The Movies:
If there's one thing you can take away from the Cinema Pride Collection, it's that "gay cinema" isn't a genre. The set compiles 10 films from the MGM and Fox DVD catalogue, a number of which are quite good, and groups them together because they all touch on themes of homosexuality.

Imagine 10 random films compiled into one program because they all contain heterosexual characters. That should prepare you for this slate of emotionally draining dramas followed by absurd farces followed by unflinching depictions of brutal hate crimes and Nazi concentration camps followed by warm, fuzzy romantic comedies. Luckily, the hodgepodge includes many good to great films, and some of the lesser titles are noteworthy cultural artifacts.

The Children's Hour, William Wyler's elegant 1961 drama about two teachers (Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine) whose careers are ...Read the entire review

The Movie:
There are teenagers who rebel by skipping school and doing drugs. They get caught on the streets and returned to school. Stevie, on the other hand, gets in trouble when she tries to attend school. The teacher notices her, recognizes that she isn't enrolled and gives her the boot.

The Unpolished follows the aimless life of a 13-year-old girl growing up with drug-trafficking parents who don't give her the boundaries or order she needs. Her dad just got out of prison. Her mother just inherited a house from her parents, who were apparently strict and disapproving. Stevie's parents are the complete opposite, with no notion of order or stability. New people show up at the house randomly while others vanish with no announcement.

German director Pia Marais has crafted an observant, surprising and raw study of life outside of the societal norm, carried marvelously by y...Read the entire review

The Movie:
The Awkward Comedy Show is ostensibly a chronicle of the voices of "alternative black comedy"--idiosyncratic stand-ups who perform nerdy material outside of the mainstream. Don't run away, they're not that weird--just enough to be interesting. (Then again, maybe I'm more familiar with "alternative" stand-up than I am with whatever's popular with the kids these days...)

The movie showcases four different comedians and features host Marina Franklin, who tells a few jokes in between each set. You can't say there's no variety in the acts. At one point, the movie transitions from the hyper, constantly moving Eric Andre to the wonderfully muted Hannibal Buress. Add in the absurdity of Baron Vaughn's song about penises and lollypops and Victor Varnado's lament on forever being known as "the black albino," and you've got yourself a fun 90 minutes. None of these guys are...Read the entire review

The Movie:
The trust of a child is a delicate thing. You might have it automatically, or you might need to work your ass off to earn it. But once you have it, you could shape a person's attitude and outlook for their entire life. Sanya, the six-year-old hero of Russian writer/director Pavel Chukhraj's The Thief (Vor), wants an authoritative male to put his faith in, and so he gives it to the only one around.

Misha Filipchuk plays the boy, whose father, a World War II soldier, died before he was born. His routine life with his mother (Ekaterina Rednikova) vanishes when they meet a soldier named Toylan (Vladimir Mashkov) on the train, and mom immediately falls for him. They rent a room in a communal apartment, but it's clear that something is off.

Toylan isn't what you'd call the ideal replacement for an unknown father. He spends much of his time trying to get Sanya out of the way ...Read the entire review

The Movie:
In the United States of America, we sometimes ponder the rest of the world's views on our country. Some may not much care about them, and others even vehemently reject the idea of exploring them, but nevertheless they're there. It doesn't matter if the subject is important policies or follies like sex scandals, you can usually bet that the other countries of the world know more about the USA than we know about them.

Cristian Nemescu's California Dreamin' is a rather remarkable blend of comedy, tragedy and absurdity, a delicious stew of what America is and what it means to the people of a small, decrepit village in the Romanian country. Part of what makes the film so fascinating is that it wasn't made for Americans, to tell them what to think about their place in the world. It's about Romania's (and many other countries') relationship with America--the fantasy and the rea...Read the entire review

The Movie:
About halfway through All My Friends are Funeral Singers, the film finds its purpose. After about 30 minutes of vaguely related vignettes, some charming and some smug and clumsy, an event occurs that finally gives the film propulsion and a purpose. That's not to say that it ceases to be a loose, surreal journey through emotions and unveils a clear plot. But the characters suddenly begin to show a desperation and an urgency that makes their lives infinitely more fascinating.

Most of the characters, I should make clear, are dead. Dressed entirely in white, they live in a large, old house with a fortune teller (Angela Bettis), where they give interviews about their lives and deaths for their filmmaker ghost friend, make noisy music, and wonder if they will ever move on from their state of limbo..

