3 great summer DVDs: Spring Breakers, The Paperboy and The Gatekeepers

The sweltering heat is so unbearable that you’ve given up on simple tasks like answering the phone, retrieving your mail and dishwashing? Sounds like you're in need of stimulation, dear reader. If you don’t want to risk hypothermia at one of the city’s cineplexes, we’ve got the perfect, AC-free solution. Among the many titles released on DVD this month, we’ve picked three that will titillate, trouble, generate reflection and polarize opinions. Consider yourself warned.

Spring Breakers ***½ 

Whodathunk Harmony Korine, the Nashville-bred enfant terrible that the world discovered in 1995 as co-writer of the unsettling skaters-and-AIDS film Kids, would grow up to be a 40-year-old filmmaker still churning out relevant and gritty depictions of youth gone awry? In Spring Breakers, by a longshot his most straightforward narrative (when compared to the relentlessly dysfunctional and often absurd Gummo or Trash Humpers, for instance), Korine rolls out a boozy, surreal, fully loaded mind trip that oscillates between Skrillex’s bro-step aggression and Drive composer Cliff Martinez’s meditative synths. At South by Southwest this past March, Korine told us: "I just imagined girls in bikinis on a beach robbing fat tourists; that was my first flash. I just built the story from there." In a nutshell, it’s the story of four college girls gone wild – Harmony’s wife Rachel Korine, Ashley Benson and former Disney royalty Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens – who rob a fast-food joint to pay for their trip to the Sunshine State. Once there, they get a little too caught up in debauchery and wind up in jail, only to be bailed out by a RiFF RaFF look-a-like/horny drug dealer played with deranged swagger by James Franco. Profoundly disconcerting, absolutely irreverent and entirely in tune with the demographic it depicts, Spring Breakers is a cinematic experience unlike any other.

The Gatekeepers ***½

Not really the light summer moviegoing experience some patrons might be looking for (then again, none of these titles fit that description), this 2012 Oscar nominee in the Best Documentary category pulls back the curtain on the Israeli Shin Bet – the internal security agency tasked with defending Israel and preventing potential acts of terrorism. Perhaps most impressive is how director Dror Moreh manages to get all six surviving "Gatekeepers", or former heads of the Shin Bet, to appear on camera and share extremely revealing insights about an organization they see as inherently flawed (the sixth, Yuval Diskin, was still heading the organization at the time of filming). With its combination of talking heads, archival footage and computer animation (not always well suited to the material – a small caveat in an otherwise powerful film), The Gatekeepers is a fascinating and surprisingly nuanced look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and certain idealized notions of security. It’s refreshing to hear the men who once used torture and drones to carry out their tactical operations reflect critically on Israel’s policies, admitting that the Shin Bet’s reasoning ultimately doesn’t add up, and that those who believe killing terrorists also obliterates the threat of terrorism need to wake up and smell the conflict.

What’s not to love about this lusty, sordid, campy-as-can-be Southern noir based on an eponymous novel? Since its Cannes 2012 debut, many have written it off as heavy-handed, melodramatic schlock (it has even been called "the worst film of 2012"). Others have chosen to fixate on a certain unforgettable scene, wherein Nicole Kidman urinates on Zac Efron to relieve the sting of a jellyfish bite (and mark her territory, of course). But trust me, the trashy, delirious fun just keeps on comin’ in director Lee Daniels’ unlikely follow-up to Precious. Set in a swampy, sizzling Florida town in 1969, The Paperboy finds a Miami Times reporter (Matthew McConaughey) return to his hometown to seek Pulitzer glory by way of revisiting a sloppy murder trial that led to the conviction a crocodile hunter (John Cusack, nightmarishly creepy). Efron stars as McConaughey’s steamy, tighty-whitie-clad baby brother, and Kidman (in an award-worthy turn) as a loose-screwed nympho with a hankering for potentially lethal prison cock. In Lee’s toxic, lewd microclimate, a number of racial and sexual tensions arise, along with distracting handheld camerawork, amateurish split-screen effects and a spotty script. It’s all part of Lee’s engrossing package of unabashed camp, the kind that subscribes to the “take it or leave it” school of thought. When we spoke to Efron at TIFF last fall, he told us: "I really appreciate that the film is so polarizing. Either people get it right away and love it, or the only thing on their mind is to run home and wash themselves clean." That feels about right.

Spring Breakers, The Gatekeepers and The Paperboy are now available on DVD