Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): *****

British artist Steve McQueen's directorial debut Hunger focuses on one of the darkest periods in Britain's recent history. When Irish republic activists were arrested en masse and staged a brutal protest campaign to make their imprisonment as costly, exhausting and embarrassing for the British government as humanly possible. The prisoners banged on walls, screamed all day, refused to bathe or use toilets and eventually went on hunger strikes that created a martyr out of a then 27 year old Bobby Sands (played by Inglourious Basterds' Michael Fassbender).

Similar to Kathryn Bigelow's (who was also a visual artist prior to becoming a film-maker) recent Oscar winner Hurt Locker, McQueen fills each frame with piercing visual details and applies a brutal sound design, delighting in taking each extreme human experience into an equally extreme viewing experience. There are moments that recall the similar tactics of the (fortunately) declining "torture porn" genre, but here with a positively Kubrick-ian approach to pacing. Modestly plotted scenes are made up of extremely long takes and very little dialogue while moments of extreme brutality are presented with so much detail they create a sense of slow delirium.

The 17-minute uncut take of a Catholic priest trying to talk Sands out of the hunger strike has become much discussed, mostly as a tour de force in execution. But within Hunger's structure it's difficult to imagine a better way of depicting internal disagreements for the Irish. It's striking to look at and intellectually honest but almost unbearable to watch.

But for all its brutality, Hunger is only as political a film as the viewer wants it to be. The outcome has already been written for the participants' fate, one can choose to walk away with only having seen the meticulous craft that went into things like an emotionally-gutting scenes that consists of only a fly and a snared piece of barbwire fence. One can also view it through a post-9/11 lens to be reminded that institutions have never been well-equipped to deal with a small group of ardent believers.

The looseness of these threads is the mark of a director who understands there are still complexities within the extremes of human behavior, without hesitating to show how paranoia and mob mentalities can bubble up in repellent ways under oppressive circumstances. It's an astonishing film in any respect, but as a directorial debut feels particularly brave.

DVD extras include typical Criterion luxuries: lengthy interviews with director Steve McQueen and lead actor Michael Fassbender, a making-of featurette, a 1981 news magazine piece on the Maze prison hunger strikes and a theatrical trailer.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): **

The new CG-animated feature film Astro Boy begins with a young boy dying in a blast right in front of his helpless father's eyes. The father (voiced by Nicolas Cage) feverishly rebuilds him as a robot, but then rejects him and banishes him. From there, the boy is viciously attacked by giant spaceships and robots, smacked through the air, and pummeled against buildings amidst a spray of bullets across the skyline (including -- no kidding -- a butt gun). It's all presented with a lack of real emotion and in a hail of noise and explosions, begging the question, who is this movie for?

Moreover, the film comes with a clumsy political allegory, in which the wealthiest and most elite of the human population lives in an opulent floating city called Metro City. Robots perform all of the menial tasks, and when they wear out, they're simply dumped to the surface, which -- as better demonstrated in WALL-E -- is covered in trash. President Stone (voice of Donald Sutherland) is an evil warmonger who is up for re-election and whose ratings are tumbling. He decides to arm a major new weapon and declare war on the surface to boost his approval. (It worked for two generations of Bushes.) Of course, there are all kinds of outcasts living on the surface and trying to scrape by, and that's where Astro Boy ends up.

He makes some new friends, including the big-eyed, dye-hair, cutie-pie Cora (voiced by Kristen Bell), and the goofy robot builder Hamegg (voiced by Nathan Lane). Astro can't tell them he's a robot, and when they find out, he's forced to fight in a brutal robot deathmatch. Then we get the usual stuff in which his "betrayed" friends learn to trust him again and a happy "be yourself" conclusion. The film totally fails to realize the much darker, underlying material having to do with the fear of becoming separated from one's parents (or creators), brilliantly covered in much better films like A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) and Coraline (2009).

The only saving grace -- aside from the great-looking, professional animation -- is the talented voice of Freddie Highmore (The Spiderwick Chronicles) as Astro Boy. He takes this ridiculous character and gives him, for fleeting moments, something resembling a soul.

The new DVD from Summit comes with several featurettes about adapting Astro Boy, recording the voices and designing the look of the film. There are also two new short animated sequences.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ****

There seems to be a movement underway to draw some attention to the forgotten cult director Marco Ferreri (La Grande Bouffe, Tales of Ordinary Madness), and judging by Dillinger Is Dead (1969), which has just been released on Criterion Collection DVD, it's a good impulse. The film is definitely a product of the late 1960s, with all that that implies, but the existential energy behind it is still very much relevant.

The film takes place over the course of one long night and contains very little dialogue. Michel Piccoli stars in a tour-de-force performance as Glauco, whose job alone is filled with fascinating symbolism: he's a maker of designer gas masks. The ramifications of this may seem obvious to us today, but how many people today are performing similar tasks, putting happy faces on ugly truths? At any rate, he goes home and finds his pretty blond wife (Anita Pallenberg) in bed. She pops a few pills and is never seen in an upright position again. Dinner is left out for Glauco, but it doesn't interest him and he begins cooking his own meal. While poking around looking for spices (or whatnot), he finds a package. Inside the package is a gun, wrapped in a newspaper. The newspaper's headline is about the death of gangster John Dillinger. Is this Dillinger's gun?

