The Closer: The Complete Fifth Season

• CLOSER, THE: 5TH SEASON (DVD MOVIE)

Moving up? The LAPD is looking for a new chief and Will Pope thinks he has the inside track. He soon has an unexpected rival for the job: Brenda (Best Actress Emmy® and Golden Globe® winner Kyra Sedgwick). And Brenda has an unexpected ally helping groom her for the selection process: Capt. Raydor. The contest for chief is only one of the ingenious, suspenseful, often funny storylines that makes Season Six of The Closer stellar entertainment. Join the squad as Sanchez looks after an orphaned boy, Tao goes undercover as a biker dude, Provenza and Flynn date airline attendants (turns out one of them has a corpse in her bathtub) and Brenda finds her family Christmas rudely interrupted by crime. Kyra Sedgwick's Brenda Johnson is one of TV's most compelling, complicated, and likable heroines. Johnson makes The Closer much more than just the well-w! ritten, crisply paced police procedural that it is. The viewer feels invested in Johnson's neurotic private life, marriage, and family, as well as in her political ambitions at the Los Angeles Police Department and in her relationships with her coworkers. In fact, The Closer hits its stride in season six as not just a fantastic showcase for Sedgwick's Emmy-winning acting talents, but also for the ensemble that helps her shine. J.K. Simmons, Corey Reynolds, Robert Gossett, G.W. Bailey, and Michael Paul Chan are among the all-too-human but motivated law-enforcement officials surrounding Johnson. Jon Tenney continues to be the super-supportive best husband ever, FBI agent Fritz, and season six shows Fritz and Brenda settling into their new marriage, with just a few speed bumps. The other big theme of this season is the LAPD's search for a new police chief. Brenda's boss, Will Pope (Simmons), thinks he has the job in the bag, but suddenly there's a dark horse in the race! --Deputy Chief Johnson herself. Mary McDonnell reprises her ro! le as th e officious Captain Raydor. Season six features plenty of gripping crime solving and just the right amount of humanity to keep lovers of The Closer entranced. Extras include lots of outtakes and deleted scenes, and an in-depth interview with Sedgwick on how she, and Brenda, have grown over the course of the show. --A.T. HurleyThe Superbit titles utilize a special high bit rate digital encoding process which optimizes video quality while offering a choice of both DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. These titles have been produced by a team of Sony Pictures Digital Studios video, sound and mastering engineers and comes housed in a special package complete with a 4 page booklet that contains technical information on the Superbit process. By reallocating space on the disc normally used for value-added content, Superbit DVDs can be encoded at double their normal bit rate while maintaining full compatibility with the DVD video format.Four extremely beautiful people do e! xtremely horrible things to one another in Closer, Mike Nichols' pungent adaptation of Patrick Marber's play that easily marks the Oscar-winning director's best work in years. Anna (Julia Roberts) is a photographer who specializes in portraits of strangers; Dan (Jude Law) is an obituary writer struggling to become a novelist; Alice (Natalie Portman) is an American stripper freshly arrived in London after a bad relationship; and Larry (Clive Owen) is a dermatologist who finds love under the most unlikely of circumstances. When their paths cross it's a dizzying supernova of emotions, as Nichols and Marber adroitly construct various scenes out of their lives that pair them again and again in various permutations of passion, heartbreak, anger, sadness, vengeance, pleading, deception, and most importantly, brutal honesty. It's only until you're more than halfway through the movie that you'll have to ask yourself exactly why you are watching such a beautifully tragic tale, as Clo! ser is basically the ickiest, grossest, most dysfunctional par! ts of al l your past relationships strung together into one movie. Ultimately, it falls to the four actors to draw you deeper into the story; all succeed relatively, but it's Law and Owen whose characters will cut you to the quick. Law proves that yet again he's most adept at playing charming, amoral bastards with manipulative streaks, and Owen is nothing short of brilliant as the character most turned on by the energy inherent in destructive relationships--whether he's on the giving or receiving end. --Mark EnglehartAt work, L.A. Deputy Chief Brenda Johnson is a woman in charge. Got a suspect to grill, a case to crack, a murderer about to walk? Call Brenda in and watch the fireworks. But at home...well, that’s another story. Kyra Sedgwick headlines a sizzling 4-disc, 15-episode Season 5 of the series that combines heart, humor and homicide into a show that’s equally compelling as a police procedural and a personal drama. As a cop, Brenda takes on everything from a corpse ! that comes COD to a serial killer to Sharon Raydor, an internal affairs officer as tough as she is. As a civilian, Brenda loses one family member and gains another: her surly niece Charlie. Brenda can outsmart, outmaneuver and out a killer. But can she handle a teenager?