DVDs In Brief: September 28, 2011 

All the Emmys went to Downton Abbey, but Olivier Assayas’ five-and-a-half-hour miniseries Carlos (Criterion) has gotten much-deserved awards attention there and elsewhere for its ability to tell a sprawling TV-movie tale without losing the pace and dynamism of great cinema. Édgar Ramírez stars as Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (a.k.a. “Carlos the Jackal”), a notorious Venezuelan mercenary who became a global outlaw with brazen terrorist acts on behalf of the Palestinian cause in the ’70s and ’80s. Assayas tracks his gradual decline from Ché-inspired revolutionary to indulgent terrorist-for-hire…

No movie at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival was more lustily pilloried than The Ledge, a gimmicky drama that details a high-pitched, high-stakes showdown between an atheist and a holy roller. Charlie Hunnam stars as the atheist, a would-be ledge-jumper who tells a cop (Terrence Howard) that if he doesn’t plunge by noon, someone will die. Of course, this requires a long explanation via flashback involving Hunnam’s lust for a pious neighbor (Liv Tyler) and his outrageous conflict with her Bible-thumping husband (Patrick Wilson)…

Pierre Thoretton’s L’Amour Fou, a documentary about the legendary fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent, begins with his dignified farewell to the industry, but it doesn’t take his work as its primary subject. Instead, Thoretton reveals Saint-Laurent’s 50-year-plus romance with Pierre Bergé, an affair that resisted and survived the prejudices of the past. It’s a beautiful-looking documentary, with evident affection for both parties, but where it should be intimate, it feels conspicuously distant and impersonal.