The Help

Emma Stone stars as “Skeeter” Phelan, a young white woman who moves back to her Mississippi home after graduating from college. The setting is the early 1960’s and Skeeter isn’t interested in just finding a husband, as is expected of her by her childhood friends and her parents. Instead, she wants to apply her education to become a writer. Skeeter has an idea to publish a book that tells the stories of “the help,” the African American women who served as housekeepers and surrogate mothers in all of the households of her small home town. Skeeter approaches Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis), a middle aged maid who’s spent her life raising white kids. Aibileen’s only son was recently killed and she’s done with being a proper servant.  Skeeter and Aibileen begin work on the book. However, both realize that they’ll need more than one voice to make the book authentic. Aibileen brings in her best friend, Minny (a priceless Octavia Spence), to contribute and the project takes off.

Simultaneously to delving into the lives of Aibileen and Minny, we get a healthy dose of southern hospitality through the characters of Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Elizabeth (Ahna O’Reilly), two young mothers who employ the help and carry on the racist attitudes of their parents. Hilly has no redeeming values and Howard plays the film’s primary villain to a T. Besides the black help, Hilly’s primary target of nastiness is Celia (this year’s breakout star, Jessica Chastain), a woman from the wrong side of the tracks.

The Help is a film that should have broad appeal to men and women alike. This isn’t a chick flick, even though the predominant characters are all female. This is a period drama that deals with racism, friendship and most importantly, family. The cast is exemplary, with Stone proving that Easy A, the comedy she headlined, was no fluke and that this young actress (she’s just 23) is a star, fully capable of carrying a movie on her shoulders. In this film, she shares the load with Davis, who turns in one of this year’s best performances. The actress brings so much to Aibileen -she owns this role – that if anyone could play this part I don’t know who it would be. And Spence, one of those great character actresses who often get overlooked, finally receives a meaty role that shows off her greatness. One of the highlights of the film are the intimate scenes between Davis and Spence, when their characters are in the kitchen gossiping. The laughter and quiet remarks they share are so authentic; you’ll imagine that these two actresses have been long time friends just like their characters.

Exclusive Blu-ray Bonus Features: “The Making of “The Help:” From Friendship To Film,” “In Their Own Words: A Tribute To The Maids Of Mississippi,” and Three deleted scenes with introductions by Director Tate Taylor.
DVD Bonus Features: Two deleted scenes with introductions by Director Tate Taylor and “The Living Proof” music video by Mary J. Blige

A completely different film about family, but once just as effective as The Help is the sports drama, Warrior. When I was in college, a film like Warrior would come on and I’d probably watch it just because I was hanging with all of my bros. A film like this would surprise me, because of its authenticity and power, and my reaction would be, “That’s a great fucking movie.”  Yes, Warrior is a great fucking movie. You expect it to be a muscleheaded dumb jock film about MMA competition, but it’s so much more.

Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton, two rising stars that you’ll hear so much more about in 2012 (when they appear in the tent pole pictures The Dark Knight Rises and The Great Gatsby, respectively) star as brothers Tommy (Hardy) and Brendan (Edgerton). The English born Hardy and Australian Edgerton each speak with perfect Pennsylvania accents in this story that finds the estranged siblings in dire situations and both separately training for a $5 Million purse in a winner take all mixed martial arts tournament.

War veteran Tommy returns from Iraq under mysterious circumstances and seeks out his father, Paddy (Nick Nolte, at his best), in Pittsburgh to train him for this competition. Tommy hates his dad, a recovering alcoholic whose years of physical abuse drove away Tommy and his mother. Tommy needs a trainer and he knows no one better than the man he despises. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, Brendan is a retired MMA fighter scraping out a living as a high school physics teacher. Beloved by his students, this good man is married to a strong, beautiful woman (a great Jennifer Morrison) and he has three young daughters. Sadly, one of his girls needed heart surgery and this medical procedure, along with a bad home loan, has his family on the brink of bankruptcy. To make ends meet, he enters fights that take place in the parking lots of strip joints. He wins each night, but these brawls cost him his job. Brendan returns to his old trainer, Frank (Frank Grillo) to help him train for more street fights to make ends meet. Eventually, Brendan finds a way to enter the big money competition and the two brothers are on a collision course for a showdown in a cage fight.

