Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code was the pass-along book when I vacationed with my in-laws a few years back. It’s a good read for lazy summer days: its historical puzzles are intriguing (if farfetched), “Magdalene theory” makes for good conversation over glasses of white wine, and there are pictures. But I figured it would make for a terrible movie, and I was right. The novel is all exposition and supposition, with paper-thin characters sitting around rooms and chatting esoterically for chapters at a time. I can’t argue with its $758 million worldwide gross in the summer of 2006, except to say that I wasn’t the only one fidgeting in my seat; Angels & Demons mustered $485 million this summer, a sizable drop-off. It didn’t have a prayer of getting my $12.50.

In one of the DVD extras director Ron Howard says the “earnest” quality of Brown’s books attracted him. Giving credit where credit is due he and Da Vinci Code screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (an Oscar winner for Howard’s A Beautiful Mind, a Razzie nominee for another ampersand credit, Batman & Robin) decided to make things less earnest this time, bringing in blockbuster scribe David Koepp (Jurassic Park, etc.) to loosen up the “static” (Howard’s word) character of ace symbologist Robert Langdon and keep the storyline to a swifter-moving timetable.

By and large the fixes work. The plot is set in the here and now, minus draggy digressions to the Knights Templar. The characters go outdoors to stretch their legs in Rome (or, rather, a clever facsimile of the Eternal City, with location footage seamlessly matched to grand sets and CGI). The book Angels & Demons preceded The Da Vinci Code, but the movie is a followup, so sins can be erased—Tom Hanks, thanks be to God, has lost his mullet. And it’s a few minutes shorter, another blessing.

But the curse of implausibility is not so easily removed. The new film finds Langdon up his code-cracking eyeballs as a papal enclave convenes to replace a deceased “progressive” pope. Meanwhile—there are a lot of “meanwhiles” in scripts like this—a vial of antimatter has been stolen from the European Organization of Nuclear Research (CERN). The apparent culprits are the zealous Illuminati, a long-dormant secret society who have kidnapped the four “preferiti” (the most likely candidates for pope) and are making good on their plan to kill one an hour in the run-up to nuking St. Peter’s Square at a midnight deadline. Enter Langdon, who has to sort out the angels (like church official Ewan McGregor and CERN scientist Ayelet Zurer) from the demons (scowling Swiss Guardsman Stellan Skarsgard and officious cardinal Armin Mueller-Stahl among them) while piecing together clues from drawn from Galileo, Roman statuary and monuments, and the elements.

These Brown adaptations are like the National Treasure pictures for grown-ups, and assuming the world’s still here in 2012 I figure we’ll be getting a film of The Lost Symbol to round out a trilogy. I don’t mind that the plots don’t hold water (Brown is a better researcher than writer, though a very selective one) as long as a certain pace is maintained, which Angels & Demons does. In so doing, however, it tags every thriller cliché there is, then takes a crazy third act leap to catch us off guard. The big finish is solemnly hilarious…trouble is, it doesn’t much involve Hanks, who again takes a backseat to the ancient clues and conspiracy theories. Rather than take charge of the movie, he hosts it, as if his secret desire is to join the ranks of Mark Harmon and David Caruso in CBS mystery potboilers. It’s not the greatest use of A-list star power. (And once more he doesn’t even get to first base with the girl. Perhaps the neutered-seeming Langdon has a secret desire?)

This skeptic was satisfied with the single-disc theatrical edition DVD of Angels & Demons but true believers will want the Blu-ray, which includes an eight-minutes-longer (if by no means better) extended cut. Extras on my runt version are an hour’s worth of making-of featurettes that are as slickly produced as the film, including an interesting session about antimatter from CERN—which, unlike the Vatican, is happy for the plug.

“Gomorrah is frightening in the best sense: Moral,” I wrote. Garrone’s adaptation of a searing bestseller leaves the capos and capers behind to concentrate on how syndicate control pervades Italian society at every level, and reaches outward. It tells five stories of pitiless corruption, with the only exposition coming afterwards. I likened it to a “waking nightmare” for the middlemen, workers, and impressionable kids caught in the crossfire, and I left the theater uneasy.

The film comes to DVD in a standard two-disc package or as a Blu-ray. In standard format the first disc is dedicated to the movie, with a new HD digital transfer that squeezes every seamy drop of life from Marco Onorato’s widescreen framing, a theatrical trailer, and new subtitles. Complementing the feature is a thorough booklet essay by Chuck Stephens that explores the history of the Camorra system, the seismic impact of the book (whose author, Roberto Saviano, has been obliged to live under police protection since its publication), and how Garrone makes use of Neapolitan architecture and plays off the works of Federico Fellini, Francesco Rosi, and Michelangelo Antonioni.

Garrone and Saviano are spotlighted in separate interviews on the second disc, the director expanding upon his vision of the film (and the problems of location shooting) and the writer filling in the details about the syndicate—the impression of a vise tightening a little harder on Italy each year if unmistakable. Chances are though that the first supplement you’ll want to dip into once you’ve seen the film is the interview with actor Toni Servillo, who plays Franco, the mob’s toxic waste management specialist. Franco is a charming, insinuating bastard, and Servillo, star of the recent political expose Il Divo, makes the most of the breakthrough part. He, Gianfelice Imparato (who plays the middleman, Don Ciro), and Salvatore Cantalupo (heartbreaking as Pasquale, the tailor) are interviewed for an additional segment on actors.

