DVD Release List – 6/23/09
This week’s DVD Release List invites you to take a tour through art-house cinema’s past and present (and future?). Start at the dawn of the ‘60s with Alain Resnais’ beguiling, frustrating existential mystery play Last Year At Marienbad, now available in a sparkling Criterion Blu-ray edition. (Full review coming tomorrow.) Then jump ahead to 1981 for the chatty, casually profound My Dinner With Andre. (Full review available last week.) Then move on to 1988, and Mike Leigh’s Thatcher-era class-war comedy High Hopes, the film that really put him on the map with American audiences. Then end with two interesting indies from this past year: the family drama Phoebe In Wonderland (starring Elle Fanning as a girl who uses her role in a school play to help her overcome an undiagnosed social disorder) and Waltz With Bashir (an animated documentary that uses the filmmaker’s hazy rcollections of a massacre to explore where dreams and memories intersect).
Alice’s House
IndiePix, $24.95
At The Death House Door
Facets, $29.95
Backwoods
Genius Products, $14.95
The Bible Unearthed: The Making Of A Religion
First Run, $29.95