I’m not going to begin to say that Warrior doesn’t follow the structure of most underdog sports films. Rocky immediately leaps to mind when you watch any movie that deals with guys, fists and Philly. But director/writer Gavin O’Connor (who also directed the underdog Olympic film, Miracle) uses those film clichés as a starting point for his powerful film that contains more than a couple of emotional wallops. You may recognize where the film is going, but this is a movie that’s worth seeing because of the superior acting by everyone in it. Hardy and Edgerton are near perfect, Nolte is never better, Morrison adds strength and compassion to a character that could have been one-note, and Frank Grillo takes the role of the “trainer” and makes him three dimensional and compassionate.

The fight sequences are expertly directed and the editing team keeps the pace moving forward. It says a lot that when you know where a story is headed, you still jump up and cheer when your guy wins his battle. Friday Night Lights had the ability to create this kind of reaction in its audience and Warrior does it just as well. I’m sure that this film isn’t even being mentioned by anyone now that awards are being handed out, but anyone who wants to watch fine acting and directing should consider Warrior during this holiday season.

The Blu-ray and DVD each have special features that include audio commentary, a “making of” documentary, mixed martial arts strategy, a gag reel, deleted scene and more!  The Blu-ray Disc also offers an Enhanced Viewing Mode for the feature film, taking fans to the next level of entertainment.

X-Men: First Class carried through on the promise (threat?) to go back to the franchise that was dulled severely by Brett Ratner’s third installment, and tarnished even more by a loud, brainless Wolverine spinoff. With original X-director Bryan Singer back on as an executive producer, the need to tell a good story beyond lots of flashy effects (of which there were many) was put at the forefront again where it belonged. What hurt the movie a bit, on two fronts, was that there was an overall brutality to it that was off-putting. Even some of the “good guys” came off like terrible people, deserving of the bigotry and shunning that is the crux of X-Men’s allegorical construction. It’s easy to forgive a good bad guy, but hard to forgive good guys that are jerks.

The other thing that held the movie back was that even though it was necessarily set in the early-1960’s, and the production design kept insisting it was so, the viewer never could truly feel the time period was correct. It felt like a post-Matrix movie, not post-James Bond like the EPKs kept insisting. These were things that kept coming to my mind even though I was enjoying the movie for what it was. It’s what they call the “Uncanny Valley” effect that the viewer knows what is a real person and what is a computer animation even if it is stunningly realized in CG. When the visual effects in First Class take over, it’s hard to go with the story being set in the handmade, sometimes clunky Sixties anymore. It looks like the times but feels far too new, go-go boots and mutton chops be damned.

Yet I will say that, of the comic book flicks of 2011, X-Men: First Class stands out above the equally anachronistic Captain America, the formulaic Thor, and the just-plain-awful-and-ugly Green Lantern. It’s a good movie that could have been better if, only once in a while, the makers would have forsaken the mouse for the practical effect.

So that brings us to Fox’s other preboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and of properties that could have been resurrected for new audiences, this is one that felt the most necessary, the most “right.” Leaving the property to the infinitely silly Tim Burton revamp seemed like such a waste of good assets, and so this story regarding the first of the sentient apes Caesar, played so well in a motion capture performance by the talented Andy Serkis, works on that fundamental story level. That story, of how a pharmaceutical organization embarks on a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease, uses lab animal simians as test subjects, and winds up playing god and setting the wheels in motion for their evolution, and man’s fall from grace, is smart and plays into the mythology novelist Pierre Boulle, original screenwriter Rod Serling, and director Franklin Schaffner conceived with the first Apes.