An excellent hour-long documentary captures, on the run, the filming of the five stories, with six deleted scenes offered as an additional extra. The exemplary presentation adds considerable value to the unsettling, unshakable Gomorrah—and I’d like to see Criterion take on the IFC-distributed In the Loop and Antichrist besides.

Interspersed between the songs are excerpts from interviews with Motown artists. These include Mike Douglas speaking with Smokey Robinson, Motown-founder Berry Gordy on a local Detroit show called Teen Town, and some thoroughly cringe-worthy shtick featuring Lloyd Thaxton with the Temptations. Bonus features include previously unseen footage from the Motown Picnic, circa 1970. Basically it’s the company’s home movies. There are a couple of poignant shots of a young Michael Jackson in this footage. The complete Gordy Teen Town interview is here, as is a 1959 featurette about what was going on in the world in the year that Motown was founded. A Maypo commercial and a trailer for a Brigitte Bardot film are fun, but that is no reason to buy this DVD. Sadly, the 1959 newsreel is the most interesting thing in this package. The accompanying booklet features a nice essay by Stu Hackel.

The music on Motown: The DVD is, of course, above reproach. That said, this disc is as close to non-essential as you can get. Compare it to a really well done documentary on a related subject, Standing In the Shadows of Motown, and it falls far short. While some of the vintage footage is interesting, the whole thing has the feeling of something that was thrown together to clean out some leftovers in Universal’s vault.

Outside of Butch Cassidy and The Sting, Redford has always been one of the most introspective stars—not for him the more declarative, chest-beating style of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, or other actors of his remarkable generation. He’s inwards, not outwards. Cautious—and, in the eyes of some critics, vague, or timid. (Brad Pitt, the star of Redford’s A River Runs Through It and co-star in Spy Game, was once called “the new Robert Redford,” but it’s as difficult to imagine Redford appearing in True Romance, Twelve Monkeys, and Inglourious Basterds as it is thinking of Pitt for The Way We Were, The Great Gatsby, or Out of Africa.) But these qualities are all pluses for the character of skier David Chappellet, who takes his place on the U.S. Ski Team, but is far from a team player.

Truth is, the close-to-unlikable Chappellet is a bit of a prick, whose dedication to his ego rivals his commitment to his sport. As the team heads to Europe he’s thoughtless to his teammates, and the women who drift through his life (principally Camilla Sparv, who in real life was a former wife of Paramount Pictures chief Robert Evans, and in this film is a challenge to any athlete’s “self-denial”). The head coach, well-played as always by Gene Hackman, is irritated by his attitude, as he tries to keep the team together and rattles his tin cup looking for funding. Plot is minimal in a script written by novelist James Salter—the only hint we get at what drives, and also deforms, the restless, self-defensive Chappellet is a tense visit with his father (non-professional Walter Stroud), a flinty Coloradoan who grouses that he doesn’t get the point of winning without compensation.

Redford picked TV director Michael Ritchie to make his feature debut with Downhill Racer, a labor of love whose production struggles, he says in a supplementary interview, inspired him to found the Sundance Institute. Ritchie favored an off-the-cuff, almost documentary approach to the movie, which withholds the standard comforts of story and third-act redemption in favor of savory found moments—Redford improvises a memorable scene of relationship meltdown with Sparv, and I laughed out loud when a TV sports program alighted on a skier who looked like Redford and misidentified him as Chappellet, temporarily confusing Chappellet (and me). This freewheeling approach bugged the film’s European crew (who found the notion of an American downhill champ unbelievable, given Europe’s dominance in the Olympic event) but covers a lot of ground more briskly than a more orthodox movie could, and Ritchie and Redford refined it for their great collaboration on 1972’s The Candidate.

Buried in its original release, Downhill Racer doesn’t hold together as tightly as The Candidate (this is the first time I’ve watched the movie all the way through) but the new disc makes a strong case for it. The only thing better than DP Brian Probyn’s exciting filming of the races would be that same camerawork in Imax, and the anamorphic widescreen image captures it perfectly. (Between this and the underrated Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, 1969 was a great year for ski movies.)

Redford, a good storyteller, and Salter discuss how the film came together in the main featurette. Redford discusses the original director, Roman Polanski, how the movie’s uncertain ending contrasts with the happy one he insisted on for The Natural, a downbeat book, and putting the production together while auditioning for a Dino De Laurentiis remake of Roman Holiday—a musical remake, which surely would have changed the course of cinema had it been made. Editor Richard Harris, production manager Walter Coblenz, and former downhill skier Joe Jay Jalbert (who was paid $500 for each stunt fall) reminisce about the nuts and bolts of the film in separate video interviews. A fine booklet essay by Variety’s chief critic, Todd McCarthy, adds further context.

Ritchie went on to direct The Candidate; a terrific movie about competition, Smile (1975); and his biggest sports-themed hit, The Bad News Bears (1976). He died in 2001, but contributes via audio excerpts from a AFI panel taped in 1977. After that his career went, well, downhill, with 1985’s Fletch and the more characteristic HBO movie The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom (1993) the only real standouts. The new disc revisits several careers on the upswing.

On the Criterion website, hear Redford discuss Downhill Racer’s icy test screening in Santa Barbara.

For more movie reviews and essays, visit Between Productions.

