New on DVD: "Milk" and more

It was the toast of the movie award season, capping off its run with two Academy Awards, and now Milk makes its DVD debut. But it's just one of several terrific titles coming out Tuesday.

With a Best Actor Oscar for Sean Penn and a Best Original Screenplay win for Dustin Lance Black, Milk rides onto the New Releases shelf with a great deal of public awareness behind it. While the film has grossed a total of $31.1 million so far, look for its viewing audience to release exponentially now that the DVD is heading to parts of the country where the film might not have screened (and into the homes of people who might not have wanted to be seen buying a ticket).

Whether or not you love the film — and I had my problems with it — Milk is effective advertising for the legacy of Harvey Milk and the need for gay equal rights in this country.

Two more of 2008's most acclaimed films hit DVD Tuesday as well: Let the Right One In is a stark and heartfelt coming-of-age love story wrapped up in one of the most effectively chilling and humane vampire stories you've ever seen on screen. If the hands-off histrionics of Twilight weren't your cup of AB negative, give this one a shot.

Probably the most love-it-or-hate-it movie of the recent past was Synecdoche, New York, the directorial debut of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich). Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as a theater director who uses his MacArthur Genius Grant to take over a warehouse and recreate his surroundings as a stage piece in the hopes of being able to exert the control over his existence in art that eludes him in life. The extraordinary ensemble cast include Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Hope Davis, Tom Noonan, Emily Watson and Dianne Weist.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone are up to their usual pop-culture-skewing hi-jinks in South Park: The Complete Twelfth Season. This new set of episodes includes an exceedingly prophetic one that guessed that the paparazzi would glom onto every slip-up of Miley Cyrus once they had consumed Britney Spears.

And Best Title of the Week goes to The Gay Dog, which is not, despite what it sounds like, a South Park spin-off. This 1954 British comedy is set in the world of greyhound racing, and the lead character happens to be named Jim Gay. Fans of pop diva Petula Clark will get a kick of seeing her in one of her child-star roles that came before she turned herself into a pop princess.