After giving Iron Man a pass, critics generally seem to have knives out for Speed Racer, despite the fact that Speed boasts the most radical visual strategies seen in a movie theater since Sin City, and maybe longer. Yes, of course "unconventional" is not equivalent to "excellent" or even "interesting," and I guess I can understand why you might not want to let the Wachowskis play your optic nerve like a Jew's harp for more than two hours in a sitting. But, man, if you value a little razzle with your dazzle, this one delivers a lot more of that stuff than, say, Iron Man.

Image nicked from Tim Lucas's excellent Video Watchblog entry on Night of the Werewolf.

It's surely convenience, or just coincidence--rather than any nods to quality or pent-up demand--that these are the first two Euro-horror titles to arrive in high definition on Blu-ray Disc. This double-feature package from BCI and Deimos entertainment pairs two films starring the well-loved (and prolific) Spanish horror actor Paul Naschy. Vengeance of the Zombies (La Rebelion de las Muertas, 1972) is a potboiler from cult director Leon Klimovsky involving a charismatic Indian cult leader (Naschy), his less-attractive brother (also Naschy), and a beautiful redhead (Romy) from a cursed English family. And Night of the Werewolf (La Retorno del Hombre Lobo, 1980) is a genre mash-up directed by Naschy in which he stars as the wolfman Waldemar Daninsky and faces off against a bevy of vampire women led by Elizabeth Bathory herself. (Scroll way down to read about some problems with these discs.)

Flight of the Red Balloon is one of those movies where nothing much happens. It's a simple, relatively peaceful film, notable in part because director Hou Hsao-Hsien is shooting outside Asia for the first time. Hou's starting point--dictated by Paris's Musee d'Orsay, which commissioned the film--is La Ballon Rouge, the 1956 Albert Lamorisse film about a little boy and his companion in the streets of Paris, a floating red balloon.

When I read Glenn Kenny's line about Iron Man being, essentially, the best Marvel superhero movie to date, I have to admit: it pissed me off. Or, at least, Kenny pissed all over the Spider-Man fanboy inside me. But movie critics are all standing in line to carry Iron Man's jock, so what do I know?

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Miramax)

Following a stroke that paralyzed him nearly completely, Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote his memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by listening to a bedside assistant read out all the letters of the alphabet and blinking each time she reached the correct one. This film is about the metaphor described in the book's title--Bauby's ruined body is like a diving bell, keeping him from interacting with the world outside, but his still-agile imagination is more like a butterfly. Director Julian Schnabel is a painter-turned-filmmaker who approaches the matter with an artist's instinct for aesthetics, and the film's first half-hour or so is a tour de force. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, known for his work with Steven Spielberg, creates a first-person experience full of both beauty and terror, imagining what the world must have looked like to Bauby in those first few days after he came out of his coma. The rest of the film, including flashbacks and fantasy sequences that amount to a contemporary take on Fellini's 8 1⁄2, is more ordinary (a tearful Max Von Sydow is excellent in what amounts to a cameo), but Mathieu Amalric gives life to Bauby's clear-eyed, life-affirming prose in an expert voiceover. (Related: Julian Schnabel in Pleasantville) Originally published in the White Plains Times.

Buy it from Amazon.com: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Charlie Wilson's War (Universal)

Charlie Wilson’s War is a rare thing—a funny political film, a sexy history lesson. Director Mike Nichols brings a light comic touch to the story of the Democratic Texas Congressman (Tom Hanks) with a thing for the ladies and a soft spot for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Julia Roberts plays the wealthy conservative socialite who convinces Wilson to orchestrate the covert diversion of hundreds of millions of dollars to the Afghan rebels in the years following the Soviet invasion in 1979. Neither Hanks nor Roberts is particularly convincing as a Texas politico, but that’s OK. The film crackles whenever Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing CIA agent Gust Avrakotos, comes on screen, ripping mischievously through his sardonic dialogue and bringing everyone else’s game up a notch. Adapted from a book by the late George Crile, Aaron Sorkin's screenplay strongly suggests that the Congressional failure to help rebuild Afghanistan’s decimated post-war infrastructure helped make that country an eventual hotbed of terrorist activity. But what sticks is the criticism of U.S. politics as essentially a popularity contest, driven by friendships, favors, and fickle public opinion—a system prone to leave jobs unfinished as they become unfashionable. Originally published in the White Plains Times.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Charlie Wilson's War (Widescreen)

Easy Living (Universal)

Preston Sturges began his career at Paramount in 1937 by writing this Depression-era-New-York comedy about a wealthy industrialist (Edward Arnold) known as The Bull of Broad Street, his unhappy son (Ray Milland) who leaves home to work as a busboy at an automat, and working girl Mary Smith (Jean Arthur), whose life changes after a crazy-expensive fur coat chucked off the roof of a Manhattan apartment building lands on her head. (She turns around, angrily, and demands, "What's the big deal anyway?" The turbaned dude behind her responds, deadpan, "Kismet." It's that kind of screenplay.) Turns out the coat is a powerful status symbol, and Mary soon learns that nothing attracts wealth as powerfully as, well, more wealth. The no-frills slapstick of director Mitchell Leisen (an accomplished art director and costume designer) is no substitute for the elegance that Sturges would later develop helming his own material, but it's fairly well-tuned for this sophisticated, breezily entertaining farce of misunderstood identities. And Jean Arthur is terrific. I'm not sure how good the DVD looks, but it's got to be better than my VHS copy, which was recorded from Showtime almost 20 years ago.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Easy Living (Universal Cinema Classics)