The German title of the film translates to The Sky over Berlin. In the sky are angels—not heavenly emissaries, but secular beings, who, like Superman, eavesdrop on our babble of chatter, complaints, and regrets, and swoop in to lend a non-judgmental, comforting, and invisible hand. (Composer Jurgen Knieper used cellos, rather than harps, to make the angels less god-like.) The story, largely improvised by Wenders but with voiceover narration, poetry, and dialogue by the Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke, concerns two angels, Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander). Cassiel hangs back, observing and recording human behavior, and finds a good subject in the aged storyteller Homer (played by the veteran character actor Curt Bois, familiar from Casablanca, in his last role). Damiel, meanwhile, is drawn to direct human experience, including an afterlife-changing encounter on a film set with the American actor Peter Falk, who plays himself. He finds himself longing to leave behind the monochrome world of the angels once he meets the beguiling but lonely trapeze artist Marion (played by Wenders’ then-girlfriend, Solveig Donmartin).

Wings of Desire, which won Wenders the best director prize at Cannes, was an arthouse smash in 1987, but I can’t say I was crazy about it. Back then I preferred films with meatier storylines; I wasn’t into films that primarily gave off a vibe. And I still don’t like it as much as the films that established Wenders as a ranking member, along with Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, of the revolutionary German cinema of the 70s, like Alice in the Cities (1974) and The American Friend (1977). A movie with angels, circuses, and an improvised script can’t help but be whimsical, or fall in love with itself, and Wings of Desire is guilty on both counts.

But my older, (perhaps) less rigorous and more sentimental self saw it anew this time, largely because of what wasn’t there, and I don’t mean the angels. Cassiel and Homer spend a good part of their time in the ruins of Potsdamer Platz, near the Berlin Wall; it’s there where Damiel decides to shuck off his wings and become human, and when that happens the previously black-and-white image (B/W is how angels perceive color) pops into natural hues. On the West Berlin side the Wall, as shown in the movie, was anything but gray—over the years it had become a kind of Cold War objet d’art, with graffiti and murals. It’s fascinating to see it again, and indeed the whole area, a barren place that’s gone multinational over the last two decades. Many reasons have been cited for the Wall’s fall, but I’d like to think this gentle-natured film did its part in chipping away at its invulnerability, a demolition the filmmakers didn’t anticipate (Mikhail Gorbachev appeared in Wenders’ 1993 sequel, Faraway, So Close!, which was as muddled as the reunified Germany in those early days).

The supplements call attention to the other great achievement of Wings of Desire, its extraordinary, mood-shifting cinematography, for which the great DP Henri Alekan used the same filter (made from his grandmother’s silk stockings) that he had employed since before the fantastic Beauty and the Beast in 1946. The film is available, and looks sharp, as a standard DVD, but I imagine the Blu-ray will have the edge in clarity.

Carried over from a 2004 MGM edition of the film is a Wenders commentary, with droll contributions from Falk, and a documentary, “The Angels Among Us,” which magnanimously includes Brad Silberling, the director of the synthetic (but also successful) Hollywood remake, 1998’s Nicolas Cage/Meg Ryan-starring City of Angels. Additional extras include an informative booklet essay by critic Michael Atkinson, deleted scenes and outtakes that try on, yikes, pie-in-the-face slapstick, and an excerpt from a film that old friends Ganz and Sander made about Bois. Seen today Wings of Desire is a memorial to its time and place, and its departed creative team, now including Donmartin, who died in 2007 at age 45. For the two hours and change it unspools, we are all Berliners.

The melancholic Ganz is an arthouse fixture, most recently appearing in Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth and The Reader. His angelic appearance on the Victory Column in Potsdamer Platz makes for a classic still image. But here Damiel, transformed but not quite understanding color, makes his way to a club where Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are playing, where we get glimpses of Cassiel and Marion:

Ganz later played Hitler in the 2004 film Downfall, the movie that launched a thousand parodies. His Wings were decidedly clipped for this one.

For more movie reviews and essays, visit Between Productions.

But sometimes the Academy gets it right. Not only did Costa-Gavras’ enthralling “Z” co-win Best Foreign Film in 1969 (along with an obscure Russian production of The Brothers Karamazov), it was also nominated for Best Picture, the first time that had happened. If it had somehow beaten Midnight Cowboy for Best Picture, I think even that film’s creative team would have understood. (What a year for winners—the only X-rated Best Picture, “Z,” John Wayne, and Goldie Hawn, too.) “Z” is one of those template movies, a fact-based political thriller that set the standard; you can see its influence from All the President’s Men (1976) to Syriana (2005).

The film opens with a defiant title card, saying that its resemblance to real life is entirely deliberate. Greek-born Costa-Gavras based the film on a you-are-there bestseller by Vassilis Vassilikos that was a lightly veiled account of the 1963 assassination of Gregorios Lambrakis, who led the country’s no-nukes movement. During a tense peace rally, as the rabble denounce him as a communist, the Lambrakis figure (here called “the deputy,” and played by Yves Montand, an actor with impeccable liberal credentials) is run down by a three-wheeled vehicle in what seems to be an accident. The government’s examining magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who is meant to declare the death a drunk driving incident, instead methodically peels back the layers of the onion. It stinks: uncovered are evidence of assassination and the complicity of foolish but dangerous generals, who are plotting a military coup. The film follows the actions of several other characters, played unobtrusively by other well-known European actors: a journalist (Jacques Perrin) who launches his own investigation, the two killers (Renato Salvatori and Marcel Bozzuffi, the latter best known as the hit man pursued by Gene Hackman in The French Connection’s legendary car chase), and the doctor’s estranged wife (Irene Papas, the cast’s only Greek), who is suddenly entrusted with his legacy.

