Dragon Tattoo

Winter's Bone Lionsgate, $27.98; Blu-ray, $29.99 This is a tense, affecting crime saga that treats its Ozark setting like something out of Greek myth. Jennifer Lawrence stars as 17-year-old Ree Dolly, a high school dropout who goes looking for her bail-jumping father when the sheriff threatens to take away her family's property. As Ree roams up and down, knocking on doors, she angers the local drug lords, including her temperamental Uncle Teardrop, played by the magnificent John Hawkes.

An air of déjà vu hangs over "The Winning Season," the story of a sad sack who takes the helm of a ragtag, losing basketball team and gets a shot at redemption. But if the Indiana-set comedy evokes " Hoosiers," "The Bad News Bears" and countless other sports movies, not to mention storytelling clichés, it also has at its center the singular and underappreciated Sam Rockwell. Divorced and hangdog, complete with cluttered apartment decorated in Early Drab, Rockwell's Bill is a onetime b-ball coach who is bussing tables when his second chance arrives.

After months of speculation over one of the most buzzed about casting choices in recent history, Sony has announced that actress Rooney Mara will play Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher's English-language version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. " Mara, whose most notable credit so far is "The Nightmare on Elm Street," has already worked with Fincher on this fall's "The Social Network. " The 24-year-old had been rumored to be in running for the part, up against other relative newcomers such as French actress Léa Seydoux and Australian actresses Sarah Snook and Sophie Lowe.

Lisbeth Salander, the punked, pierced, dragon-tattooed heroine of Stieg Larsson's international bestselling Millennium trilogy, is back on the high wire in "The Girl Who Played With Fire," locked in an ever more treacherous game with villains more depraved, mysteries much murkier and family ties more dark keeping things twisted and taunt. Though the thriller is in the hands of a different filmmaking team this time led by Swedish director Daniel Alfredson and screenwriter Jonas Frykberg, they've kept the searing intelligence and ruthless bent that turned the first book's adaptation, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," into an international box office hit and having a strong run in the States, still in theaters four months after its release.

Fiction 1. The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson ($15.95) 2. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson ($14.95) 3. Little Bee by Chris Cleave ($14) 4. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann ($15) 5. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese ($15.95) 6. A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick ($14.95) 7. The Last Song by Nicholas Sparks ($7.99) 8. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery ($15)

‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is such a grown-up treat, a mesmerizing thriller that takes its time unlocking one mystery only to uncover another, all to immensely satisfying effect. Based on the first novel in Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, Danish director Niels Arden Oplev found a way to adapt one of Europe's most popular contemporary books, a bestselling sensation in the U.S. as well, and still infuse it with surprise.

It's the time of year when anything seems possible. The Chicago Cubs are not yet mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, your taxes could still yield an unexpected refund and some little art-house movie just might exceed all expectations. The last is the fantasy shared by any number of independent film distributors as they head into what have been some of the most perilous -- but also potentially rewarding -- weeks in the theatrical release schedule: For every breakout specialized film hit in the late spring and early summer, there are many more crash-and-burn disasters.