The movie has at least one shocking turn of events and a terrifically weird ending, but none of these detracts from or solves the movie's theme, which is that -- despite all this stuff in his house, and even the people in his house -- Glauco's life is meaningless. He focuses on dozens of things, but no one thing holds any importance. He's bored and restless, but has no idea how to satisfy these itches. Even his most drastic act leaves him unsatisfied, and perhaps even his radical departure at the end will fail to fill the holes. Ferreri directs all this exactly right, with great deal of dark amusement, and filling his frame with the same meaningless stuff with which Glauco has filled his life (even the light feels like a cluttered cluster of colors). It's a bizarre, fascinating experience, and one that will sink a bit deeper into your psyche than you might expect.

The new Criterion DVD comes with a new interview with Piccoli (who worked with Ferreri several more times). There's also an interview with film historian Adriano Aprà, and a roundtable discussion about the director, with filmmakers Bernardo Bertolucci and Francesco Rosi and film historian Aldo Tassone. Ferreri himself died in 1997, so this video transfer was supervised by director of photography Mario Vulpiani.

Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***

Do you have to be an Asian queer to appreciate Asian Queer Shorts? I don't think so. Though this relatively new compilation of five short films from Strand Releasing is a mixed bag by and about Asian homosexual men, nothing in it reaches rock-bottom -- though I do wish the final and longest film were a bit better. Totaling around 85 minutes of "movie," AQS more or less delivers.

Last Full Show, from Filipino filmmaker Mark V. Reyes, begins with a couple of queens at their favorite movie theater/cruising spot. They reminisce and bitch a bit until one of them spots a cute young man. The older guy follows the younger, sits next to him, chats him up and then – romance is in the air. But there are many bridges to cross, as the cliché has it, before we find out enough about this twinkie to realize...but you'll see. I would guess Mr. Reyes will be heard from again, and in longer format.

An art film of sorts, Kevin Choi's thirteen-minute Dissolution Of Bodies offers, in addition to the usual, some semi-interesting gay philosophizing. Photographed in black-and-white, this romp in bed between two would-be maybe lovers, one of whom is perhaps keener on the idea than the other, is full of nice photography, some charm and two attractive men. And, yes, that philosophical conversation.

In just thirteen minutes, Park Hyun-jin tackles Korea's distant past as His Majesty and his court argue over the time of proper morning while a love affair surreptitiously begins. The stately and elegant little film A Crimson Mark is also awfully slight – perhaps, though it appears to be a "short," it is because it really is an audition for the full-length movie most likely burgeoning in Mr. Park's fertile mind. I hope we see that version someday soon.

The final film, alluded to earlier, comes from Raymond Yong and is called Yellow Fever. It strives for, but only rarely achieves the stylish wit and smart, "faggy" humor that might lift it to the level of a latter-day Oscar Wilde/Noel Coward. Much of it falls flat, though the plotting and pacing isn't bad, even if the performances run the gamut from OK to not-so-good. This one's cute, sweet and obvious, but in its very obviousness, it may be the one film here that rings the bell for the great, gay unwashed masses.

Reviewer: Jeremy Hatch
Rating (out of 5): ***

"Gigante" is a good adjective to describe the protagonist of Adrian Biniez's film, a gentle giant named Jara (Horacio Camandulle) who lives with his sister and her pre-adolescent son, listens to heavy metal, and works seven nights a week in Montevideo, Uruguay -- weekends as a bouncer at a clube, weeknights as a security guard at an unidentified supermarket. (There used to also be a supermarket chain in Mexico called Gigante, though that appears to be a coincidence.) Jara has a simple job at the supermarket: monitor the security cameras. But it's the middle of the night, the store is locked up, and there is never any crime apart from shoplifting by employees, which Jara mostly lets go.

After all this is established, the story really begins. One day Jara is watching as a young janitor, Julia (Leonor Svarcas) accidentally knocks over an elaborate display of toilet paper rolls, under which she is buried. It's a hilarious gag, and no harm is done, but she's immediately chewed out by the night manager.

He zooms in on her face, and it's the beginning of an epic crush, the kind of infatuation most people stop experiencing well before the age of sixteen. He tries to avoid her, he's nervous when she's nearby, and for his heightened awareness of her, she evidently has zero awareness of him. Unable to simply approach her and introduce himself, he follows her around the city, learns where she lives, learns her routines, and he even steals her employment records. He's stalking her, and it is more than a little creepy, but there's nothing overtly ominous about it -- by this point in the
story, Jara has been well-established as a nice guy who would never harm anybody, least of all her. Jara is likeable and we care about him, and long before the ending we are rooting for him to overcome his shyness and say hello.