Had the filmmakers of today relied on such a strong foundation and rejected easy outs, my review would not now be heading into negative territory, but here we go. The script becomes so leaden with in-jokes and nods to the original story, those in the know can’t help but fall off the haycart to start looking for storyline easter eggs. Also, one of the “baddies” who is just more greedy and officious than pure evil, is Idris Elba who has a British accent. This convention, even though Elba is a very good actor, does some damage to the factor of suspension of disbelief. These can be glossed over when the character of Caesar takes the spotlight, but only to a point.

See, here’s the thing. Even though Serkis is giving his all for this part, and the interactions between him and the lead, played by James Franco, are alternately heartwarming and heartbreaking, I as the viewer could never get past the feeling I was watching a special effect. Forget the Blu-ray’s special features that tout the effects as revolutionary and spellbinding. They’re actually some of the worst effects I’ve seen in years.

The awfulness is that, one assumes, because the movie makers were shooting for that 3-D sweet spot, there’s a lot of separation between the digital apes and the live action actors. With the glasses, sure they may pop from the screen but even without, they are uncomfortably apart from the narrative. At times, the apes feel like Colorforms stuck to the TV screen, floating above the story world and never living in it.

Moreover, the designs of the apes range from indefinably simian but not sentient to weird, hairy children that have no monkey-like attributes otherwise. Seldom if ever does effects powerhouse WETA Workshop strike that middle path where you believe these creatures are a) actually a part of the movie, b) the next evolutionary phase inflicted by the ‘disease’ of a radically altered consciousness, or c) not just there to add 3-D jolts. Again, were it not for Serkis’ very heartfelt performance, there would be nothing to recommend these characters for.

And that’s pretty sad, really. The story is full of potential and hits it on a number of occasions. That the demise of humanity as dominant species was caused by the liberties they take on the natural world is a very Twilight Zone/Serling-esque P.O.V. and makes the conceptual aspirations of Rise of the Planet of the Apes perfectly aligned with the series it hopes to meld with. It was our species’ hubris that was our undoing, as well as a kneeling before some technological deity and not considering what such a pact entailed. The story gets that. The realization, however, misses it entirely and hits that digital effect chord way too hard and way too often.

Would the movie have been better with real apes? Well sure, but that defeats the point of the story of animal exploitation. What about putting people in ape suits? Yeah, but nobody would have taken it seriously; not by today’s audience standards. No, what was really necessary for both Rise of the Planet of the Apes and X-Men: First Class was that they tried a little harder. Both movies were on the right track but both got caught up with what the digital Buddha could give them, and not remembering that you also have to work harder to earn it.

Timberlake’s Dylan begins the film breaking up with his girlfriend (a hilarious Emma Stone) outside of a John Mayer concert. He’s not too torn up because he has a great job running an up an coming website in L.A. Dylan does such fine work that he’s recruited by Kunis’s Jamie, a headhunter based in New York. She thinks he’d be perfect to run the art department of GQ. Upon his arrival to the Big Apple, Jamie takes Dylan around New York to show him how great living there can be. The two hit it off immediately and when Dylan takes the job (like you knew he would) Jamie becomes his best friend. She’s single, too, by the way, after a terrible break up. One night, while hanging out, making fun a a romantic comedy starring Jason Segal and Rashinda Jones, Jamie laments that she misses having sex, but she doesn’t miss the baggage that comes with having a boyfriend. Dylan devises a plan: They should become sex buddies with no emotional commitment. Friends with benefits.

After an amusing “first time,” which includes Dylan singing Semisonic’s “Closing Time,” (and confusing the band with Third Eye Blind), we have a montage of sex in all sorts of places. Glick uses this opportunity to showcase the smoking bodies of his two leads. Kunis and Timberlake must have spent as much time naked on the set as Michael Fassbender did on Shame. Everything is going great, but we know their fool proof plan is destined to fail because a) Woody Harrelson’s character tells us so and b) because Friends With Benefits has already fallen into the formula.

