Kingsman: The Secret Service (Blu-ray + Digital Copy), kingsman, the secret service

This science fiction blockbuster from 1990 began its production life as a very different movie than the one that was released. An adaptation of the Philip K. Dick short story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," Total Recall was originally conceived of with Richard Dreyfuss starring as a Walter Mitty-like character who experiences a variety of artificially induced fantasies. The movie we know is a mega-budget action epic set on Mars. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a normal working man who discovers that his entire reality has been invented to conceal a plot of planetary domination. Oscar-winning special effects and violent action propel the twisting plot, in which Arnold manipulates his manipulators in a world of dazzling high technology. Director Paul Verhoeven (Robocop) indulges his usual penchant for gratuitous bloodshed, but the movie has enough cleverness to rise above its excesses. —Jeff Shannon

You've got to give it up for a movie that goes the big-canvas route and then some: Cloud Atlas is a mega-project, a star-studded near-three-hour opus that reaches for deep metaphysical meaning. And instead of one story, the movie adapted from David Mitchell's novel features six interlocking narratives, ranging from a 19th-century seafaring yarn to a pair of futuristic dystopias (one high-tech, the other a postapocalyptic return to barbarism). To emphasize the themes of eternal recurrence and transmigrating souls, the hard-working actors play multiple roles across these timelines, so you get to see Tom Hanks and Halle Berry et al. ensconced in a variety of makeup and prosthetics. This includes casting across gender and race, which means if you've ever wondered how Hugo Weaving would look as a tough female nurse, or Jim Sturgess as an Asian action hero, this is your chance. (Coming across best are a sprightly Jim Broadbent, a mournful Ben Whishaw, and a genuinely haunting Doona Bae.) This tapestry is so large it required three directors: Andy and Lana Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer, who applied all their talent to a project that, the more it goes on, begins to resemble a kind of glossy New Age seminar complete with chase scenes. Cloud Atlas is often fun to watch just for the sheer ambition of it, in the way you'd watch a circus act full of dangerous stunts… but nonsense dressed in highfalutin clothes is still nonsense, and in the end the approach feels more than a little silly. —Robert Horton

Future. Present. Past. Everything is connected. An exploration of how the actions of individual lives impact one another in the past, present and future, as one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero, and an act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution.The story is a time-shifting weave of six interlinking narratives, with diverse settings from the savagery of a Pacific Island in the 1850s to a dystopian Korea of the near future. Based on the New York Times best-selling novel "Cloud Atlas" written by David Mitchell.

Self-made superhero Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and sweet-faced, foul-mouthed assassin Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) try to return to life as “normal” teenagers, but soon they are faced with their deadliest challenge yet. To seek revenge for his father’s death, Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) has re-invented himself as the leader of an evil league of super-villains. To defeat their new nemesis, Kick-Ass and Hit Girl must team up with a new wave of masked crusaders, led by the badass Colonel Stars and Stripes (Jim Carrey), in this battle of real-life villains and heroes.