There's not much more than this in the way of plot -- after the situation and characters are established, the film mostly consists of a series of minor misadventures on Julia's trail -- and many will think the pacing is a bit slow. But it is drawn out very skilfully, both with humor and with the use of one motif in particular, screens and security cameras, which is thought-provoking and interesting to note as it develops over the course of the film. Jara's life is full of screens: at home he falls asleep to incongruous TV programs, at work he watches the security monitor, in public
he gets caught on security cameras himself, and he turns his attention to screens numerous times while tailing her. All these screens and cameras are presented as a benign fact of life in Montevideo, which I suppose they probably are.

[Minor spoiler:] The whole story wraps up when the two lose their jobs on account of a subplot, Jara gets up the courage to approach Julia, and she finally gets to deliver, with a beautiful smile, one of her only lines of dialogue: "hola!"

It's an offbeat and memorable subversion of stereotypical rom coms, and I like to think of Gigante, out on DVD thanks to Film Movement, as perfect for a nice movie date at home, to be seen with somebody you want to make out with afterwards, who also can't stand to watch anything with Jennifer Aniston in it.

Three (3) very lucky winners will receive a copy of the Greenberg soundtrack sampler, which includes six new songs by James Murphy (whose band LCD Soundsystem scores the film).

To enter, email contest@greencine.com and include your name, email address, mailing address, and, if you're a GreenCine member, your username in the email, and "Greenberg" in the subject header. Entries without all this information will not be considered. (You will not be added to a mailing list!). One winner will be selected at random from all valid entries. The deadline to enter is March 29. Winners will be notified by e-mail and announced in future editions of the GreenCine Dispatch newsletter.

See the official trailer here.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ****

Wild Rumpus

There seems to be some question as to exactly who this film is intended for. Based on Maurice Sendak's classic 1963 children's book, Where the Wild Things Are [Blu-ray] isn't exactly for children (except for the most mature children). It's also not quite mature enough for adults (except for the most arrested adults). But what I love about the film is that director Spike Jonze and co-writer Dave Eggers, as well as producer Sendak, have made a film for themselves. It's something that they themselves would perhaps like to see, and that is an all-too-rare quality in the ever-increasing business of making movies. The filmmakers are not concerned with selling "wild things" toys at fast-food restaurants; they merely have an interesting idea that they would like to try out, just to see how it looks.

The movie gives Max a more complex home life. He's lonely and unbearably sad; his older sister (Pepita Emmerichs) is becoming more interested in going out with boys, and his mother (Catherine Keener) is a working, single mom with a boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo, briefly) that Max understandably does not like. So the night Max wears his wolf suit, and after he shouts "I'll eat you up," he runs out the door and into the woods, and there finds the boat that will take him to the place where the wild things are. He meets Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini), who is perhaps the neediest and loneliest of the wild things. When we first see Carol, he is involved in something peculiar; he's destroying all the wild things' individual nests because he wants them all to live together. (The little nests are keeping them all apart.) It's an interesting idea, this destructive behavior, which has as its ultimate goal something whole -- even if the goal is probably unattainable.

Max becomes king and we meet the other wild things: Judith (voiced by Catherine O'Hara) and Ira (voiced by Forest Whitaker) are in love; Judith is a loudmouth troublemaker with a cynical streak, and Ira adores her. Alexander (voiced by Paul Dano) is a smaller goat-like thing who never gets the attention he wants. Douglas (Chris Cooper) is the practical one who usually sides with Carol. The Bull (Michael Berry Jr.) is a mostly silent presence who watches the new King Max carefully. Finally, we meet K.W. (voiced by Six Feet Under's Lauren Ambrose). Like Max's sister, she has begun to find acceptance from friends outsider her family circle. One of the best scenes has the wild things embarking on a dirt clod fight, but the dividing of teams and the ambush attacks eventually wind up in arguing, rather than bonding.

The movie runs with the idea of imperfect family units, even if the screenplay itself doesn't quite feel fully formed. A scene with a bitter science teacher explaining the eventual death of the sun is played for dark laughs, and doesn't seem to go anywhere. And Eggers slips in a few Eggers-style one-liners that stick out from the rest of the film. But most of the dialogue feels loose and low-key, and it's wonderfully surprising and disorienting to see these monstrosities behaving exactly like people, with a minimum of growling or hysterical, animal-like behavior. (In one scene, Ira lets slip that he's a "lucky man.") There's nothing over-the-top here, and the characters refreshingly do not feel like over-eager puppies.

Likewise, Jonze's gorgeous, hand-held camerawork (shot by Lance Acord, who has done many of Jonze's and Sofia Coppola's films) emphasizes and flattens the planes of reality; we can clearly see that Max is on the same ground with the wild things, and they are on the same ground with him. (The great visual effects appear to utilize people in wild thing suits, with computer animated faces for more complex performances.) The talented singer Karen O. -- from the band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- provides some moody warbling on the soundtrack, accompanied by a lovely, dreamy score by Carter Burwell.

It's important to remember that Sendak's book, though it is a beloved classic, is mainly about imagination, breaking the rules and having fun, and with the exception of a few extra themes and some dangling scenes, Jonze and Eggers have done the same thing with their movie. Like the book, it's more nonsense than sense, though it's rooted more in sadness and in acting out than in anything else. But the movie understands that, with a little imagination, sadness, too, can pass.

