Roland Joffé
Adventure, Drama, History
Warner Home Video
PG
Jeremy Irons plays a Spanish Jesuit who goes into the South American wilderness to build a mission in the hope of converting the Indians of the region. Robert DeNiro plays a slave hunter who is converted and joins Irons in his mission. When Spain sells the colony to Portugal, they are forced to defend all they have built against the Portugese aggressors.

Blake Edwards
Art House & International
Turner Home Ent
PG
Blake Edwards's delightful "Victor/Victoria" may be one of the last of the great, old-style movie musical comedies--it is so good, it was turned into a hit Broadway stage musical years later. And both versions starred Edwards's wife Julie Andrews (the former Mary Poppins) in the title role--as Victor and Victoria. She's a down-and-out singer who hooks up with a flamboyantly gay theatrical veteran (Robert Preston), and together they become the toast of 1934 Paris by dreaming up a provocative nightclub act in which Victoria assumes the identity of a man in drag. So, in other words, Andrews plays a woman playing a man playing a woman ... and that's only the beginning of the sexual identity confusions that provide the fuel for this splendidly classy slapstick musical farce. (Yes, it's all those things.) James Garner, as a Chicago club owner, finds himself strangely besotted with this stylish, androgynous creature--even though he thinks Victor/Victoria is a man. Legendary Hollywood composer Henry Mancini (a longtime collaborator with Edwards) won his last Oscar for the score; Andrews, Preston, and Lesley Ann Warren, as Garner's cheeky girlfriend, were also nominated. Musical highlights include Victor/Victoria's sizzling "Le Jazz Hot" (in which Andrews shows off her incredible vocal range); another showstopper for Victor/Victoria, "The Shady Dame from Seville"; Preston's witty ode to "Gay Paree"; Warren's hilarious burlesque number, "King's Can-Can"; and a charmingly casual yet elegant side-by-side number, "You and Me," done in a small club by Preston and Andrews in tuxedos. "--Jim Emerson"

Annie Sundberg, Ricki Stern
Documentary
International Film Circuit / Break Thru Films
NR
"The Devil Came on Horseback" presents a first-person account of the genocide in Darfur. Former Marine Captain Brian Steidle joined the African Union in 2004 to help monitor the cease-fire in Sudan. As he puts it, "All I had was a camera, a pen, and paper. I was totally unprepared for what I'd see." An unarmed military civilian, he describes his observations, via voice-over and audio recordings, as filmmakers Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern alternate between their contemporary footage and his images of slaughtered civilians and incinerated villages. When his contract ends, Steidle leaves in disillusionment. He wrote his reports and took his pictures, but nothing changed. Since reporters lacked the same degree of access, he goes to "The New York Times", and they publish his photographs. The soldier-turned-activist proceeds to spread the word everywhere he can. Aside from Steidle, the film features his sister Gretchen Wallace, founder of Global Grassroots (an organization working with female victims in Sudan and Rwanda), and Senator Barack Obama, who has also made Darfur his personal mission. The title comes from a loose translation of janjaweed, the government-backed Arab militias behind the atrocities to which Steidle bore witness. (Steidle and his sister use the same title for the book they wrote together.) As in their previous documentary, "The Trials of Darryl Hunt", Sundberg and Stern maintain a measured tone, but their subject's horrifying images speak for themselves. "The Devil Came on Horseback" is accompanied by Wallace's "Supporting Survivors", a short film about Global Grassroots. "--Kathleen C. Fennessy"

Jeffrey Reiner
Action & Adventure
Universal Studios Home Entertainment
Unrated
 


Stills from Caprica (Click for larger image)