Jamie decides that they should starting dating other people and she falls for a pediatric cancer doctor (Bryan Greenburg). Dylan starts to get jealous. Fortunately, when the doctor breaks Jamie’s heart, Dylan is on hand to lift her up. He invites her to L.A. for the 4th of July to meet his family. At this point in the film, Richard Jenkins appears as Dylan’s father, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. I must point out that Jenkins is great. I wish more of the movie had to do with Dylan’s family and that Jenkins had more to do.  His speech to Dylan near the end of the movie is just so wonderful. During the visit, Dylan is speaking to his sister (Jenna Elfman) and Jamie overhears a portion of a conversation. She mistakes what he’s saying (that Jamie is too fucked up for him to like her) as full truth. It’s a misunderstanding that leads to the separation of the two love birds. Didn’t see that one coming.

Actually, you can see everything that’s coming, which would have been fine IF Glick and his fellow screenwriters didn’t make a point to ridicule romantic comedies and how they’re all so similar. If you’re going to make fun of the genre, you better make damn sure that you do something different, otherwise you set yourself up to he type of criticism I’m writing right now. How does the film end? Do I really need to tell you? If you like rom coms, and I happen to love them, then you know were the film is headed as soon as Kunis flees L.A.

There are ways that the film could have been tightened and made a stronger film. Cutting back on the montages would have been one. More Richard Jenkins would have been another. Also, it seems like  when Timberlake and Kunis veered from the script their playfulness together was very engaging. Too often in the film it feels as if they were trapped by the script and couldn’t act more naturally. The commentary by Glick, Timberlake and Kunis certainly indicates that they all enjoyed making the film together, and the outtakes imply a fun film shoot. Unfortunately, none of that translates on to the screen.

Additional bonus features on the Blu-ray include deleted scenes, a pop up trivia track, a behind the scenes featurette, and a featurette about choreographing a flash mob (which plays an important role int the plot of the movie).

Everyman, Rudd, grew his hair long and didn’t shave so that he could fully inhabit the role of Ned, a free spirit, organic farmer whose utmost trust in all people gets him thrown in jail. When a uniformed police office approaches Ned asking to buy some pot, Ned complies because he believes the cop is actually suffering. That’s where the idiot part comes in. Four months later, Ned is released from prison on good behavior and returns to find that his girlfriend (Kathryn Hahn) has shacked up with another hippie dude (a funny T.J. Miller) and taken custody of their dog, Willie Nelson. Believing that if he raises $500 bucks he’ll be able to move into a goat barn, Ned seeks help from his family.

Ned first goes to live with his mom (Shirley Knight), but quickly realizes that he can’t stay with her. He proceeds to live with each of his three sisters, creating havoc in each home he moves into. Sister Liz is a stay at home mom married to Dylan, a documentary filmmaker (Steve Coogan at his deuchiest). Dylan reluctantly hires his brother-in-law as an assistant, until Ned uncovers a secret Dylan had been keeping from Liz. Next, Ned goes to live with Miranda (Banks), a burgeoning journalist for Vanity Fair. Just as Miranda is about to get her big break, Ned won’t compromise his values to help her out. So, Ned winds up crashing with younger sister, Natalie (Deschanel), a lesbian living with her girlfriend (Rashinda Jones) in big loft. As you would expect, Ned blunders that situation, as well.

Meanwhile, Ned has regular visits with his parole officer (Sterling K. Brown) and continued run-in’s with his ex-girlfriend and the new guy in her life. As the director, Jesse Peretz, described the film in the behind the scenes featurette, Our Idiot Brother is like a road movie, except that the characters never leave New York. Indeed, the film is very episodic, allowing ample time for Rudd to interact with all of the fine actors included in the movie (his scenes with Adam Scott are particularly good).  However, because of the sharpness of the script, written by husband and wife, Evgenia Peretz and David Schisgall, and the nice performances by all involved, this setup didn’t bother me.