The Wild Things Blu-Ray Details: Warner Home Video's Blu-Ray come with a new 23-minute short, Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or There Must Be More to Life, based on another Sendak story. That's the highlight; there's no commentary track, but several other short featurettes are consistently amusing and unique, including an on-set prank and the absurd difficulty of filming a dog running and barking at the same time. The BR video transfer is fine, but frankly not as gorgeous as it was in the theater.

Reviewer: James van Maanen

Two of the three movies considered here have already been made available on DVD some years back, though in lesser manifestations than the excellent new Criterion Collection transfers in the three-disc Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy. Made in the mid-1940s within three years of each other, each film has its own separate time frame, plot(s) and characters. You can watch them individually with no problem, but seeing them one after another provides a different context that, I think, strengthens the entire experience.

The shining star of this threesome and Roberto Rossellini’s most successful combination of in-your-face realism, documentary and drama (which came to be known as neo-realism, a term that is now somewhat disputed), Rome Open City has the most successful rendering of professional actors (Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi, among others) with non-professionals into one amazing ensemble that brings to life – alternately wild and shocking, sad and moving -- Italy under the Nazis.

Here Rossellini has a fine script by Sergio Amidei that offers layered characterization, smart dialog, brisk pacing and scene after scene that sizzles with surprise, suspense and even humor. The director was not afraid to offend, and this remains one of his great strengths, as he did this not do this merely to give offense but to bring the kind of reality heretofore unseen to his mix. Without giving away plot secrets, I’ll just say that this director’s view is often and rightfully dark. The shock and loss you may feel as you view the film now must have hit audiences of the late 1940s tenfold.

The transfer I saw prior to the new Criterion version was not the best by a long shot, and so seeing the film a second time seemed in some way like a “first.” If you’ve never seen Rome Open City, you’re unlikely to get a better version than this. If you’ve seen only the earlier one, do yourself a favor and watch it again.

PAISAN (1946, 126 minutes)

Rating (out of 5): ***½

The raison d’ être of the new collection is this second film, formerly unavailable on DVD, at least in its full-length version, and here given a wonderfully vivid Criterion transfer. Featuring six episodes that offer foreign soldiers, Italian partisans and locals interacting in ways quite different from one locale to the next, Paisan (a term that which means someone who hails from the same village or town as you) slowly leads us from southern to northern Italy.

In the first encounter, a Sicilian girl must guide U.S. soldiers over treacherous terrain, as language and the lack of it, not to mention courtesy and understanding, becomes spectacularly vital. Part Two pairs a black MP with an orphaned Italian boy in Naples, opening both their eyes a little wider, with the view being darker than one of them can tolerate. The third section offers a love story (of sorts) in Rome and is probably the most conventionally successful tale, leaving a particularly sad, wartime after-taste.

Love leads the fourth episode, too, as a fellow in Florence tries to reach his family via an almost impossible route, accompanied by a British nurse trying to find her partisan lover. This suspenseful, action-filled sequence also offers up some gorgeous architectural visuals. A mountain monastery is the setting for the penultimate tale in which three chaplains (yup: a Catholic, a Protestant and a Jew) arrive to seek food and shelter. Interesting, if awfully stagy, conversations ensue. In the final and in some ways strongest section, the Po Valley and River house the action, as US soldiers and Italian partisans fight the Germans. The scene of a very young child wandering amidst the corpses of his village is indelible, and the finale is quietly devastating.

Using a mix of professionals but mostly amateurs, Rossellini performs his usual feat of combining the two surprisingly well. Yet the film remains an uneasy mix of documentary style and narrative pull, with neither completely successful though consistently interesting enough to hold our attention for over two hours. As usual in movies of this time period, the music is so insistent as to drown out much else. Viewers today simply have to clench their teeth (and ears) and bear it.

What ensures the film’s success is Rossellini’s ability to pack in so much human behavior, good to bad, stupid to wise, and much in between -- giving us a view of wartime, now history, that simply did not exist before he brought it to the screen. The filmmaker does not sugar-coat, and this must have been a shock to audiences at the time. The film bombed upon its release in its home country. It took France to properly herald it. Another interesting note: Federico Fellini collaborated on this screenplay and served as one of the two assistant directors on the film.

GERMANY YEAR ZERO (1948, 73 minutes)

Rating (out of 5): **½

Recommended, I would think, more to “completist” fans of Roberto Rossellini than to everyday moviegoers, Germany Year Zero is an odd little film detailing the dreadful days of Germany just after WWII. Early on, there is enough exposition to choke the proverbial horse--and nearly as much sermonizing. Add a musical score that lets almost no moment get by merely on its own quiet merit, and you have a fiasco in the making. And yet: Rossellini's sense of justice, love for humanity and skill at neo-realism almost takes the movie into decent territory. It helps that it’s short, too.

