Smartly fashioned less as sci-fi than as an all-out, dirt-on-the-lens combat film, it’s the most satisfying Apes adventure since Charlton Heston’s spaceship first crash-landed on not-so-unknown territory. And while both have their individual fighting strengths, you have to hand it to the simians: Matt Reeves’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Fox, 12) is a dynamite extension of a franchise that should by rights have run out of story space-years ago. I t’s genetically modified humanoid apes versus genetically modified humanoid raccoons - well, one raccoon at least - on DVD shelves this week.
