Movies are rarely, if ever, as whirringly rich and strange as House. The 1977 fairy-tale-as-fever-dream from Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi was the debut of a guy who was known mostly for his TV commercials, notably a popular series for the men’s cologne Mandom starring American tough guy icon Charles Bronson. Given a shot at making his first feature by a struggling studio that had nothing to lose, Obayashi did what any aspiring auteur would do: He went to his 11-year-old daughter Chigumi for ideas.
What they came up with is a …

Turner Prize-winning British artist Steve McQueen makes his feature debut with Hunger (Criterion Blu-Ray), a tough, soul-rattling film about brutality and deprivation conceived as a sensory overload. Not a bio-pic in the conventional mode, the drama takes an inside-out view of events leading to the 1981 hunger strike and death of Irish Republic Army activist Bobby Sands, and nine others, in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison. The shit-covered cell walls, the obscenely brutal beatings, even the seemingly mundane act routine of someone washing their hands, boast an acutely amplified resonance, as …

Last year, he won an Oscar for best documentary, though most viewers only remember its gymnastically adept star—death-defying French wirewalker Phillipe Petit—and not James Marsh, the English director who made Man on Wire. Marsh, 46, can live with the anonymity. The success of the film, which chronicled one man’s impossible dream to walk between the towers of the World Trade Center on a highwire, redeemed his career.
Marsh’s next move wasn’t another documentary, though. It’s In the Year of Lord 1980, the middle segment of the Red Riding Trilogy, a grim …

If this year’s Academy Awards producers are foolhardy enough, they could score the show’s customary satirical opening musical bit to R.E.M.’s Nineties anthem “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” Celebrating the post-apocalyptic jollies that destructo epics like Terminator Salvation, 2012 and The Book of Eli (due in January from the Hughes Brothers), the ceremony could acknowledge big-screen doom-and-gloom while glancing sideways at the recession and the rapid decline of studios like Miramax and the Weinstein Co.
Of course leave it to the Weinsteins …

What’s all this nonsense about the “silence” of the lambs? The sheep who populate nearly every frame of Sweetgrass are bleat merchants of a spectacularly boisterous order. They may seem gentle and easily persuaded, as they cluster in a vast, moving carpet of snowy wool, kept in regimented order by attentive sheep dogs. But these hooved beasts are louder than bombs. That incessant bahhhh, in all its variations, makes a hypnotic soundtrack for this absorbed and absorbing documentary about the end of an era: The camera follows Montana rancher Lawrence …