As I said in the outset, this isn’t a laugh fest like we’ve come to expect from most of these actors, Rudd in particular. There are plenty of funny moments; but overall, Our Idiot Brother is a sweet little film with some real human moments in it, reminding me of some of Hal Ashby’s fine movies. Ned is such an appealing, good man, the kind of honest person we wish the whole world could be like, that it’s impossible not to be won over by his goofiness and naiveté.

The Blu-ray has very minimal special features, deleted scenes and a making of feature. The commentary is insightful and worth checking out.

Set in 1979, the story takes place in an small Ohio steel town, where the factory is in the middle of town and everyone either works at the steel mill or has a family member who does. In a heartbreaking opening, we meet young Joe Lamb (newcomer, Joel Courtney), whose mother has just been buried after dying in an accident at the factory. The 14-year-old boy sits outside in the snow, idly swinging and clutching a locket that belonged to his mother. As Michael Giacchino’s tender score plays through the scene, we meet Joe’s best friends, the one’s who will help him heal. We also meet his father, Deputy Jackson Lamb, played by Friday Night Light’s Kyle Chandler with his usual excellence. A drunk man named Louis Danard (Ron Eldard) arrives at the wake and is promptly hauled off to jail by Jackson. The Deputy is better equipped to handle lawbreakers than the emotions of his own son. Having grown up in a small Ohio town where adult men never expressed their emotions, I felt that Jackson’s actions rang true.

After the wake, the action jumps ahead four months, the end of the school year. As we get into the meat of the story, we get to know Joe’s friends. Charles (Riley Griffiths) is a budding filmmaker who is directing a zombie movie he hopes to enter in the Cleveland Film Festival. Being a typical kid director, he’s enlisted all of his friends to be his cast and crew. Preston (Zach Mills) is the most intelligent of the group, Martin (Gabriel Basso) is the dopey hunk with a pension for tears and nervous vomiting, and Cary (a hilarious and scene stealing Ryan Lee) is the smartass, pyromaniac. Needing a female for his story in order to provide emotional depth, Charles enlists Alice Danard, Louis’s daughter. She is played by the exceptional, Elle Fanning.

The four guys sneak out one night and are picked up by Alice, who’s stolen her dad’s car. They head out to an old depot to shoot a pivotal scene in Charles’s film.After Alice nails her rehearsal and steals each boy’s heart, they begin to film, just as a train is about to pass by. What happens next is one of the most thrilling, intense crash sequences in modern film. On the big screen it had audiences curled in their seats. On the small screen, it’s just as intense and scary. At this point, Abrams introduces the sci-fi element of his story and, well, things start to get a little wonky. Just one example is the possibility of any person, especially a pivotal character in the film, surviving a head on collision between the speeding train and the pickup truck he was driving. Moreover, he comes away from the accident relatively unscathed. Granted, this is a movie, but come on guys!

Following the train crash, mysterious events begin to unfold around town. Dogs begin running away (a plot point that’s never clearly explained), engines are ripped out of cars, and people begin to disappear, in the night by a humongous monster that’s seen only in glimpses. Abrams wisely uses Spielberg’s JAWS tactic throughout the film. When the military arrives to claim responsibility for the cargo on the crashed train, we all know that some kind of cover up is taking place and that these government men (led by a menacing Noah Emmerich) are up to no good. Eventually, the boys uncover the truth behind the train crash and the monster that escaped from it. At the same time, Jackson and Louis go on their own mission to save their kids.

Mixed in with all of the action and suspense is the remarkable coming of age story about Joe and Alice, who find comm on ground in the fact that they’re both being raised by single fathers (Alice’s mother skipped town). I can’t emphasize more how wonderful Courtney is in Super 8, most significantly in the scenes he shares with the more experienced Fanning. Together, these two actors capture the excitement and the heartbreak of being on the cusp of adulthood. It’s not just in the way they deliver the lines, but in the expressions they share and the quiet reactions during the most poignant scenes. For all the great action pieces in Super 8 that Abrams pulls off so well, he really has to be commended for his direction in the dramatic scenes.