Bettis plays the fortune teller, the only person who can see the ghosts, wi...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Nothing is quite as scary as nature. Villains and monsters have some sort of motivation, or at least a hunger. They can be distracted or delayed. But the north face of the Eiger mountain and the weather around it has no agenda and shows no mercy. It simply is the environment that it is. Its blizzards can emerge out of the calmest, sunniest weather, and if you're unfortunate and/or foolish enough to be caught climbing when one hits, you'll be lucky if you merely brush with death.

North Face (Nordwand in its original German title) portrays mountaineers Toni Kurz (Benno Fürmann) and Andreas Hinterstoisser's (Florian Lukas) disastrous attempt to climb one of the most treacherous faces of the Alps in 1936. It is a marvelously stressful, nerve-racking, harrowing portrayal of men clinging onto life.

The documentary Touching the Void proved that the experie...Read the entire review

The Movie:
I don't know if I've ever been as skeptical of the legitimacy of a DVD release than I was while watching You Really Got Me: The Story of The Kinks. Now, I've seen some unsanctioned documentaries on iconic bands in my time, but if the disc was commercially sold in stores and on website, I was always pretty certain that its distributer operated in within the bounds of copyright law--either by not using the band's music or by legitimately licensing what they did use.

And ABC Entertainment must have gone through the normal licensing channels when releasing this sorry excuse for a documentary. Otherwise major retailers like Amazon wouldn't stock it. DVD Talk probably wouldn't receive screeners either. But there were several reasons to suspect something shady was going on:

1. The picture quality of the footage was terrible. Like a video taped off TV. Surely if there were ri...Read the entire review

The Movie:
You can't fault Scott McGehee and David Siegel for lack of ambition. In writing and directing Uncertainty, the duo didn't merely attempt to crosscut between two simultaneous stories about the same couple of lovebirds, following two ways they could spend their Fourth of July holiday. They also tried to merge into one film a quiet drama of familial routine and an adventure with fantastical thrills. The marriage may have been as ill-fated as one between the Mantagues and the Capulets, but it also shares a reckless, often exhilarating passion.

The film starts off with a young New York City couple, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lynn Collins, as they stand on a bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn, mumbling with no conviction about what they're going to do. The prologue ends with a coin toss--she runs toward Manhattan, he toward Brooklyn, and when they get to the other s...Read the entire review

The Movie:
You can throw a load of waste into a pile and it will compost into nutrient-rich soil. Unfortunately, as DIRT! The Movie shows, that technique isn't quite as effective in filmmaking. A coincidental companion piece to 2008's Flow: For Love of Water, the documentary focuses on the soil that we take for granted, explaining how we're indebted to it and how we're destroying it with modern agricultural practices and urbanization. It is a film that is at once moving in its alarming content and frustrating in its inability to gel into into a single work.

DIRT!'s main point is that it's important to treat the soil and the earth properly because it's the key to keeping our planet and ourselves healthy. The theme is repeated too often, however, and the scatter-shot structure only engages the audience in fits and starts. Likewise, the filmmaking choices vary from c...Read the entire review

The Movie:
It says something about the confidence Serge Bozon has in his vision when, 25 minutes into his dreamy World War I film La France, his band of misfit soldiers...well...becomes a band of misfit soldiers, pulls out some instruments and launches into a musical number. On first viewing, I wondered if it was a bit late, arriving a quarter of the way into a film that made no previous announcement of its musical intentions. But as I went deeper into the film's journey of haunting memories and shocking realities, everything felt poetically perfect--the muted mood, the elliptical dialogue and yes, those unforgettable tunes.

The first song comes shortly after the film's heroine, Camille (Sylvie Testud), has finally secured a place traveling with a platoon, using the disguise of a 17-year-old boy. She left her village to find her husband after he sent her a letter telling h...Read the entire review

The Movie:
The folks at the BBC haven't done themselves any favors. By creating some of the best literary-adaptation mini-series ever, they set a high bar for themselves and continue to raise it. So when a perfectly serviceable take on Jane Austen's Emma comes along, its exquisite craftsmanship and copious charm are almost lost in the letdown of its imperfection.