“Z” received additional Oscar nominations for Costa-Gavras’ direction and his taut but often quite witty screenplay, which he co-authored with Jorge Semprun. Another deserved Oscar winner was editor Francoise Bonnot, whose masterful manipulation of Raoul Coutard’s images is the key to the entire film. I hadn’t seen “Z” in a while (this superior Criterion disc definitively replaces its no-frills laserdisc, and another distributor’s allegedly dismal DVD from a decade ago) and though I remembered it in fragments seeing the entire picture snap back into place before my eyes was a revelation. The funny thing about “Z” is that while it ends unhappily, with characters we’ve come to admire imprisoned or worse and the censorious junta in place (the famed closing credits list The Beatles, Harold Pinter, long hair on men, and new math as among the “deviant” elements banned by the regime, along with the letter “Z,” for a reason you’ll see) you finish the film elated. Maybe it’s the soaring music, by composer-activist Mikis Theodorakis, who contested the regime that ruled Greece from 1967-1974 (his scores have included 1964’s Zorba the Greek and 1973’s Serpico), the quality of the filmmaking, or the notion that while wars go on brave individuals can win battles and make a difference.

Europe’s other great political thriller of the 60s was The Battle of Algiers (1966). How the French-language “Z” came to be filmed in Algeria, and how the country was cleverly camouflaged to resemble the unnamed but clearly Greece-like Mediterranean location of the film, is one of the subjects Costa-Gavras (whose politically engaged filmography includes 1982’s Missing and 1989’s Music Box) addresses in a featurette. Other supplements include an interview with the great Coutard, the eye of the French New Wave, archival interviews with most of the cast (Pierre Dux talks about the fun of playing the most bumbling and hot-headed of the generals), an informative booklet essay by New York Press critic Armond White, and a fine commentary by historian Peter Cowie. Among the revelations: Lambrakis’ widow married a Greek army officer and filed suit against the filmmakers after the Oscar nominations were announced.

Here’s the score’s main theme, and images of Lambrakis:

Criterion has done well by the barnstorming movie maverick Sam Fuller, with DVDs of his earliest films plus the immensely entertaining Pickup on South Street (1953) and all the way up to his last Hollywood movie, 1982’s White Dog. Sony fills in a few gaps with the seven-disc “Collectors Choice: The Samuel Fuller Collection,” spotlighting his work for Columbia Pictures.

The set is unusual in that Fuller only wrote, produced, and directed the last two films in the chronology, 1959’s The Crimson Kimono and 1961’s Underworld U.S.A. The rest show how the former crime reporter, pulp fiction writer, and Purple Heart recipient became the tough-talking, cigar-chomping indie auteur beloved by the likes of directors Martin Scorsese, Tim Robbins, Curtis Hanson, and Wim Wenders, all of whom offer testimonials in featurettes that are part of the package.

Fuller’s early screen- and story-writing credits, 1937’s star-studded It Happened in Hollywood (with Fay Wray) and 1938’s serial-like French Foreign Legion movie Adventure in Sahara, don’t add up to much, except as a tutorial in how a major studio processed hour-long B pictures. 1943’s Power of the Press, based on one of his hard-driving stories, is more like it. Fuller, an ink-stained wretch, loved the newspaper racket (he broke the story of the shocking drug overdose death of Broadway star Jeanne Eagels in 1929) and the 64-minute picture has a little of his stamp. A schemer played by a typically villainous Otto Kruger uses gangland muscle to gain control of a big city newspaper, with only a small-town editor (Guy Kibbee) standing in his way. Of interest in what amounts to a propaganda piece is the fast-talking Lee Tracy, a great unsung actor who always livened up a movie, as one of the many Fuller protagonists named Griff.

The set gets more Fulleresque with two movies, 1949’s Shockproof and 1952’s Scandal Sheet, that could easily fit into one of Columbia’s new film noir boxes. Shockproof combines his co-written script with direction by Douglas Sirk, whose mid- to late-50s melodramas like All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life inspired 2002’s Far from Heaven and continue to be felt through Mad Men. This isn’t one of those films, as Sirk tries to tame a far-fetched but entertaining-bad-girl-trying to-go-straight scenario, starring heartthrob (and future director) Cornel Wilde (as a smitten parole officer, Griff) and his then-wife, Patricia Knight.

Scandal Sheet was released the same year Fuller directed his favorite film, the tabloid history lesson Park Row. Based on one of his novels, Scandal Sheet is the lesser of the two movies, but director Phil Karlson (best known for 1972’s vigilante picture Walking Tall) was somewhat in sync with his sensibility. Columbia had trouble finding good parts for big, broad Broderick Crawford after the Oscar-winning All the King’s Men and Born Yesterday but he amply fills the plus-sized shoes of a tabloid-minded editor who cultivates a rising reporter, played by John Derek (another director-to-be, and future husband of Bo). That’s good and bad news when Crawford commits a murder, which drives up circulation but places an obvious wedge in the father-son surrogate relationship as the reporter gets closer to the truth. Fast-paced and full of twists, the film co-stars Donna Reed (a year before her From Here to Eternity Oscar win) as the appealing conscience of the piece.