The film centers on a German family in which the older son served Hitler’s military with perhaps undue (or maybe just typical) passion and commitment and is thus in hiding. The younger son, of elementary school age, tries to hold things together when nobody has enough to eat or the necessary medical assistance. His attempts include selling bootlegged Hitler speeches for a former teacher who clearly has eyes (and hands and lips) for the kid. Things go from bad to -- this being Rossellini -- worst.

The major bonus of this new Criterion Collection transfer, in addition to its high visual quality, is that is brings German voices to the soundtrack. The earlier rendition I saw offered the same actors dubbed into Italian with English subtitles. The Italian spoken -- so different from the German language -- made for a bizarre soundtrack, adding yet another level of unreality to the whole enterprise. I like the work of this director, so despite the film's many flaws, I'm glad to have seen it again. Tamp down your expectations, and you may enjoy it more than I.

EXTRAS:
Rating (out of 5): ****

As usual with Criterion, if you watch everything included on all three discs, plan to spend a full weekend with only minimal sleep and food. Among the choice items is a different interview with Rossellini scholar Adriano Aprà (on each disc) who talks smartly about the three films. We see Rossellini himself in his introduction to Paisan with students and faculty at Rice University. On the Germany Year Zero disc, the Taviani brothers discuss Rossellini’s influence on their own work. On the Rome Open City disc, scholar Mark Shiel’s visual essay "Rossellini and the City" shows us the filmmaker’s use of urban landscape in his War Trilogy; and there is also a worthy commentary over the film by film scholar Peter Bondanella.

See a trailer here.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

Up to now, I've not been an enormous fan of the animation technique known as claymation. Of course I've loved the Wallace & Gromit stuff, but beyond that, not a whole lot has appealed. Now that I've seen $9.99, the relatively new (2008) animated film from director/co-adapter Tatia Rosenthal and Israeli writer Etgar Keret, all that has changed. This 78-minute, Australian/Israeli co-production seems a perfect fit for the claymation process. With its rough edges and let-the-seams-show animation, the look compliments Keret's characters -- slightly weird, off-kilter, and other-worldly -- to a "t." (The characters' voices belong to some of Australia's finest actors: Geoffrey Rush, Anthony LaPaglia, Claudia Karvan and Barry Otto.)

A homeless fellow accosts a man leaving for his morning work with unpredictable results. So begins a roundelay of connections & events that take in several fractured "families" (interestingly, these are made up of males only; the moms/wives are gone). There is also a young man, his fiancé and a trio of tiny intruders; and that supermodel and her new boyfriend who works as a re-possesser and is the older son of one of the aforementioned families.

Keret's subjects include human connection and the meaning of life -- no small potatoes in the theme category -- and while these have been done to death already, the writer finds some new wrinkles to explore and Rosenthal's animation helps him do it with fantasy and reality, the real and the surreal coexisting side by side. (Keret's surreally funny screenplay for Wristcutters: A Love Story was based on one of his short stories, and he also directed the odd and affecting film Jellyfish.)

In addition to the claymation figures, Rosenthal and her crew have devised some wonderful, small scale models that serve as sets and contrast exquisitely with the figures in the foreground (the cheesecake in the photo at bottom looks good enough to eat). The angles she shoots from cover the beautiful, amusing and dynamic, and her views of the apartment building by day or night are exquisite.

The film's title -- $9.99 -- refers to the price of a book that promises the meaning of life that one of our young protagonists purchases and then, as usual, receives offers of more things to buy. Sounds like your typical advertising ploy? But wait: Sometimes what you see is what you get. You simply have to learn how to use it.

Available now on DVD, $9.99 is a small, precise movie that keeps opening up into something that finally compares to little else I've seen.

Reviewer: Steve Dollar
Rating (out of 5): ****

If Kathryn Bigelow succeeds in winning an Oscar for best director next Sunday, which many pundits (including this one) anticipate, it will strike a revolutionary blow in the Hollywood Gender Wars: The 57-year-old action specialist will become the first woman ever to take home a Miniature Gold Bald Man for a job that's as male-dominated as the U.S. military once was.

It's not a complete novelty to have been nominated. Lina Wertmüller (Seven Beauties) in 1976, Jane Campion (The Piano) in 1993, and Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation) in 2003, managed it. And she's hardly a shoo-in, what with ex-hubby James Cameron (the 27-D, future-of-all-media, aggro-mythic Avatar) and Lee Daniels (left-field ridiculous phenom Precious), who could score a coup of his own as the first black (though hardly the first gay) man to win as best director. Anything could happen, and it probably will. But with its truckload of preliminary awards and eight additional Academy Award nominations (from best picture to sound editing), there's little doubt that The Hurt Locker had made its impact, and (no pun intended) blown up Bigelow's career at the very stage it might have begun a premature fade-out.

Perhaps as significantly, in zeitgest-y terms, this is the movie that finally makes a compelling and credible narrative feature of the nearly decade-long Iraqi War. The debacle has been a boon for documentarians, who rushed in where network news outfits feared to tread, telling stories the mainstream American media was too compromised to risk telling (No End in Sight, Taxi to the Dark Side, hell even Heavy Metal in Baghdad, among many notable efforts). Yet, attempts at fictionalizing such recent history for the screen have usually been hobbled by knee-jerk politics and tear-jerk dynamics.