Austen's classic romance focuses on Emma Woodhouse, a proper, wealthy woman who sees herself as a keen matchmaker and an all-knowing judge of where people fall on the social hierarchy. In reality, she starts off dense, judgmental, arrogant and undeserving of the interest a story hopes to generate in its protagonist. While the time the story spends with her eventually earns some empathy, the first of the series' four hours feels a bit like being stuck at a party with people you can't stand.

The role of Emma requires deli...Read the entire review

The Movie:
There's one reason most people who watch More than a Game will watch it: Lebron James. The basketball player's rise from the lowest class neighborhoods of Akron, Ohio to high school sensation to NBA superstar is as well known as the story of any athlete in the United States. But Kristopher Belman's documentary about his pre-NBA days isn't just about a boy wonder with an awesome dunk--it's about a group of friends growing up under extraordinary circumstances and struggling with the demands of growing up fast.

James played with the same three friends--Dru Joyce, Sian Cotton and Willie McGee--from the fifth grade to his high school graduation. They called themselves the "Fab Four" and all went to the same high school so they could continue to play together. (Romeo Travis later made it the Fab Five.) The same coach that put the kids together, Coach Dru Joyce (the younger Dru...Read the entire review

The Movie:
It's amazing how much some solid writing and great performances can lift a film. A few minutes into Islander, I was ready to give up on it. One of the film's early scenes continually brought me out of the moment with distracting shots and edits. Two characters watch on in close-ups that don't feel at all organic to the wide shots in rest of the scene, in which fisherman turn in their daily catch. The visuals aren't completely amateurish by any means--certain individual shots are even quite lovely--but their clunky assembly belied the film's low budget, and I prepared to suffer through an awkward 100 minutes.

But then something surprising happened. I started to become genuinely involved in the characters, their fragile natures and uncertain futures. The small Maine island community in which the film takes place came to life, as did Eben, a troubled man played by Thomas Hi...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Takita Yojiro's Depatures is the kind of film that is thoroughly pleased with itself. What is ostensibly the story of an angsty young man finding his way in life plays second cello to a jumbled collection of cheap laughs and cheap tears. In the end, it's hard to shake the impression that, with a little effort, the film could have accomplished something much more profound.

The film, which won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2009, explores the world of encoffinment, a ceremonial process of cleaning and dressing bodies before putting them in coffins. Apparently it is not very well known in Japan--but I didn't realize that while watching the film. Everyone seems to know what it is and have a strongly held opinion about it.

Daigo drops his dream of playing cello professionally when his orchestra goes bust. He responds to a job advertisement to work in "departures," which he ...Read the entire review

The Movie:
It's only while watching a Dardenne brothers film that it becomes clear how few filmmakers--even the really good ones--fully realize their characters and story. The heroine of Lorna's Silence continually surprises us with her emotions and decisions, and yet the motivations for her reactions are always clear. Likewise, the scenes used to outline the plot's progression aren't the obvious ones we've come to expect, but precisely because events unfold in unexpected ways, they have more emotional kick.

Since transitioning from documentaries to raw, naturalistic dramas in 1996, writer/directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have created a legacy of deeply human stories about mostly lower-class characters in industrial Belgium, trying to survive, live life and redeem themselves. Their latest film features the steadiest of their free-moving handheld photography, but maintains the...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Like a new interpretation of an old song, Christian Petzold's Jerichow twists a familiar tune and entrances with surprising variations. The setup recollects The Postman Always Rings Twice and Ossessione, but Petzold translates it to modern times and modifies the story's structure and essence into something fresh that's consistently compelling and suspenseful. He creates three main characters who are both mysterious and vivid, and slowly moves them toward a devastating finale.

The film's anti-hero, Thomas (Benno Fürmann) isn't a drifter, but a man cornered in the German town where grew up, imprisoned by debts and roots. The excellent opening sequence finds his mother's funeral interrupted by an angry friend and/or money-lender who seeks to confirm that Thomas has no funds with which to renovate his childhood home or begin a new life. Thomas is the quie...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Myths and legends have a way of reinventing themselves. As they travel from place to place, they're retold in new ways, with different variations and emphases that reveal as much about their teller as the characters in the story. Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues manages not only to give new perspective to the centuries-old Indian Ramayana epic, but to do so in a fun, constantly inventive way.