The two Fuller-directed movies are the filmmaker in his prime, tackling controversial themes with gusto. His in-your-face style of directing (think 3D without the glasses) was never more high voltage than at the start of Kimono, where a fleeing stripper, “Sugar Torch,” is gunned down in the mean streets of L.A. Investigating the murder in Little Tokyo and along Skid Row are two cops, Charlie (Glenn Corbett) and Joe (James Shigeta), a Japanese. They share an apartment—Charlie calls Joe, with affection, “meathead,” more than 10 years before the phrase’s All in the Family heyday—but are pulled apart when both fall for the same woman, Christine (Victoria Shaw), who’s mixed up in the case. Interracial relationships were a taboo topic back then, but Fuller handles the subject with sensitivity. In his he’s helped immeasurably by Shigeta, who’s best known for playing the doomed Nakatomi in Die Hard but was the Asian-American Sidney Poitier in a number of films starting with this debut feature. I’d like to have heard from him on a commentary track, but outside of the attractive (if sometimes grainy) transfers the extras are restricted to those director-driven supplements.

You’re never more than a few minutes away from an act of violence in Underworld U.S.A, where the son of a small-potatoes thief murdered by the mob grows up to be Cliff Robertson, who avenges himself on the killers. They’re a rough bunch, planning to flood high schools with drugs and killing kids—but the cops and FBI agents aren’t much better, hampered by their lack of inside information and inability to do much to protect the rare informants. The dirty job of purging America’s rot is left to Robertson, of Charly and Spider-Man, who relishes playing an outsider. “The Samuel Fuller Collection” should be watched in order for the last shot of this last film to really register. It’s of a fist clenched in anger and defiance—the essence of Sam Fuller.

Here he is in the film’s trailer, giving us the facts:

For more movie reviews and essays, visit Between Productions.

A lot of the stories questioned Cobain’s “health,” by which they meant drug addiction, but there were also rumors that Nirvana might be breaking up. It didn’t help things when the band decided not to undertake another U.S. tour to promote their major label debut, Nevermind, instead opting for select dates here and there. The reason given at the time was “exhaustion,” and everyone knew, or thought they knew, what that meant.

The band’s answer to all the rumors came at England’s legendary Reading Festival on August 30, 1992. Nirvana had played Reading the previous year, but at that time, they were halfway down the bill. When they returned in 1992, it was as the headliners. That night Nirvana played what Kerrang magazine called one #1 of the “100 Gigs That Shook the World,” and Nirvana fans voted the show “Nirvana’s #1 Greatest Moment” in a NME poll.

To put the health rumors to rest, Cobain had himself pushed onstage in a wheelchair guided by bassist Krist Novoselic. Cobain had a hospital gown on over his street clothes, and he kept it on for the entire set. But the real answer came as Nirvana fired back at their critics and doubters in the only way they could, by playing an absolutely torrid set that blended both old and new material. They not only played nearly every song on Nevermind, they included three songs that wouldn’t appear until In Utero was released two years later. They also went back to their Sub Pop debut Bleach for five songs, and included a couple of fairly obscure, but influential covers. In a nicely subversive moment, the band showed utter disdain for their huge hit single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by morphing its introduction into an ugly version of Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” before returning to a rather desultory version of their own song.

The evening’s most poignant moment came when Cobain stepped up to defend his wife. He began by saying that his daughter Frances Bean had just turned 12 days old. He told the vast crowd that there had been some pretty nasty things said about Courtney of late, and asked them, on the count of three, to say “we love you, Courtney.” The audience happily complied, and Kobain led Nirvana through an as yet unrecorded song called “All Apologies.” No matter what you might think of Cobain, or Love, or Nirvana, this is a man doing the right thing by publicly standing up for his family. Less than two years later, he ended his own life.

Nirvana at Reading is nicely shot and recorded. Only two of the 25 performances from this set have ever been released previously. This one is a no-brainer if you’re a Nirvana fan, a fan of grunge in general, or simply someone who is interested in seeing one of rock and roll’s epochal moments as it happened. Nirvana at Reading can be purchased as a DVD+CD Deluxe Edition, a single DVD, or audio CD.

Castle, who started as an assistant stage manager to Bela Lugosi on his Dracula stage tours, charmed directors George Stevens and Orson Welles with his chutzpah, then won over the notoriously unwinnable kingpin of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn, who put him to work on grinding out B-pictures. Castle stepped away from the studio to make two career-defining horror pictures, 1958’s Macabre and 1959’s House on Haunted Hill. The movies are entertaining but the real fun was in picking up your “Death by Fright” insurance before the former, or dodging the plastic skeleton hoisted above your head—the miracle of “Emergo”!—during Hill. The films were astonishingly successful, and Castle (who was paid homage in Joe Dante’s sweet Matinee) returned to Columbia a star in his own right.

A number of the eight films in this collection are retreads, but remastered for greater goose-pimpling clarity. The new-to-DVD ones, like the Tom Poston-starring Zotz! (1962) and the Hammer Films co-production The Old Dark House (1963), lacked more exploitable gimmicks, or any gimmick at all, and helped bring that phase of Castle’s career to an end. By producing Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning Rosemary’s Baby (1968) he achieved the artistic respectability he craved but, as the bonus disc documentary Spine-Tingler! The William Castle Story shows he was unable to parlay that into much else of lasting interest in his last frustrating years.