What he also captures well is the camaraderie between the four boys. In nearly each scene they share, there is an authenticity that places those moments in a pantheon of great friend movies like Stand By Me. Abrams should seriously consider ditching sci-fi and thrillers for his next project and focus on a straight forward drama or dramedy. Watching Courtney, Griffiths, Mills and Basso interact, especially during the fantastic diner scene, took me back to my own childhood and the way my buddies and I would burn each other any chance we got, but we always had each others back in a pinch.

I’ve seen the film twice now, once in the theater and once at home. In the theater, with surround sound and a screen the size of my house, it was easy to get caught up in the spectacle of Super 8 and overlook some of its several shortcomings. Upon second view, the alien adventure is lacking in many ways, with some plot holes and an creature that betrays the film’s overall love of 1980’s aesthetic (when the main character discusses learning special effect from the Dick Smith Makeup Book and Steven Spielberg, the guy who build a life size T-Rex for Jurassic Park, is the executive producer, Abrams and company should have at least built a close up puppet of their overly complicated alien monster). That said, Super 8 is worthwhile viewing simply to experience the adventures of the kids. In watching that portion of the film, it’s hard not to wish that Abrams original intentions for the characters had been the only story.

The bonus features are plentiful on the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack. There are behind the scenes featurettes about the genesis of the film, the search and casting of unknown teen actors, a nice piece about the scoring of the film, and or course, plenty of deleted and extended scenes. In each of these bonus features, Abrams comes off as one of the most likable and generous filmmakers working today. Because of that, I hope he really does make a film that breaks away from genres. If he decides to follow a career path like his idol, Steven Spielberg, I don’t think it’s too much of a reach that this talented director will someday helm his own Schindler’s List or Saving Private Ryan.

There was some trepidation earlier this year when the beloved brand announced a Hulu Plus channel online–was Criterion throwing aside us collectors for streaming? Nope, just advertising the spectacularly produced musculature of its physical media (the Hulu versions seem barren of supplements) and perhaps previewing titles to come. (Is Criterion putting out, so to speak, David Hamilton softcore from the 80s? The stuff I watched on Cinemax after midnight is now art? Really? When?) The discs have continued as usual…and next year begins with the “biggest” release of them all, as Criterion looses its DVD and Blu-ray of Godzilla (1954) on the world.

Meanwhile, here’s eleven 2011 releases worth adding to your shopping bag before today (that’s right, today) rolls over into Tuesday and you have to wait until 2012 for another round of bargain shopping.

Broadcast News (1987). As James L. Brooks’ lousy How Do You Know was tanking in theaters last winter the movie that is line-for-line his best resurfaced, rescuing it from a prior poor DVD transfer. (Which reminds me that Holly Hunter’s other 1987 classic, Raising Arizona, is also finally available in a version that does it justice.) I hadn’t seen it in years until I tuned into a Fox Movie Channel telecast midway and was hooked–such a vibrant, pointed screenplay, with valid (and funny) insights into work, romance, and personal and professional ethics, and beautifully acted down to the smallest bit part. It also has a look to it, too, and a shape, something Brooks isn’t given proper credit for, maybe because his later films are slovenly by comparison. I thought, “Criterion should really do this”–and lo and behold, it has. The TV news business has splintered but Broadcast News holds up.

Best Bonus. We hear a lot from and about Brooks in a commentary track and documentary. I liked the concise interview with Susan Zirinsky, the model for Hunter’s character.

Carlos (2010). The film ranked No. 5 on my Top 10 list last year. Carlos had the makings of a top-flight Criterion disc and so it is. Over five-and-a-half enthralling hours Olivier Assayas brings the pathetic phenomenon of the “world’s most fearsome terrorist” to life–hustler, ringleader, menace, media sensation, failure, scapegoat, fat, crashing bore. The whole sad carnival come to vivid life. From prison Carlos threatened reprisals upon the filmmakers but the dustbin of history failed to stir; the production is a potent reminder of that particular flashpoint.