Made almost entirely by Paley on her Mac, the film proves that anyone with the proper skills and sensibilities can make a great-looking computer-animated feature without the mammoth staff and render farms of a Pixar production. Paley wisely avoided comparison by not trying to compete with 100-million-dollar 3D extravaganzas. Instead, she used flash to create a potpourri of style, feeding off a century of tradition to create a film entirely her own.

She repeatedly cycles through t...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Louie Psihoyos' The Cove may be the first heist film in which the heist in question is the shooting of the film itself. It is the story of documentary filmmakers who were so dedicated to exposing the truth about dophin slaughter that they were willing to risk arrest and worse to capture it on camera. The resulting film not only touches the heart, but starts the adrenaline flowing. Many big-time Hollywood directors ought to be jealous of the film's tense, thrilling action scenes.

Those same directors might find the eerie setting familiar: an apparently charming, quaint town that's hiding a big secret. Walk around and you'll see statues, mosaics, murals and other tributes to whales and dolphins. But the town is not only capturing dolphins for captivity, but slaughtering thousands of them, often selling their mercury-heavy meat in the guise of other fish.

Welcome to Taiji...Read the entire review

The Movies:
The set is officially called TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Family, but a more honest title might have been Four Family Films of Various Quality, Each About Animals. Yes, Warner Bros. has repackaged some decade-old DVDs into a new value pack, branded it with the venerable Turner Classic Movies network's trademark and declared its contents to be amongst the "greatest classic films." Now, I could go on a detour and offer an entire list of the top 10, 25 or 100 greatest classic family films, which would in turn inspire many comments about other better titles that were omitted. But let's simply accept that there are many better family films than The Incredible Mr. Limpet, Flipper, Lassie Come Home and National Velvet.

That said, the set isn't entirely without value, especially considering the low retail price for four fil...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Jennifer Phang's Half-Life wonders what it would be like if someone threw an apocalypse and nobody came. The film takes place in a world on the brink of some sort of unavoidable environmental catastrophe. Chaos could break at any moment, but in general everyone just goes about their angst-loaded lives.

Writer/director Phang can't be faulted for her lack of ambition. She intersperses multiple character arcs with fantastical animated sequences, shades of science-fiction and a tapestry of emotional misery. Unfortunately, the film inspires more admiration for its concept than its actual execution. I wanted it to work, I wanted the beautiful, scenic cinematography of fields and the roaring sun to amount to something moving. Instead, I continually found myself drawn away from its emotional center and thoroughly annoyed by the unavoidable emptiness.

The various storylines in...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Perhaps it was foolish to expect a film with the subtitle "The Island of the Pachyderms" to be anything but muddled nonsense. Perhaps it was too much to expect characters to react to the world around them and behave coherently from scene to scene. Perhaps I was simply supposed to embrace some sort of enchanted force while watching Jean-Jacque Beineix's IP5, but when characters aren't awed by the magic in front of them, it's hard for it to translate through the screen.

The title (whose Pachyderm subtitle is conspicuously missing from Cinema Libre's new DVD) refers to the tag-name of a graffiti artist and thief named Tony (Olivier Martinez), who lives in an unfashionable neighborhood of Paris and spends his days spray-painting elaborate designs on walls. He's taken under his wings a plucky poor boy named Jojo (Olivier Martinez), I guess to teach him how to be an ass.

I w...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Left Bank does just about everything a horror film ought to do, except create something truly frightening. Oh, it fills the air with a disturbing presence for some time, and continually raises the tension surrounding its mystery. Yet just when it needs to kick into high gear, it descends into convoluted confusion. It's like a delicious cake with cloying frosting.

Belgian director Pieter Van Hees skillfully sets his film in a seductive but creepy apartment complex in the film's titular Antwerp neighborhood. Marie (Eline Kuppens) finds herself under its spell after years of training to run track in the European Championship prove for naught after she collapses one day and discovers that she has nutrient deficiencies. While normally not the most social of girls, she decides to spend some time with a persistent archer from her training grounds named Bobby, whom she abruptly ...Read the entire review

The Movie:
If anyone doubts the con artist's right to the word "art," they haven't met the Brothers Bloom. When Stephen Bloom masterminds a con, he's not just thinking about how to drain money from a mark, but how to lead that sucker to a mindset in which money is no longer the issue. The perfect con, Stephen realizes at a young age, is one in which everyone gets what they want. And so he builds elaborate plots rife with motifs, literary references and thematic arcs, so he knows exactly what everyone is going to do before they know it themselves.

Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom is a movie that somehow feels as light as air while carrying considerably more heft than the average con-men movie. It has all elements of your classic con--exotic locations, convoluted plans, unexpected twists, controlled explosives and a fun look behind the smoke and mirrors. But where it really shines ...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Somewhere on the movie genre spectrum, there's a line that separates the grand epic from the particularly long road movie. The version integrale of Roselyne and the Lions falls on the road movie side of that line. It is the story of a young couple who set out to become lion tamers in the circus, but delivers a frustratingly tame experience everywhere but the lion cage.

A new Cinema Libre DVD presents the film in a nearly three-hour-long director's cut that restores Jean-Jacques Beineix's original intent. Beineix, best known for Diva (1981) and Betty Blue (1986), shows off his gift for visually immersive scenes and grand gestures. Where he falters is in crafting his characters, who lack the spark of the young dreamers they're supposed to be. I haven't seen the theatrical cut of the film, so I can't compare the two versions, but the problem lie...Read the entire review

The Movie:
The trust of a child is a delicate thing. You might have it automatically, or you might need to work your ass off to earn it. But once you have it, you could shape a person's attitude and outlook for their entire life. Sanya, the six-year-old hero of Russian writer/director Pavel Chukhraj's The Thief (Vor), wants an authoritative male to put his faith in, and so he gives it to the only one around.

Misha Filipchuk plays the boy, whose father, a World War II soldier, died before he was born. His routine life with his mother (Ekaterina Rednikova) vanishes when they meet a soldier named Toylan (Vladimir Mashkov) on the train, and mom immediately falls for him. They rent a room in a communal apartment, but it's clear that something is off.

Toylan isn't what you'd call the ideal replacement for an unknown father. He spends much of his time trying to get Sanya out of the way ...Read the entire review

The Movie:
A family with a 15-year-old daughter goes through enough strife and tension under normal circumstances. The one portrayed in The State I Am In not only has to contend with a moody girl who's suffering her first love, but with the constant fear that the law will one day find them. Yes, many of us may have thought our childhoods were lousy, but few can top being the offspring of wanted terrorists.

Jeanne (Julia Hummer) flees with her parents (Barbara Auer and Richy Müller) to one small, quiet vacation town after another. never talking to other kids and always suspicious of a conversation. While the film never explicitly states it, it can be inferred that they were members of the RAF in late 1960s Germany, and are wanted for violent acts against the state. In the film's opening scene, a young fellow named Heinrich (Bilge Bingül) introduces himself to Jeanne, and discovers...Read the entire review

The Movies:
Phil Mulloy's work exists somewhere between the realm of the scatological sophomore and the defiant artist. At any moment, the British animator can be offensive, clever, bizarre, obvious, muddled, smug, distinct, or any combination of those traits. It would be easy to brand many of his scenes as pornography if his visuals weren't so primitive and ugly that they cancel out any sense of eroticism. He makes sure you always feel uneasy and dirty, never aroused.

KimStim and Kino's (Extreme Animation) films by Phil Mulloy collects 24 of Mulloy's shorts and offers a lengthy, if incomplete, overview of his career. Mulloy's loose narratives contain satirical parables that paint a bleak picture of human nature, complete with violence, longing and, whenever possible, penises.

Mulloy's style matches his worldview well. His character design yields grotesque, simple black-and-white...Read the entire review

The Series:
There's no mistaking Pushing Daisies for any other show on TV. Every episode features new supporting characters, new locations and new mysteries, but all of them fit into creator Bryan Fuller's whimsical, playfully sideways universe. The show bundles romance and comedy with tragic undertones, and flavors it with musical numbers, synchronized swimming routines, magic tricks and murder.

The show's second--and sadly abbreviated--season features 13 episodes, each loaded with more ideas than other series turn out in a full season. By the time you finish The Complete Second Season DVD set, you'll have walked the hexagonal offices of a honey empire, covertly played poker using a Chinese restaurant's elaborate code, walked through secret passageways in a nunnery and witnessed a traveling aquatics show that actually makes a traveling aquatics show seem appealing.