But it was a hell of a run. Besides the documentary, which has affectionate testimony from fans like John Waters, each film has trailers (featuring Castle) and most have featurettes explaining what the gimmicks were and how they worked (or didn’t). I’ve written about Castle before, and what you see is what you get—inexpensive, unpretentious, but at times stimulating shockers. The horror highlights are The Tingler (1959), with Vincent Price’s researcher isolating the lobster-like “essence of fear,” an unexpected foray into LSD use, a marvelous color insert scene of tingler-generating chills, and the “Percepto” gag; 13 Ghosts (1960), where “Illusion-O” specs were handed out to let audiences see the house-haunting ghouls (a prior DVD release had a pair of the 3D-type viewers, but you don’t need them); and the delightful, end-of-the-line Strait-Jacket (1964), with a domineering Joan Crawford as an axe murderess, released from the asylum, tangling with another cut-up as she tries to mend fences with now-grown daughter Diane Baker. Baker’s reminiscences of the production’s troubles with the star, who had been reborn as a scream queen in the 1962 hit What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, are poignant.

Robert Bloch wrote Strait-Jacket. Bloch had written the novel on which Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) had been based, and Hitchcock used Castle-like ballyhoo to promote his horror smash. Castle got his own back by releasing Homicidal, my favorite of the collection’s films, the following year. It has a completely bizarre opening sequence, a funny gimmick (a “fright break” toward the climax, during which petrified audiences could retreat to the yellow-lit “coward’s corner” in the auditorium) and a twisted ending—really, all a film like this needed to have. Blood-and-guts-filled, but gimmick-free, remakes of Castle’s pictures have been produced over the last decade; though not a redo, the recent Orphan is very much in the spirit of Homicidal. This is a fun set, but I highly recommend attending one of Film Forum of New York’s Castle revivals, where real live Percepto and Emergo are trotted out.

The only good thing about horror remakes is that they bring the originals out of hiding. It’s gratifying to see 1987’s The Stepfather again, in all its shivery glory. Written by the late, great Donald E. Westlake, the accept-no-substitutes film has one of the top genre performances by Terry O’Quinn, as an upstanding family values type who marries single mothers, then slays his new families when they fail to live up to his inhuman expectations. Besides being a crackerjack thriller (Jill Schoelen is very good as a suspicious stepdaughter) The Stepfather is a witty little indictment of the false front offered by the overly glorified Reagan years. And, while not overly violent, it does have a “smashing” scene involving the kind of telephone that was in use in the last century.

This welcome first-time release offers a handsome transfer and a commentary track with director Joseph Ruben, whose Hollywood career, including the Stepfather echo chambers Sleeping with the Enemy and The Good Son, has never been as satisfying. Curiously absent is O’Quinn, who found his niche on Lost; maybe he’s embarrassed by his participation in ersatz sequels that followed the original film’s success on VHS in the covered wagon days of home video. As for the remake, surely the actor best suited to repeat O’Quinn’s classic line—“Who am I here?”—was Mad Men’s Jon Hamm.

Japan’s Takashi Miike was in vogue for a few years, when, like Prince, he started producing and producing and producing, till only the hardcore buffs were still interested in his cluttered career. (The filmmaker had a cameo in Hostel.) A two-disc set of Miike’s US breakthrough, 1999’s Audition, reminds us what the fuss was all about. I saw this cold at Film Forum, where it was positioned as an arthouse release. The excellent poster, with a great double-entendre tagline (“She always gets a part”), didn’t hint at what was to come.

Unlike Miike’s later splatterfests (like Ichi the Killer), this one starts slow. A widower reenters the meet market in an unconventional way, as a filmmaker friend sets up fake auditions that are just a pretext for getting to know that special someone. Eihi Shiina is bewitching as Asami, the most memorable applicant, a former ballerina who casts a spell despite a hidden past. It looks like love—but as we had been advised Asami always gets a part, and as her psychosis becomes abundantly clear (Miike leaves nothing to the imagination) you’ll want to have a coward’s corner set up in your living room.

One of the more assured thrillers of the last decade, Audition has at last gotten a proper release on DVD, with a Miike commentary, cast interviews, and a Tom Mes-penned booklet essay that fits it into the context of the director’s sprawling career and Japan’s sexist culture, which the film critiques. The movie has had an afterlife, with a clip turning up in The Departed (another false front film) and My Chemical Romance dedicating an entire video to it. But it’s good to revisit it again in its entirety, rather than Asami-sized slices.

The rest is a mixed bag. If only the anime-derived Blood: The Last Vampire, a martial arts/army base espionage/teen girls-mixed-up-with-ancient-legends thing, was the last vampire movie—it would save us from films where a drop-kicking Asian lead who can’t speak English is paired with a whiny American lead who can’t act in any language. I did wake up for the scene where a bat-winged creature threatened a military transport, though. Co-star Colin Salmon (Resident Evil) really should play Blacula someday.

None of the four movies released on DVD by Sam Raimi’s “Ghost House” initiative is much good. The Thaw is not a title that applies to co-star Val Kilmer’s career, as he’ll go into permanent direct-to-video deep freeze if he keeps churning out undistinguished alien parasite flicks like this. Seventh Moon is a disappointment, wasting an interesting location (Hong Kong’s countrified New Territories) and mythology (Chinese “hungry ghosts”) on bleary blur-o-vision filmmaking by Blair Witch Project co-director Eduardo Sanchez, which pretty much confirms that lightning can be captured in a bottle, but can’t be recaptured. I confess not to making it to The Offspring, as the British-produced The Children was enough to put me off tyke-sized terror. Not a remake of the semi-notorious 1980 movie where terrified parents are forced to chop off the irradiated arms of their touch-of-death kids, this instead has a mysterious syndrome turning prepubescent tots into shadow-eyed maniacs, with the teen in their midst taking the blame. The weapon-wielding youngsters probably had a ball making it.

