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International DVDs

Sense & Sensibility (with Miss Austen Regrets) (BBC TV 2008)

Sales Rank:1560
List Price: $34.98
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
Subtitled
Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Hattie Morahan
Charity Wakefield
Dan Stevens
Janet McTeer
Mark Williams

Lush, dramatic, and beautifully acted, the BBC's three-part miniseries Sense & Sensibility captures the languid urgency that resonates throughout the Jane Austen novel on which it is based. The miniseries begins with a seduction scene: As a young girl cautiously gives herself to a man, she asks, "But when will you come back?" He answers ominously, "Soon... very soon," and gallops off into the night. We know what she does not--that he will not return for her. But viewers do not learn until the end who the couple are, and how their actions set off a chain of events. It is inevitable that this period piece will be compared to the 1995 big screen adaptation that starred Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet and Hugh Grant, and won Thompson an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. To its credit, this later version stands up incredibly well, with actors whose looks match Austen's written description. And due to a longer running time than the film version, there is more attention paid to detail and minor characters. Sense & Sensibility focuses on the longings of the Dashwood sisters Elinor (Hattie Morahan) and Marianne (Charity Wakefield). After their wealthy father dies, leaving his entire estate to their milquetoast half brother John (Mark Gatiss), Elinor, Marianne, their younger sister Margaret (Lucy Boynton), and their mother are left penniless. John and his shrew-like wife Fanny move into the manor, making the Dashwoods feel like unwanted guests. It is only after Fanny's handsome and kind brother Edward Ferrars (Dan Stevens) arrives for a visit that Elinor feels happy again. Marianne, too, has attracted the attention of two suitors: serious and shy Colonel Brandon (David Morrissey) and dashing Willoughby (Dominic Cooper). Learning that the 35-year-old colonel is interested in her, a stunned Marianne says, "You do realize that it will be impossible for me to speak to him again." Her actions are that of a little girl, running away and hiding when he comes to call on her. But her feelings for Willoughby are real: the kind of love a girl feels for the first time. The differences in the sisters' choices, actions, and secrets set the tone for an era when a perceived impropriety could ruin a woman's reputation and her family's standing in a community. Filmed in England with good use of aerial shots, the production has a sweeping feel that adds a distinct flavor to the drama. As with many Austen novels, the heroines in Sense & Sensibility go through many misunderstandings before their happily-ever-after ending. But that ending leaves viewers satisfied that things turned out just the way that they should.

Austen fans will be delighted with the second disc in this set: Miss Austen Regrets is a perfect companion to the miniseries, starring Olivia Williams stars as the author, and Greta Scacchi--who could easily pass as Williams' real-life sibling--as Austen's sister Cassandra. The film takes a bittersweet look at Austen's life and hints at what could have been had she married one of her suitors. Smart and headstrong, Austen refuses to cave into society's notions of what a proper woman should do. While her famous heroines all paired up with dashing gentlemen, Austen found that the loves of her life were her written creations. --Jae-Ha Kim

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Anne of Green Gables - The Sequel

Sales Rank:1063
List Price: $24.99
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MPAA Rating: G (General Audience)

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This video is the sequel to the beloved children's book and video Anne of Green Gables. It continues the story of Anne Shirley, an imaginative and headstrong young orphan in 1890s Canada, whose hot temper matches her red hair. Anne of Green Gables told of Anne's adoption by an elderly brother and sister, Marilla (Colleen Dewhurst) and Matthew Cuthbert, and her childhood adventures in the idyllic village of Avonlea on Prince Edward Island. Anne of Avonlea takes up the story soon after Matthew's death, when Anne has graduated from college. It follows her struggles and adventures as an aspiring writer and English teacher in a private school on the mainland. Girls seven and older, as well as adults, will enjoy this intelligent and beautifully made film, first shown on PBS. It's filled with themes parents can discuss with their daughters--including self-reliance, generosity, and perseverance. It also gives a realistic portrayal of the situation for women during this historical period, through characters that are multifaceted and human. Anne's struggle to find her voice as a writer, to handle difficult people maturely, to stay optimistic despite setbacks, and to nurture her students are both thought provoking and entertaining. Girls will also enjoy Anne's romantic travails, as she tries to decide between two suitors: her childhood friend Gilbert, and a rich, handsome, and mysterious widower. The film is beautifully filmed, and the costumes and settings portray an idyllic time and place. The cast is excellent. Megan Follows as the spirited Anne and Dewhurst as the gruff but tender Marilla give especially fine performances. --Elisabeth Keating

