If you missed Meryl Streep’s award-winning performance in ‘The Iron Lady’ (PG-13), now is your chance to see it on DVD. Interestingly enough, while the film generated major awards season buzz, it was largely dissed by critics for being strangely unfocused. It’s a valid complaint: Margaret Thatcher (Streep) was Britain’s first and only female prime minister, and had to smash through gender and class biases in order to make her voice heard. Unfortunately, the movie seems less concerned with her political prowess and more concerned with her later years, when she suffered from dementia.

That aside, Streep is the shining star of the film, and her performance as Thatcher is undeniably award-worthy. It’s just a shame that the rest of the film feels so fuzzy and half-hearted, since it rather waters down what should be a steely biopic.

Not interested in “based on true events”? Try something that’s literally out of this world: an alien attack in Moscow! In ‘The Darkest Hour’ (PG-13), a group of teens stranded in Moscow, Russia try to survive a full-blown invasion from aliens that are nearly invisible. While this could be an interesting horror/sci-fi hybrid, the main characters are hard to like, the script is flat, and the film never really tries to do anything new or original. Perhaps the biggest problem is with the aliens themselves: after all of those teasing shots of flashes of light here and there, we never actually get any big reveal at the end. That just leaves the audience feeling cheated.

Warner Herzog explores the American justice system’s use of the death penalty in ‘Into the Abyss’ (NR), which includes conversations with death row inmate Michael Perry (who was executed shortly after his interview with Herzog). It’s a dark subject, to be sure, but Herzog achieves a sense of humanity in his documentary that makes it compelling and enlightening, rather than brooding.