far from the showpiece Hudson deserves, she nevertheless is able to reveal appealing new dimensions that the slight, meet-cute formula of her recent romantic comedies haven’t allowed her to show. She’s not alone in mixing things up. Venerable actress Gena Rowlands, huffing and puffing as if she were a 1960s-era Bette Davis, also stars, as does Peter Sarsgaard and John Hurt in creepy supporting roles. Rated: PG 13. Grade: B

“Whoopi: Back to Broadway – The 20th Anniversary”: At the start of her career, when Whoopi Goldberg was fresh and hadn’t become a caricature of herself, she was superb, using stories from her own life to make her one of the best stand-up comediennes of her day. Those who remember her when she was first introduced to the masses via an HBO special in the mid 1980s saw something that no longer exists – a raw insight that made her dangerous. Now, two decades later in “Back to Broadway,” Goldberg revisits the Lyceum Theater and her most famous characters, including the drugged-out Fontaine. Some of the jokes hit their mark, particularly when Goldberg takes on the current political climate, but others are disappointing, seemingly conceived by a very comfortable, slightly out-of-touch Hollywood square. Grade: C+