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Happy Feet (Full Screen Edition)

Sales Rank:2074
List Price: $19.98
Lowest New Price: $2.53
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MPAA Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)

Format:

Closed-captioned
Color
Full Screen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Peter Carroll
Richard Carter
Savion Glover
Nicole Kidman
Anthony LaPaglia

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I'm Not There (Two-Disc Collector's Edition)

Sales Rank:1207
List Price: $29.99
Lowest New Price: $8.34
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

Closed-captioned
Collector's Edition
Color
Subtitled
Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Christian Bale
David Cross
Charlotte Gainsbourg
Richard Gere
Bruce Greenwood

Unapologetically audacious, I'm Not There is more post-modern puzzle than by-the-numbers biopic. A title card sets the scene: "Inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan." Yet the film features no figure by that name. Instead, writer/director Todd Haynes presents six characters, each incarnating different stages in the artist's career. Perfume's Ben Whishaw, a black-clad poet, serves as a slippery sort of narrator. The action begins with the wanderings of an 11-year-old black runaway named "Woody Guthrie" (Marcus Carl Franklin)--his raucous duet with Richie Havens on "Tombstone Blues" is a highlight--and ends with a silver-haired Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) watching the Old West die before his eyes. In the interim, there's the folk singer-turned-preacher (Christian Bale), the actor (Heath Ledger), and the rock star (Cate Blanchett, who has Don't Look Back Dylan down to a science). The chronology is purposefully non-linear, and editor Jay Rabinowitz cuts rapidly, Jean-Luc Godard-style, between cinéma vérité black-and-white and saturated color, Richard Lester-like slapstick and Fellini-inspired surrealism (Ed Lachman served as cinematographer).

What makes the picture fun for Dylan fans--and potentially frustrating for neophytes--is that every album and movie bears an alternate title. Ledger's Robbie, for instance, stars in "Grain of Sand," actually a reference to the Pete Seeger song. As in Haynes' glam rock reverie Velvet Goldmine, the trickery involves the entire cast. While Julianne Moore plays former lover Alice, a dead ringer for Joan Baez; Michelle Williams embodies elusive scenester Coco, i.e. Edie Sedgwick. If I'm Not There is less affecting than Control, the year's other big music film, it rewards repeat viewings like few biographical features. The soundtrack mixes originals with covers, like Jim James's heartfelt "Goin' to Acapulco." --Kathleen C. Fennessy

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Help!

Sales Rank:1525
List Price: $29.98
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MPAA Rating: G (General Audience)

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After the worldwide success of A Hard Day's Night, the Beatles and director Richard Lester reunited for a follow-up film, Eight Arms to Hold You. Well, that wasn't the final title; a pleading Lennon-McCartney tune provided the catchier handle: Help! A loose semispoof of the globe-trotting James Bond pictures, Help! has always been considered a somewhat disorganized comedown from its predecessor; but it presents "the famous Beatles" even more clearly as the English cousins of the Marx Brothers. The plot has an Eastern religious cult declaring that the new ring on Ringo's finger is the key element in a human sacrifice; they will stop at nothing to obtain it. Meanwhile, a mad scientist (crazed Victor Spinetti, who also appeared in A Hard Day's Night and Magical Mystery Tour) believes that if he has the ring, he could--dare we say it?--rule the world. The songs, including "Ticket to Ride" and "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," are filmed with gleeful ingenuity, in locations such as the Bahamas, an Austrian ski resort, and the Salisbury Plain. The relentless nonsense becomes nearly the equivalent of a swinging-'60s Alice in Wonderland: for instance, Paul shrinks to the size of a gum wrapper, John fishes a season ticket out of his soup, George wears a top hat on the ski slopes, the lads sing the "Ode to Joy" to a lion. Oh, and the film is dedicated to Elias Howe, "who in 1846 invented the sewing machine." Brilliant. --Robert Horton

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Savage Grace

Sales Rank:1390
List Price: $24.95
Lowest New Price: $15.99
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MPAA Rating: Unrated

Format:

Color
DVD-Video
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Director(s):

Actor(s):

Julianne Moore
Eddie Redmayne
Stephen Dillane
Elena Anaya
Simón Andreu

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Encounters at the End of the World

Sales Rank:1315
List Price: $27.98
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MPAA Rating: G (General Audience)