Best Bonus. Lots here on two discs, notably a French program about “the Jackal” from 1997 and another documentary about the Carlos-sanctioned bombing of the Maison de France in West Berlin in 1983, featuring interviews with two of the terrorist’s wives.

Cul-de-sac (1966). Roman Polanksi has a new movie out, Carnage. And via Criterion he also has this old movie out, which, given its relative obscurity over the decades, is practically a new one, too. It’s an absurdist fusion of noir, crime, and horror movies, wherein a mismatched couple (Donald Pleasence and Francois Dorleac) are unsettled by a pair of gangsters who intrude upon their castle home in Northern England. A movie where Pleasence gets dolled up in drag is indefinable, but, if you admire Polanski’s films, unmissable. (It’s said to be a favorite of Chinatown star Jack Nicholson’s.)

Best Bonus. A retrospective piece about the difficult location shoot, including the circumstances that led to the filming of one seven-and-a-half-minute continuous take, a record at that time.

Harakiri (1962). I love samurai movies, and so does Criterion, which has a few outstanding ones (like The Seven Samurai and Samurai Rebellion) in the collection. This is an unusually introspective one, however, from director Masaki Kobayashi (The Human Condition), with Tatsuya Nakadai (Ran) as a ronin without illusions, recounting his bleak story as he insists upon death by seppuku. The action is as much internal as external as Kobayashi strikes a blow at the rotten feudal system.

Best Bonus. A 2005 interview with the great Nakadai, who turns 80 next year.

Insignificance (1985). The buzz this week is about Michelle Williams playing Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn. Theresa Russell did the same thing, sort of, in one of her unclassifiable movies with ex-husband Nicolas Roeg (The Man Who Fell to Earth). Based on a play by Terry Johnson (most recently the Tony-winning director of the recent revival of La Cage aux Folles), it gathers the Actress (Russell), the Ballplayer (Gary Busey), the Professor (Michael Emil), and the Senator (Tony Curtis) in a hotel room for a series of seriocomic confrontations, all hinged on the theory of relativity. An Oscar season vehicle it’s not, though there is food for thought, some of it quite tasty, here.

Best Bonus. Roeg and producer Jeremy Thomas, the go-to guy for so many challenging films then, explain themselves in a video interview.

Kes (1969). My movie group showed this a few years back. We may need to show it again, as this fine Criterion presentation uplifts the whole movie, which had fallen into disrepair over the decades. The story of a 15-year-old miner’s son and his spiritually revivifying relationship with a wild kestrel is the cornerstone of British filmmaker Ken Loach’s sterling reputation (though we here across the pond need to have the earlier Poor Cow, with Terence Stamp, more available, and that is a suggestion) and a worthwhile viewing experience even under only adequate conditions. The Blu-ray restores the rough beauty of Chris Menges’ cinematography, which is reason enough for a purchase.

Best Bonus. Loach, Menges, producer Tony Garnett, and the film’s star, David Bradley (who auditioned for the free food and drink the production was offering) are all interviewed. But the most gratifying extra is an earlier film of Loach’s, the homelessness drama Cathy Come Home (1966).

The Killing (1956). This hardboiled noir detailing a racetrack robbery put Stanley Kubrick on the map, and filmmakers still quote from it. (The ironic outcome of the big heist is practically a cliche now, not that the ingenious direction won’t grab you.) It’s an essential, pure and simple, with one of the great lowlife casts, including the aspirational Sterling Hayden (later of Dr. Strangelove fame) and perennial inhabitants of the bottom depths Elisha Cook, Jr., Marie Windsor, and Timothy Carey.

Best Bonus. Another whole movie, Kubrick’s earlier, uneven Killer’s Kiss (1955), of interest for signs of the leap forward just ahead.

