Even tenacious Jack Black fans might concede that his goofy, mock-rocker energy is probably limiting. But then along comes a surprisingly persuasive counterargument: “Bernie” (2012), director Richard Linklater’s true-crime account of a small-town Texas mortician beloved by his community even after the discovery that he’d murdered a prominent local widow (a dryly dour Shirley MacLaine). Yes, Bernie Tiede stuck Marjorie Nugent in a freezer for nine months. But, shee-oot, was that old gal ever a sourpuss. Some of the movie feels like Black getting up to his old tricks, with minor variations: high-stepping to “Seventy-six Trombones” and leading gospel hymns in scenes conveying Bernie’s charismatic, twinkle-eyed flamboyance. But as the story goes on, Black and Linklater (who previously collaborated on “School of Rock”) do crafty work stripping away some of the levity, and impressing on viewers that this was, after all, a tragic case. This is Linklater’s version of a Coen brothers film, complete with the director’s old “Dazed and Confused” bud Matthew McConaughey glamming down again as a cowboy-hatted DA. Extras: A featurette compiles audition sessions with the many nonactor locals used in recurring town-gossip cutaways. Entertaining stuff, but we’re still slightly confused about how Linklater coaxed such amusingly authentic work out of them. Another segment traces the project’s down-home roots in a Texas Monthly magazine article. (Millennium Entertainment, $28.99;
Blu-ray, $29.99)
FOREIGN
A SEPARATION (2011)
In last year’s Oscar winner for best foreign language film, Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi tells a morally intricate story about a Tehran couple’s split and the unforeseeable domino effect it triggers. The wife wants the family to leave Iran. The husband won’t go, concerned for his Alzheimer’s-afflicted father. Their adolescent daughter (Farhadi’s own daughter, Sarina) is caught in the middle. But so is a working-class couple whose caretaker involvement with the old man turns tragic, and litigious. Worth watching just for the way that religious beliefs affect character choices. Extras: Farhadi commentary, Q&A, and background primer. (Sony, $30.99; Blu-ray, $35.99)
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COMEDY
THE DICTATOR (2012)
Sacha Baron Cohen, reigning master of the uncomfortable moment, pushes even more buttons than usual with his farce about a boorish Middle Eastern despot cluelessly lost in New York. A couple of heavily teased bits trading on post-Sept. 11 anxieties really do go too far — outrageous doesn’t necessarily equal funny — but other moments are on a par with “Borat.”
Extras: Blu-ray offers an extended cut of the movie with more of, say, a great Sellers-absurd exchange between Cohen’s Aladeen and his WMD engineer (Jason Mantzoukas) about cartoons’ scientific reliability as “research films.” (Paramount, $29.99; Blu-ray, $39.99)
ANIMATION
POCAHONTAS (1995)
Looks like painting with all the colors of the wind only gets you so far, judging by Disney’s decision to give its naturalist-princess tale a Blu-ray
vibrancy boost. The reissue also includes the made-for-video sequel, “Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World.” Among the other titles in the studio’s flurry of hi-def animated re-releases this week: “The Aristocats,” “The Tigger Movie,” and a double-feature presentation of “The Rescuers” and “The Rescuers Down Under.” (Disney, $39.99 each)