Lee ...Read the entire review

The Movie:
It tells you something about a man when he can't even narrate his own story. Billy Cruddup's hero in Jesus's Son recounts his life in the same manner in which he lives it--in starts and fits. He sets up a structure only to go off on a tangent, winding deeper into the story before finally getting back to his initial point (if he gets back to it at all). He fails to include key moments, like when he finds out out his girlfriend is pregnant, and instead mentions them later in passing while talking about another scene.

The character, identified only as FH in reference to the derisive nickname by which everyone calls him, drifts through the world in the same way he drifts through his voice-over. He and his girlfriend are heroine addicts, but in FH's case it seems more like a symptom of aimlessness than the cause of it. Jesus' Son, then, operates as a sort of collage ...Read the entire review

The Movie:
You bought your tickets to Cancun and supplied yourself with sunscreen, drinking money, condoms and everything else needed for a fun vacation. But as you head to the taxi, you remember the one thing you forgot to cram into your over-stuffed suitcase: your three-year-old.

The DVD Travel with Kids - Mexico: The Yucatan Mayan Riviera was designed to help you avoid such travel missteps. We'd all like to write off our vacations off as a business expense, but "the Roberts family" (directors Jeremy and Carrie Simmons and their kids) found a way to do it. The family documents their trip to the Yucatan and identifies the potential pitfalls of traveling with restless, messy children.

The concept certainly sounds useful, but the movie spends too much time stating the obvious and not enough unravelling the real joys of travel or seeking out hidden gems and surprises. It h...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Last Year at Marienbad is oft described as a great cinematic puzzle, but that's not quite right. Puzzles are meant to be solved, whereas Alain Resnais's masterpiece is meant to wrap itself around your consciousness, touch your emotions and leave you moved and mystified. Whether you can satisfactorily decipher the film's story or map-out its timeline is of little concern.

Finally receiving the quality U.S. DVD release it deserves (thanks, Criterion Collection), the film holds the same power to haunt and mesmerize audiences that it possessed when it premiered in 1961. It also holds the power to divide them. While many once-divisive films from its era now sit securely on their canonical thrones, Marienbad continues to draw debate not only between those who reco...Read the entire review

The Movie:
For some people, getting out of bed is an accomplishment. Sure, it doesn't reflect well on her mothering skills when Florence can't get her daughter to school on time, but the way she lives, it's a wonder Eugenia ever makes it to school at all. All the credit, however, is owed to the plucky young girl.

The curious, smart, free-spirited nine-year old played by Lucia Snieg is the driving energy of Kept and Dreamless, a sometimes false but nevertheless fascinating film that studies the lives of a mother and daughter who've swapped the traditional roles of who nurtures who. Young Snieg gives a great young performance as a girl who is smart and knows the kind of care she needs and isn't getting, but is still very much a child.

Eugenia doesn't expect much--and usually gets less--from her coke-addled mother, played by Vera Fogwill, who also wrote the screenplay and co-directe...Read the entire review

The Movie:
The Perfume of Yvonne is a burst of nostalgia, sexual ecstasy, young love, longing and uncertainty, bottled into celluloid by director Patrice Leconte. Above all else, the film succeeds in creating the feel of memories, of a magic, glorified, fleeting period in a young man's life. Whether it ends in a satisfying way, whether the audience or the characters learn what they need to learn--if that's even possible--is beyond the point.

Hippolyte Giradot stars as Victor Chmara, a wealthy young count who lives a life of unproductive leisure. His life changes at a resort off Lake Geneva, when he meets and falls in love with Yvonne, an actress who just starred in her first film. Played by the radiant Sandra Majani in her only film role, Yvonne is both an object of desire and her own woman, devoted more to whims and adventures than to any plans for her future.

Leconte, who adap...Read the entire review

The Movies:
No one shoots a scene quite like Philippe Garrel. The director always captures his characters' turmoil, conflicts and beauty in the most peculiar, surprising ways. Where we expect an establishing shot to set up a scene, he might provide a tight composition and only reveal more if naturally inclined to do so. Maybe he won't need to pan or cut, and we'll study one person's face for the whole scene, never seeing the other party to the conversation.

Despite more than 40 years spent creating indelible moments of cinema, DVDs of the Frenchman's work have been woefully lacking. Zeitgeist Films and The Film Desk look to remedy that, however, with Philippe Garrel X 2, a set featuring two intensely personal films from the second half of the director's career: 1991's I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar and 1989's Emergency Kisses.

Guitar, which tops the bi...Read the entire review