As a new parent, and a fan of the 1974 original, I did check out the straight-to-DVD remake of It’s Alive. Bijou Phillips as a new mom and grad student studying “19th century French poets” did not have me pregnant with anticipation, but I wanted to see what the filmmakers would do with Larry Cohen’s popular drive-in concept of a monster baby. They picked the wrong time to go all Val Lewton on us—the baby here is an outwardly normal infant who only gets mad when he or his mom are upset, and is shown just briefly in its pissed-off form. The strangest sight in this shot-in-Bulgaria redo is what the production designer considered an American house, with weird angles and dismally lit, hodgepodge of styles interiors.

Far and away the best of the new blood is a film that should have earned a theatrical release, but is instead fast scaring up fans on DVD, Michael Dougherty’s excellent Trick ‘r Treat. Produced by Bryan Singer (Dougherty co-wrote Superman Returns and X2), the movie blends Halloween imagery and mythology into a five-story narrative that gradually unwinds. Unlike say, Creepshow, the stories are mixed together, with satisfyingly grisly payoffs throughout. (The repetition of the phrase “I wanna go home” in one awful vignette really got under my skin.)

Kids bear the brunt of it again, as high school principal (and serial killer) Dylan Baker picks the wrong victim in a Halloween-obsessed town, a shy virgin (Anna Paquin) partakes in an unusual initiation rite, and a bitter old man (Brian Cox) confronts demons of various kinds. Stylishly made and replete with old-school makeup effects rather than the usual CGI, the movie is ideal viewing this weekend, of course, but any time when you’re looking for a horror movie that’s a cut above.

By all means curl up with Trick ‘r Treat this Halloween. But don’t show it to…the children:

This year marks the 25^th Anniversary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and there’s a star-studded concert in Madison Square Garden to celebrate the occasion. In conjunction with the anniversary, Time-Life has released a nine-DVD collection called Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Live. It includes eight discs of Hall of Fame inductions and a DVD featuring some of the performances from the 1995 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert that took place in Cleveland. Since the very first induction back in 1986, we’ve seen and heard about the induction ceremonies (usually in New York) that are a gathering of music legends. They get up on stage and perform their biggest hits; give speeches that are sometimes emotional, sometimes raucous, sometimes spiteful, and at the end of the night all of the inductees and presenters come together for one kick assjam session. With this DVD collection, it appeared as if music aficionados — you know, you and I, the people who made these rock stars legends — were finally going to be included in these events, and not just through the chopped-up versions we’ve seen on VH1.

Well, not quite.

First let me say that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Live collection has enough great moments to warrant checking it out if you’re a music junkie. Check it out, yes, but buy it? I’m not sure. You see, this box set doesn’t live up to the hype and certainly not my expectations. With so much talent to showcase, how could such a huge set go wrong? That’s part of the problem: there’s so much ground to cover in the 25 years that not every inductee receives attention. In fact, some vital artists, such as Led Zeppelin, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and Talking Heads, are missing altogether. While the designers of this collection have culled together a remarkable set of performances, including Bruce Springsteen, U2, Jeff Beck, Metallica, Solomon Burke and Bonnie Raitt, the collection feels more like a highlight reel for the Hall of Fame rather than a music lover’s dream.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a thrill to see the members of Cream putting aside their differences to jam again, then watch Tom Petty and the original Heartbreakers (“mach 1” as he calls them) play together one last time, to see Roy Orbison singing alongside Springsteen, Springsteen joining U2 on stage to perform “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” Billy Joel and Bonnie Raitt singing “Runaway” and Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard receiving the respect they deserve. Even better are the induction speeches: Mick Jagger poking fun at his old rivals the Beatles and then the awkwardness as George, Ringo and Yoko Ono accept the award while Paul is notably missing (due to bad business); McCartney giving a moving induction speech for John Lennon (as a solo artist) with sincerity and nostalgia; Jakob Dylan telling the story of how he told Tom Petty’s daughter how cool it was that her dad was Tom Petty.  And then there are Bono and the Boss, who deliver poetic statements for their heroes and humble acceptance speeches when they were inducted. Most fascinating to watch is the footage from the early induction ceremonies, when the cameraman wasn’t sure where to stand, the stage seems too small and there is a genuine sense that no one knows what’s going to happen next. As the years have progressed, the induction ceremony appears better organized and more — I hate to say it — corporate.

My chief complaint is the way this set has been organized. Instead of sequencing the artists in chronological induction order or even by musical genre, songs are grouped together like a mixtape, or one of Time-Life’s many CD compilations you can order for mail delivery. They try to create themes, with titles like “Feelin’ Alright,” “Light My Fire” and “I’ll Take You There.”  It didn’t work for me; it didn’t feel cohesive. I feel that devoting DVDs to particular years would have better shown off the history of rock and roll and how it’s progressed as an art form. But the bottom line is that I expected more. After 25 years and so many historical moments to choose from, I expected the packaging and the design to be something that blew me away like the latest U2 concert: a mixture of spectacle, great music and a message. Instead, it’s like seeing John Fogerty performing Creedence hits at the Oxnard Strawberry Festival. The music’s great, but it feels a little cheap. Furthermore, the packaging itself is kind of flimsy. I’ve seen better packaging on DVD collections for failed TV sitcoms.