But anyone can immediately zero in on the core dynamic. Renner's bomb junkie is the classic "rock star," juiced on his own Ninja-like cool when it comes to reckless engagement with improvised explosive devices. He's not only hooked on the adrenalin rush, he's practically a fetishist – a distant cousin to James Spader's collision obsessive in David Cronenberg's Crash. Mackie, who's seen his previous team leader go down in a lethal rain of shrapnel when everyone was being extremely paranoid (as opposed to normal paranoid), understandably views the new dude as a dangerous freak who's going to get everyone blown up in the waning days of their tour of duty.

And yet, he also marvels, and the crucible of combat, with its endless stretches of boredom and unpredictable jolts of sudden death, forges a bond amid all the inevitable love/hate. Although, sorry, this is no Swayze-Keanu bromance a la Point Break. Bigelow strictly avoids any pop hooks, whether actual musical references (Renner cranks a little metal, but that's about it) or dialogue snippets begging to go viral (a staple of the Vietnam War movie cycle, from Robert Duvall's "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" speech in Apocalypse Now to the "me so horny" come hither of Full Metal Jacket).

Despite the presumed apolitical posture, the film would be just another exceptionally well-staged war movie without the smog of wartime debate hanging over it. Though it indulges in caricatures, such as an overzealous colonel (David Morse, with full Strangelove-ian brio) and a feckless Army shrink, and, of course, various innocents who get blown up, it requires our own need to get at some kind of truth about the situation as a dramatic license.

Bigelow's masterful hand at triangulating the tension and release of an action sequence does most of the rest. These scenes (bomb defusions, desert ambushes) have a brutal immediacy that is often breathlessly balanced against the Tums-chewing anxiety of the suspended moment. Even if Renner's character remains as much a cipher as a serial killer, she gets us behind his eyes and into his nervous system, and pretty soon we don't care if this is a "newsy" film soaked in the stink of gunpowder and cold sweat, we're just cocked, locked and ready to rock.

That element, and a heartbreaking coda, lost in a supermarket back in the American heartland, constitutes the film's "truth." Whether Bigelow wins an Oscar or not, her film contributes more to our grasp of this totally fucked historical moment than a shelf of socially conscious fictional and non-fictional movies that have tried to sort out Iraq.

Awards are icing on a highly explosive cake.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): *****

Of all the comedians and comedy filmmakers who tried to make the switch to serious stuff, Leo McCarey (1896-1969) was perhaps the most graceful. McCarey started out in the silent era as one of the original creative forces behind Laurel & Hardy. In the sound era, he directed the best Marx Brothers movie, Duck Soup (1933), the Charles Laughton comedy classic Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), and an entertaining Harold Lloyd picture, The Milky Way (1936). In 1937, he made the screwball comedy classic The Awful Truth and helped make Cary Grant a star. Incredibly, he won an Oscar for Best Director for that film, but when he accepted the statue, he gratefully thanked the Academy and then added: "You gave it to me for the wrong picture."

He was talking about Make Way for Tomorrow, which was his first real transition to drama. He went on to great success and more Oscars for films like Love Affair (1939), Going My Way (1944), The Bells of St. Mary's (1945) and An Affair to Remember (1957), but Make Way for Tomorrow remained his personal favorite. It has been very nearly a "lost" film for years. Hardly anyone saw it upon its release, and it has never -- to the best of my knowledge -- turned up on VHS or laserdisc or DVD until now. This week the Criterion Collection releases it in a gorgeous DVD package worthy of the film itself.

Of course, the parents quickly make nuisances of themselves in their children's homes. "Bark" imagines he can get a job and start over with a new place to live, but George soon comes to realize that moving his mother into a home for the aged is the only answer. The sequence in which he tries to tell her -- and she tries to spare his dignity -- is one of the most heartbreaking (and gloriously subtle) ever filmed. Meanwhile, "Bark" gets sick and it is decided that he will move out to California to stay with the fifth child, a sister we never see.

"Bark" and Lucy are reunited for one evening in the city before they are to be separated, and here McCarey buoys the film with an almost joyous half hour. In this sequence, the Coopers finally find their place. Several strangers treat them with a kindness that their own children cannot muster. He realizes that the old couple is tenderly, genuinely in love, which may have perhaps been the hardest thing of all for American audiences to contemplate. (Isn't love only for the young?) In one scene, "Bark" tries to kiss his wife, but she refuses, too shy; she looks over her shoulder at the camera, the audience, watching. It's perhaps the most overt example of how McCarey brings the audience inside his films, rather than preaching to them or claiming to be superior to them.

