It won the National Board of Review award for Best Film of 2008 and numerous international film awards and was an early Oscar favorite for the triple crown of Best Animated Feature, Best Documentary and Best Foreign Film. Alas, Ari Folman’s Israeli film Waltz With Bashir ended up being nominated only in the latter category, losing to the Japanese film Departures which has thus far had only limited release in the U.S.

A unique film that defies easy description, Waltz With Bashir is well worth your time. Using the animated likeness of the filmmaker as its protagonist, it is about the suppressed memory of not only Folman, but an entire generation of Israelis who fought in the first Lebanon War twenty years earlier.

A mixture of the real and the surreal, the animation turns to documentary footage as Folman’s memory returns in the film’s last few shocking moments.

Waltz With Bashir is available in both English and the original Hebrew on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Another award winning Israeli film, Eran Riklis’ Lemon Tree features a heart rending performance by Hiam Abbass as a poor Palestinian widow whose lemon grove in the West Bank is located across the street from the Israeli Defense Minister’s new home. As such it is declared a security risk and the woman is served with a notice that her beloved lemon trees will be cut down. Frightened, but unbowed, she fights the Defense Minister in court, even taking her case to the Israeli Supreme Court, finding an unexpected ally in the Defense Minister’s wife.

Lemon Tree is not yet available on DVD in Region 1, but is available in Region 2.

Another film awaiting a Region 1 DVD release is the controversial UK/Irish co-production, Hunger which marked the directorial debut of Steve McQueen, the brilliant Irish filmmaker who is no relation to the late actor of the same name.

McQueen’s film has won numerous international awards including the Irish Film and Television Awards for Best Film, Actor (Michael Fassbender) and Supporting Actor (Liam Cunningham).

An absorbing, if difficult, film to watch, it chronicles the intolerable living conditions and brutal beatings of the Irish prisoners administered by the British guards at Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison in the 1980s. Protests against the treatment of the inmates and their struggle for basic human rights led to the IRA prison hunger strike which claimed the lives of ten inmates.

Fassbender plays Bobby Sands, who led the strike, during which he was elected to Parliament while he lay dying. His ordeal is shown in excruciating detail. This is not a film for the faint of heart.

Cunningham plays the prison chaplain.

When it will be released in Region 1 is anybody’s guess.

Vying with Waltz With Bashir and Departures for last year’s Best Foreign Oscar, Uli Edel’s epic German film The Baader Meinhof Complex is a riveting, no-holds-barred tale of the rise and fall of Germany’s RAF (Red Army Faction) that grew out of dissatisfaction with world events the group perceived to be a new fascism in the early 1970s, little by little creating their own terror attacks culminating in the failed international hijacking of an airliner.

It was produced by Bernd Eichinger, the man responsible for the highly acclaimed 2004 film about Hitler’s last days Downfall.

Released on DVD in Region 2 months ago, its Region 1 release has not been set. In fact, the film only had a limited showing in the U.S. last Fall.

A more accessible film from a German director is Tom Tykwer’s The International. Tykwer has struggled to retain the success of his breakout hit, Run Lola Run, for more than a decade now. His latest film, it’s sad to say, does little to restore his reputation as one of the current cinema’s most audacious artists.

Stylishly filmed in locations around the world including Berlin, Milan, New York and Istanbul, only the extended set piece action sequence in New York’s famed Guggenheim Museum achieves the sense of wonder Tykwer’s early work hinted at.

Clive Owen stays true to form as yet another of his self-sacrificing lone wolf heroes as the investigator out to bring down a Swiss bank which seeks to control the world through monetary control and illegal arms sales to third world countries. Co-star Naomi Watts plays yet another of her overworked career women, this time a New York Assistant D.A. Only Armin Mueller-Stahl as a heavy hearted senior advisor within the bank offers something new in the way of character interpretation among the main cast members. It’s a decent time killer, but not a film you’re likely to recall much of once it’s over.

The International is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

The latest comedy by P.J. Hogan, the once promising director of Muriel’s Wedding and My Best Friend’s Wedding, is Confessions of a Shopaholic, a film that is just as frenetic as his earlier efforts but hardly as good. A sort of anti-Sex and the City, the film’s heart is in the right place, it’s just that the forced comedy is not very funny. The film is at its best when it stops trying to be funny and lets the romance between Isla Fisher as the titled character and her boss, Hugh Dancy, take over.

The supporting cast of Kristin Scott Thomas, Joan Cusack, John Goodman, John Lithgow, Julie Hagerty, Christine Ebersole and others is largely wasted. Lynn Redgrave is completely unrecognizable as an elderly drunken society matron in one brief scene.

Confessions of a Shopaholic is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

One of the most unusual films ever made, Louis Malle’s My Dinner With Andre took critics and audiences by storm in 1981. Filmed in documentary style, it is about two old friends, theatre director Andre Gregory and playwright Wallace Shawn who have dinner together in an Upper East Side Manhattan restaurant. That’s it – two hours of two guys talking, but the talk which covers everything from love to death to superstition to money, is endlessly fascinating.

The two-disc Criterion Special Edition includes two hour-long supplements, a 1982 retrospective of Malle’s work narrated by Shawn and newly conducted separate interviews of Gregory and Shawn by writer-director Noah Baumbach.

It used to be that the major studios released their classic films in groups on DVD. Lately those releases have dwindled to the point of extinction. While we await the long delayed releases of Columbia’s classic comedies, Theodora Goes Wild and My Sister Eileen, promised for August 4, the studio has reached deep into its vaults to come up with an unusual release. Barely released in 1957, and then in a truncated version, Jack Garfein’s film of The Strange One is an almost literal transposition of the Actors’ Studio production of Calder Willingham’s End As a Man, the play on which it is based.

Ben Gazzara, George Peppard, Pat Hingle, Geoffrey Horne, Paul E. Richards, James Olson and Larry Storch all made their screen debuts here, as did Julie Wilson as a character interpolated into the film.

Originally a novel by Willingham, who later co-wrote the screenplays for Paths of Glory and The Graduate, the film is largely confined to cramped spaces perhaps psychologically revealing the mindset of director Garfein, an Auschwitz survivor at 15. Gazzara is the sadomasochist who lords it over his fellow Southern military cadets. Peppard is the good guy. The DVD restores the once heavily censored “homosexual undertones” mostly involving Richards’ character.

Gazzara provides a ten minute on-screen reminiscence, largely about the genesis of the play into film and nothing about the controversy over the censorship.

-Peter J. Patrick (June 23, 2009)