Furthermore, with so many passionate speeches every year, we should have received the full speeches, instead of edited versions, which is what are presented here. Am I the only one who finds it annoying as hell to be watching McCartney talk about his fallen mate John Lennon, only to have the moment interrupted by a jump cut in the video and audio? As a viewer I want to feel like I’m in the audience; I want to see that these music legends are human, not just mythic figures the press and record companies have created for us to admire.

Maybe I’m being a crank; maybe this collection wasn’t intended for music critics, but for the casual rock fan. There are definitely stellar performances and anyone looking to explore the early era of rock will get to see icons like Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Roy Orbison and Wilson Pickett own the stage while people like Springsteen, Jagger, Joel and Costello stare on in admiration and awe. And each disc (save for the concert DVD) contains at least 80 minutes of bonus features that include (edited) speeches, behind the scenes footage and rehearsals. But at $120.00, I’m curious who will buy it.

I’ll admit that I feel a little guilty about giving the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Live collection a mixed review. I know there are glowing write-ups in the mainstream press (five stars from Rolling Stone). However, I’m just continuing the long tradition of rock and roll: I know what I like, I’m opinionated about it, and if you don’t agree with me, we can debate it until we’re blue in the face.

The Brothers Bloom

Mark Ruffalo (You Can Count on Me) and Adrian Brody (The Pianist) star as Stephen and Bloom, two brothers who have always shared everything. Tossed around from foster home to foster home as boys, they learned that they could only depend on each other. They also learned that they could make a lot of money by conning people. The opening prologue of The Brothers Bloom is an innocent, funny and expertly executed introduction to the boys, finding their calling as con artists and scamming their peers. From the start, Stephen is the planner and Bloom the one who sets the con in motion. We also see that at this early age Bloom longs for a connection with someone other than the brother he loves and admires; he wants to be loved. As Rod Stewart’s version of “I Know I’m Losing You” accompanies the boys’ slow-mo walk out of their latest town, the film titles appear and the story jumps ahead 20 years, when Stephen and Bloom are world renowned for being able to pull off the most elaborate and well-staged cons.

During a huge celebration after a big con (look for cameos by Noah Segan, Nora Zehetner and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the stars of Brick, during this sequence), Bloom expresses his desire to quit the game. He’s burned out; he wants to have a life that hasn’t been planned out by his brother; he wants to fall in love with a woman and have the feelings mean something and not just be part of a role he’s playing. In essence, he wants free will. The brothers argue, and Bloom walks away from his life of crime to live in seclusion in Montenegro.

Not much time passes before Stephen shows up with an offer: One last con and he’ll let Bloom walk away for good. Bloom relents, although you get the idea that his coastal paradise isn’t what he thought it would be; he’s still lonely and he misses his brother. With the help of their silent, explosives expert Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi of Babel), the boys stake out rich, lonely, eccentric heiress, Penelope Stamp, played with charm and innocence by the wonderful Rachel Weisz (The Constant Gardner). Stephen’s plan is to have them act as antique dealers and get Penelope to hand them over her massive fortune.

However, the brothers soon learn that nothing with Penelope goes as planned. They think she’ll flee when things get rough, but Penelope instead joins them in their madcap quest to steal an antique book and sell it for millions. Penelope is so dissatisfied with her life she leaves it all behind for a life of intrigue and danger as she gradually falls in love with Bloom.

Johnson’s script is full of so many twists and wonderful turns it would be pointless to try and explain the plot; it would take too long. Instead, let me speak about the marvelous cast that Johnson has assembled for his movie. Mark Ruffalo continues to show that he deserves to be bigger star — he deserves every word of praise he’s been given. Ruffalo is the type of actor who can pull off his roles with a twinkle of mischief in his eye, yet break your heart with a simple look or smile. Brody has been a favorite of mine since he showed up in Barry Levinson’s underrated Liberty Heights, and here, he pulls off the role of romantic lead with great ease. In every film Brody has done, there is always a sadness underneath his eyes that makes his characters more sympathetic; The Brothers Bloom is no exception. Yet he is also able to show his character’s love of life and really convey the love he has for his brother. There are occasions in movies when two actors are asked to play siblings and you don’t buy t for a second. Ruffalo and Brody have a genuine rapport that makes you believe they love each other, making Bloom’s ending all the more tragic.

As for Rachel Weisz, she continues to thrill me with her versatility and charm. It takes a strong performer to hold their own when acting alongside powerful actors like Ruffalo and Brody, but Weisz is more than up to the task. From About a Boy to The Constant Gardner to The Fountain, Weisz has proven herself to be one of the most interesting actors working. In The Bothers Bloom she seems to be having just as much fun as her character, which makes watching her a delight.

Rian Johnson handles the intricacies of the script and the nuances of his actors like a seasoned veteran instead of a young filmmaker with only one movie under his belt. What amazed me, after watching the tons of deleted scenes, is that Johnson did away with an entire storyline in his movie (involving Russian mobsters) and still made the movie work.  Johnson’s first two films have been daring cinematic delights, and I’m looking forward to seeing what he does next.

The DVD (which includes great commentary by Johnson and assorted other great features) is only available to rent. Hopefully it will see a proper release in the near future.