The movie ends with a whimper, without hope or sadness, and just basic, sad acceptance (it looks forward to Yasujro Ozu's Tokyo Story). Indeed, the entire movie is made without sentiment or even blame. Clint Eastwood touched upon this issue in Gran Torino, but paints the offspring as ungrateful brats. Here, the grown children come across as entirely human, dealing with an impossible issue and coping the best they can. McCarey creates an impossibly delicate balance here, finding drama and compassion in individual everyday moments, rather than constantly foreshadowing to some terrible conclusion. It's almost realistic, or as realistic as a 1930s Hollywood studio production can get.

This leads us to the question of the film's disappearance. It's very easy to jump to the defense of a "lost" film like this one and blame the cowardly people who did not have the strength to see it or appreciate it, but that's too easy. It's also too easy to suggest that, if more people saw this movie, the problem of the aged would be solved. No, this is a troubling issue for any of us, and it's asking a lot to get people to see a movie about it, when they'd much rather forget their troubles. Let's just say that, in calling Make Way for Tomorrow a masterpiece, we can also call it a dear movie, a wonderful movie, a refreshing movie, or an honest movie. Maybe those terms will make it a bit more appealing.

Criterion's beautiful, much-appreciated new DVD comes with a 20-minute interview with Bogdanovich, a 20-minute interview with critic Gary Giddins, and a liner notes booklet with essays by critic Tag Gallagher and filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier, and an excerpt from film scholar Robin Wood's 1998 piece "Leo McCarey and Family Values."

Criterion trailer for Make Way For Tomorrow.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Based on David Peace's novel, which is itself [loosely] based on the true story of Brian Clough's quite doomed 44-day stint as manager in 1974 of the then reigning champions of English football Leeds United, The Damned United is both a sport film and a character study and succeeds pretty damned well at both.

Different audiences will have varying levels of appreciation for the film; clearly, football/soccer fans will have higher regard for it though it is not simply a film about sport but a film about male relationships, both friend and professional, and about the damage rendered by the male ego. It is a most lovingly portrayed period piece, capturing the 60s and 70s United Kingdom with bang on accuracy. Damned United screenwriter Peter Morgan (the gifted Oscar winner behind The Queen and Frost/Nixon) also does a smart job of reducing the book's back and forth, almost subconscious (look up other ways of saying this) meandering style into a more cohesive shorthand -- while still maintaining the novel's chronological jumps.  These flashes backward and forward make the narrative more interesting than it might have been had it stayed  on a steady line through Clough's difficult, short period as Leeds manager.

It also should be noted that Timothy Spall, forever doomed to be an underrated character actor, or "that bloke from that Mike Leigh movie," more than holds his own with Sheen on screen. The droop-faced Spall plays Clough's longtime sharp-minded and level-headed right-hand man Peter Taylor, whom a lot of people considered to be a major reason that Clough got as far as he did.  Their eventual falling out due to a disagreement over their career paths forms the major spine of the film -- as important as the story of Clough's rivalry with Don Revie. Morgan and Hooper smartly realize that the friendship is more interesting and painful than the story of the two enemies.  Where the film fudges on reality (spoiler alert of sorts: but while it has them eventually coming reconciling at the end, in real life their rift was not repaired by the time Peter Taylor passed away in 1990 -- though Clough and his family attended the funeral. Still, hard to blame the film for making that choice. Their fantasy is much more satisfying than the sadder reality.)

Colm Meaney is quite fine as the arrogant, veteran manager whose incredibly huge shoes Clough has to fill and Jim Broadbent is at his broadbentiest playing put-upon Derby County owner Sam Longson.  Also notable is Stephen Graham, a recognizable, short-statured actor (so disturbing in This is England), who looks about as spot-on as Leeds captain Billy Bremner as any capable actor could possibly look. And Graham captures his taciturn quiet stubborness quite well, his chippy on the field style and his cool surface with rage boiling underneath off the field.

I think even more than the Leeds years I enjoyed the period where Clough built the ramshackle Derby County team (both the stadium/pitch, and the team itself, were rotting). That part of the story is one of those getting the band/team back together sequences that I find irresistible, and the meetings between his Derby team and Revie's famous, more supported Leeds squad are memorable, indeed. (One odd sequence shows Clough unable to watch his own team playing, either out of superstition and/or nerves, and we becomes as tense and in the dark as he is. It's not your typical way of showing a climactic sports match but it works because you're in Clough's point of view.)

And the soccer -- sorry, football, for those in the UK -- scenes they do depict, whether practice scenes or actual matches, are expertly captured. From the mud and muck in a rainy Derby field to a disastrous Leeds match, you get enough of a taste of the sport to get the sense of the players and the teams' growth (or lack of it).