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Just about anywhere Werner Herzog goes becomes an interesting place, in part because the director shapes it with his distinctively sardonic eye. In Encounters at the End of the World, the 'Zog heads off to Antarctica, finding there a population of unusual people, hallucinatory underwater life, and penguins. He doesn't appear on camera, but the unmistakably Teutonic Herzog voice is very much with us all the time, a baleful tour guide for this blank destination. In the human outposts of Antarctica, Herzog finds the kind of people you might expect would gravitate to the edge of existence--the curious, the oddball, the wanderers who've run out of other places to explore. He finds some deadpan hilarity, especially in filming a communication drill involving people practicing blizzard conditions (they wear buckets over their heads while roped together). The underwater photography (a realm previously explored in Herzog's The Wild Blue Yonder) is by Henry Kaiser, and it meshes perfectly with the director's interest in alien eye-scapes. And when Herzog finally does find penguins, his imagination goes to the idea that some penguins go insane, scurrying off into their own suicidal directions. This isn't as arresting a film as Grizzly Man, but it is an entertaining travelogue spiked with quirky observations. --Robert Horton

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Casino Royale (2-Disc Full Screen Edition)

Sales Rank:3036
List Price: $19.94
Lowest New Price: $9.59
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MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)

Format:

AC-3
Closed-captioned
Color
Dolby
Dubbed
DVD-Video
Full Screen
Subtitled
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Urbano Barberini
Crispin Bonham Carter
Tom Chadbon
John Chancer
Jesper Christensen

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Oliver!

Sales Rank:1495
List Price: $12.99
Lowest New Price: $7.45
Lowest Used Price: $7.08
MPAA Rating: G (General Audience)

Format:

Anamorphic
Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Carol Reed
Ronald Saland

Actor(s):

Mark Lester
Ron Moody
Shani Wallis
Oliver Reed
Harry Secombe

Film buffs and critics can argue until their faces turn blue about whether this lavish Dickensian musical deserved the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1968, but the movie speaks for itself on grandly entertaining terms. Adapted from Dickens's classic novel, it's one of the most dramatically involving and artistically impressive musicals of the 1960s, directed by Carol Reed with a delightful enthusiasm that would surely have impressed Dickens himself. Mark Lester plays the waifish orphan Oliver Twist, who is befriended by the pickpocketing Artful Dodger (Jack Wild) and recruited into the gang of boy thieves led by Fagin (played to perfection by Ron Moody). The villainous Bill Sikes (Oliver Reed) casts his long shadow over Oliver and his friends, but the young orphan is still able to find loving care in the most desperate of circumstances. Full of memorable melodies and splendid lyrics, Oliver! is a timeless film, prompting even hard-to-please critic Pauline Kael to call it "a superb demonstration of intelligent craftsmanship," and to further observe that "it's as if the movie set out to be a tribute to Dickens and his melodramatic art as well as to tell the story of Oliver Twist." --Jeff Shannon

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Lawrence of Arabia (Single Disc Edition)

Sales Rank:1320
List Price: $14.94
Lowest New Price: $7.50
Lowest Used Price: $6.00
MPAA Rating: G (General Audience)

Format:

Anamorphic
Subtitled
Color
Dolby

Director(s):

Actor(s):

John Dimech
José Ferrer
Alec Guinness
Jack Gwillim
Jack Hawkins

There's no getting around a simple, basic truth: watching Lawrence of Arabia in any home-video format represents a compromise. There's no better way to appreciate this epic biographical adventure than to see it projected in 70 millimeter onto a huge theater screen. That caveat aside, David Lean's masterful "desert classic" is still enjoyable on the small screen, especially if viewed in widescreen format. (If your only option is to view a "pan & scan" version, it's best not to bother; this is a film for which the widescreen format is utterly mandatory.) Peter O'Toole gives a star-making performance as T.E. Lawrence, the eccentric British officer who united the desert tribes of Arabia against the Turks during World War I. Lean orchestrates sweeping battle sequences and breathtaking action, but the film is really about the adventures and trials that transform Lawrence into a legendary man of the desert. Lean traces this transformation on a vast canvas of awesome physicality; no other movie has captured the expanse of the desert with such scope and grandeur. Equally important is the psychology of Lawrence, who remains an enigma even as we grasp his identification with the desert. Perhaps the greatest triumph of this landmark film is that Lean has conveyed the romance, danger, and allure of the desert with such physical and emotional power. It's a film about a man who leads one life but is irresistibly drawn to another, where his greatness and mystery are allowed to flourish in equal measure. --Jeff Shannon

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