Leon Morin, Priest (1961). Best known here for outstanding existential gangster films like Le Samourai (1967), Jean-Pierre Melville had a few posthumous surprises for us Americans. One was the great French Resistance thriller Army of Shadows (1969), which topped a number of Top 10 lists, including my own, when it was finally shown here in 2006. Criterion adds to its Melville holdings with this Resistance-set drama, a smash hit in France that fills a gap in his resume here. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Emmanuelle Riva, the respective stars of the New Wave sensations Breathless and Hiroshima Mon Amour, play the more traditional roles of a charismatic priest and an atheist widow, but their relationship proves anything but conventional in a turbulent era.

Best Bonus. Melville expert Ginette Vincendeau returns to discuss selected scenes, as deleted scenes offer tantalizing glimpses of the three-hour epic that the director whittled away at to arrive at this version.

Solaris (1972). Science fiction meets “slow cinema” in what has become a litmus test for art, aridity, and pretension in the movies. A lot of “cultural vegetables” are stringier than this Soviet specimen, however, which overflows with stimulating ideas adapted from Stanislaw Lem. It may be the best place to start an odyssey through the films of Andrei Tarkovsky–that is, if you’re man enough. (Watching Steven Soderbergh’s Cliff Notes remake of 2002 to prepare is cheating.) My advice is to forget the advance word and open yourself up to the experience, then, if you dare, move on to Stalker and the rest. You have nothing to lose except your assumptions.

Best Bonus. For gluttons of punishment (I kid) there are 25 minutes worth of deleted and alternate scenes. Tarkovsky died in 1986 but a number of his colleagues survive; I found Eduard Artemyev’s overview of how he composed the film’s electronic score to be of particular interest.

Something Wild (1986). A shame that the archives of the Daily Northwestern don’t reach back to the prehistory of the 80s, where you’d find my (if I do say so myself) wonderful interview with filmmaker Jonathan Demme, surely one of the nicest (and most candid) people involved in the movies. Five years before the staggering success of The Silence of the Lambs he was still an outlier in Hollywood, and Something Wild (which floored me when I saw it, as much as Blue Velvet that same fall) may be his best film, a flavorfully scored joyride with Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith (surely her best performance) and a few hairpin turns provided by a scary Ray Liotta. Still an unknown quantity with viewers, it’s best to see it cold, as I did. Even if it didn’t give me a chance to talk to Demme I’d still love it.

Best Bonus: Not as much here as usual, then again the movie speaks for itself. Demme and screenwriter E. Max Frye are featured in video segments. If anyone had asked I would have provided my Daily interview…

The Times of Harvey Milk (1984). If the 2008 biopic whetted your appetite to see the Oscar-winning documentary, hunger no more with this definitive presentation. Combined with some choice extras, including a piece with the makers of both films on Harvey Milk’s legacy, you get a full portrait of those heady days of promise, change, and disaster in San Francisco. It’s a landmark of its genre.

Best Bonus: The Harvey Milk recordings collected here are priceless. And there is a discussion of the trial of Milk’s killer, Dan White, that addresses the controversial “Twinkie defense.”

12 Angry Men (1957). I can’t help myself with Criterion so I went to 12. It is, however, a ringer, in that it’s not available untll Tuesday and not part of this sale. But why not treat yourself to this American classic? Do it in memory of the late Sidney Lumet, whose first feature this was in a prolific 50-year film career. He was certainly prepared, having directed much live television beforehand, and he brought that particularly density of vision to this closed but never claustrophobic courtroom drama, which, like The Killing, is far more alive visually compared to the bewhiskered, featureless disc issued by MGM at the dawn of DVD time. Starring the unimpeachable Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb; co-stars who proved themselves more than numbers in subsequent years include Martin Balsam, Jack Klugman, and E.G. Marshall. The durable material was as big a hit as ever when it became a Broadway stage play in 2004 and toured the country.

Best Bonus: Hard to pick given that the choice includes a selection of Lumet interviews and a discussion of the great cinematographer Boris Kaufman by DP John Bailey (Ordinary People) but I’m casting my vote for Reginald Rose’s original 1954 teleplay, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner (Planet of the Apes, Patton).