Something about Damned United keeps it from being an utter classic -- whether it's the schizophrenic nature of the story that makes it hard to connect with, or frustration with Clough's choices, true though they may be -- but despite these things I have to say that it is quite likely one of the better films about the world's most popular sport. This may not be high praise given the lack of a wide array of choices in that arena, but it's undeniably about as good as we've gotten. As a soccer film, it's in the championship division if not quite premier league.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ****

Georges Méliès (1861-1938) may well have been just another magician, but one day in 1895, he attended a showing of films by the Lumière brothers. A year later, he had built his own movie studio and began shooting his own films. Between 1896 and 1913, he shot over 500 films, ranging from one-minute to "epics" running more than a half hour. His work covers an amazing array of genres. Many of his films are simple magic tricks, incorporating cutting and double-exposures to create fantastic illusions; his timing and knowledge of the camera are still amazing. Some of them get into more complicated stories of fantasy, using dreams and nightmares, and a few strove toward high art. He is often credited with making the first horror films, and his ten-minute sci-fi effort Le Voyage dans la lune (1902), a.k.a. A Trip to the Moon, is currently his best-known film. The shot of the rocketship crashing into the moon's eye is surely one of cinema's greatest indelible images. (Most people will recognize the picture, even if they don't know the film.)

Some of these dramatic epics, The Christmas Angel (1904) in particular, don't move very well in a narrative sense, and Méliès intended for live readers to narrate along with the films. Flicker Alley provides this original narration both in French and in English. The set also includes Under the Seas (1907), with some interesting camera effects, and an early chiller called The Haunted Castle (1896). There are some fragments here as well, such as the interesting-looking Robinson Crusoe (1902), as well as a couple of Méliès imitations that audiences and historians often mistook for the real thing.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

Troubled Water has already won two of Norway's official film awards for 2007 (it was nominated for six), as well as walking away with the Audience Award at the 2008 Hamptons International Film Festival -- which I find a little surprising. Audience awards almost always go to feel-good movies (even sometimes to good feel-good movies) but Troubled Water is too complicated a film to fit easily into that category. It deals with victims and perpetrators who are themselves victims, slowly piecing together past and present as it keeps looping back and in on itself -- in order that we might better understand the complexity of the situation and the pain that drives two of the leading characters forward.

Organ music is also a highlight of the film (one character is particularly adept at it and we hear a lovely organ rendition of "Bridge Over Troubled Water"). The cast of a half-dozen lead players (two of which are shown above and two more below) and as many again in supporting roles is -- to a man, woman and child -- excellent. Above everything, however, hovers the pain that comes with the loss of a child. This persists, as we learn in one superb scene set around a restaurant dinner table, no matter how that loss occurs. Troubled Water, from Film Movement, comes complete with the usual short subject that appears on all of FM's titles - a Serbo-Croation film called "The Kolaborator," which is well worth a watch.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): **½

It's interesting how well the time travel subgenre goes with romance (the equivalent of a ticking clock and a beating heart?), and equally interesting to note how many of them adopt the same soft, goopy look and tone, re: Somewhere in Time (1980), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), and The Lake House (2006).

The Time Traveler's Wife, recently released on DVD, was adapted from Audrey Niffenegger by Bruce Joel Rubin, who is perhaps better known for writing Ghost and Jacob's Ladder (both 1990). Ghost was another supernatural romance, but one that benefited from a fun, comic-relief supporting character (Whoopi Goldberg) as well as some steamy moments like the famous pottery wheel/Righteous Brothers sequence. Jacob's Ladder was a twisty, disconcerting nightmare that refused to stay narratively put.

Eric Bana plays Henry, who will suddenly and occasionally travel through time. He never knows when this is going to happen, where he'll appear, or how long the trip will last, but he sticks to the high points of his own life. He cannot change anything in the past or in the future. When he arrives, he arrives naked, so he has perfected lock-picking skills to procure clothes. The movie doesn't explain this phenomenon, except to say that it's genetic.

Henry often meets Clare (McAdams) during his travels. He sees her at all different ages, and she falls in love with him. When they first meet as consenting adults, he has never seen her before, but she knows him well. He's a bit weirded out by her, but it must be destiny! The story gets more complicated as they marry and try to have children, and tragedy -- cruelly foreshadowed by Henry's time traveling -- lies waiting around every corner.

One of the best and warmest scenes unfolds as Henry disappears just as he's about to walk down the aisle at his own wedding. Fortunately, a nice situation presents itself. It's just too bad that the movie didn't take advantage of the scene to present its other side later down the timeline, but the movie, directed by Robert Schwentke (Flightplan), seems unconcerned with nerdy sci-fi stuff like time paradoxes or logic.

Ron Livingston (Office Space) plays Henry's best friend, who apparently has a bit of a thing for Clare, though this never goes anywhere. Henry's father (Arliss Howard) is shown to be deeply depressed and overly distraught in one scene, but is apparently cured for good after Henry's wedding. And character actor Stephen Tobolowsky (Groundhog Day, Memento) shows up as a geneticist who studies Henry's problem, but aside from a couple of awkward meetings, nothing much happens.

On the plus side, cutting down on all these subplots and other details tightens the focus on the romance; it's a total immersion into the couple's life together. But while this may be enough for weepie junkies, and the idea is interesting, why not some occasional levity, or some rest breaks for the rest of us? Why not a little rhythm to go with this ticking clock?

The DVD from New Line comes with a bunch of trailers and a pretty standard-issue little making-of featurette (22 minutes), though I suppose it's nice to know that McAdams was a longtime fan of the book and was genuinely thrilled to be able to be in the movie.