Damon and De Niro on DVD

Matt Damon stars as Mark Whiteacre in The Informant, alongside director Steven Soderbergh. A real-life over-eager agri-business corporate executive and biochemist who decides to turn whistle-blower on industry price-fixing in the '90s implicating his firm, Archer Daniels Midland (A.D.M.), becomes an FBI informant so he can be hailed as a hero and get a promotion. As the investigation progresses and he starts to think of himself as a "spy," Whiteacre begins building lie upon lie until he himself can't keep track of his own stories. This too-funny-to-be-true tale is in fact, fact, and critics swooned over Damon's portrayal of a snitch.

The New York Times' Manohla Dargis says, "This one can be appreciated on purely formal terms, for the clarity of its images and the economy of the storytelling. But it is Mr. Soderbergh’s insistence on seeing the A.D.M. scandal as a collective tragedy rather than as another white-collar crime that gives the movie force, resonance, feeling."

In Director Kirk Jones's Everybody's Fine, a widower (Robert De Niro), who realized his only connection to his family was through his wife, sets off on an impromptu road trip to reunite with each of his grown children. De Niro leads a stellar cast in this insightful dramatic comedy starring Drew Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale, and Sam Rockwell. A remake of the Italian film, Stanno Tutti Bene, this is a standard, feel-good, family film.

Scoring a whopping 48 percent on the Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes, the site says: "A calm, charismatic performance from Robert De Niro nearly saves the movie, but ultimately, Everybody's Fine has the look and feel of a stereotypical Christmas dramedy." Although slammed by critics, the flick is a decent, good-old-fashioned tear-jerker.

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The Informant and Everybody's Fine are out on DVD now.