Ray McCormack, Basil Gelpke, Reto Caduff
Documentary
DOCURAMA
NR
While the previous eco-doc "Who Killed the Electric Car?" spent some time on the world's oil crisis, "A Crude Awakening" (formerly "OilCrash") builds an entire film around the subject. Swiss journalist Basil Gelpke and Irish filmmaker Ray McCormack have constructed their narrative in a conventional manner, alternating between talking heads, archival footage, and modern-day material, but the addition of several pieces by Phillip Glass is an artful touch (and evokes his work on 1988's "The Thin Blue Line"). Throughout, a diverse array of experts from the U.S., Azerbaijan, Venezuela, and other countries explain how the 20th century became addicted to "the blood of the dinosaurs," and why contemporary society needs to change course. As attorney/activist Matthew David Savinar puts it, "Oil is our God." As Stanford professor Terry Lynn Karl adds, "More and more oil is going to come from less and less stable places...places that actually challenge the taking of oil in the first place." One of the more chilling revelations concerns the discrepancy between the reserves oil-producing nations claim they possess and the actual amount. These padded estimates allow them to drill with impunity, leading to an abundance of wealth in the short term and cataclysmic consequences once they've depleted their supply of this non-renewable resource. "A Crude Awakening" isn't exactly a day-brightener, but Gelpke and McCormack are comprehensive and impartial in their inquiry, which makes for an informative examination of a vitally important subject. Extras include extended interviews with four participants and bonus chapter "Petrostates". "--Kathleen C. Fennessy"

Phillip Noyce
Action & Adventure
Paramount
PG-13
The third installment in the cinematic incarnation of Tom Clancy's CIA analyst Jack Ryan and the second starring Harrison Ford, this follow-up to "Patriot Games" is a more complex, rewarding, and bolder film than its predecessor. Ford returns as Ryan, this time embroiled in a failed White House bid to wipe out a Colombian drug cartel and cover up the mess. The script, by Clancy and John Milius ("Red Dawn"), has an air of true adventure about it as Ryan places himself in harm's way to extract covert soldiers abandoned in a Latin American jungle. There are a couple of remarkable set pieces expertly handled by "Patriot Games" director Phillip Noyce, especially a shocking scene involving an ambush on Ryan's car in an alley. The supporting cast is superb, including Willem Dafoe as the soldiers' leader, Henry Czerny as Ryan's enemy at the CIA, Joaquim de Almeida as a smooth-talking villain, Ann Magnuson as an unwitting confederate in international crime, and James Earl Jones as Ryan's dying boss. The DVD release has a widescreen presentation, theatrical trailer, closed captioning, optional French soundtrack, and optional Spanish subtitles. "--Tom Keogh"

Richard Attenborough
Biography
Carolina Bank

"Gandhi" is the tale of the "half naked fakir" (quote courtesy W.L.Churchill) who took on an Empire with nothing but truth, non-violence and indomitable will as weapons...and won.

Danny Schechter
Documentary
Cinema Libre
NR
Studio: Cinema Libre Studio Release Date: 09/26/2006 Run time: 98 minutes

Darren Aronofsky
Action & Adventure
Fox Searchlight
R
The mystery of Mickey Rourke's career comes to a grungy apotheosis in The Wrestler, the much-battered actor's triumphant return to the top rope. He plays Randy "The Ram" Robinson, a heavily scarred and medicated battler who's twenty years past his best moment in the ring. But he still schleps to every second-rate fight card he can get to, stringing out the paychecks (more likely a fistful of cash) and nursing what's left of his pride. His attempts to adjust to a more normal kind of life form the most absorbing sections in the movie, whether it's flirting with a stripper (Marisa Tomei is in good form, in every sense), establishing a bond with his understandably angry daughter (Evan Rachel Wood), or working behind the deli counter at a nondescript megastore. Rourke is commanding in the role; he obviously spent hours in the gym and the tanning salon, and his ease with the semi-documentary style adopted by director Darren Aronofsky allows him to naturalistically interact with the colorful real-life wrestlers who crowd the movie's ultra-believable locations. All of which helps distract from the film's overall adherence to ancient formula. You might find yourself waiting for the scene where the risk-taking Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream) pulls the switch and reveals his true motives for pursuing this otherwise sentimental story, but there's no switch. The Wrestler is an old-fashioned hoke machine, given grit by an actor who doesn't seem to be so much performing the role of ravaged survivor as embodying it. --Robert Horton

Michael Kirk
Documentary
PBS (Direct)
NR
9/11 and Al Qaeda, Afghanistan and Iraq, WMD and the Insurgency, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah and the Surge. For six years, FRONTLINE has been revealing those stories in meticulous detail, and the political dramas played out at the highest levels. Now, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the full saga will unfold in this special definitive documentary analysis of one of the most challenging periods in the nation's history.