The disc: The Exiles

The details: For too long, American independent filmmaking has been a wooly no-man’s land between the early 1950s work of Morris Engel and the rise of John Cassavetes in the 1960s. Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles is one of those discoveries that force movie critics to reassess their assumptions.

Mackenzie graduated from USC in 1956, and started to make a movie about a group of American Indians living in the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles — the romantic Angel’s Flight streetcar plays a picturesque part in the proceedings. The film takes place over one long night as the group falls apart and comes back together. Read the full story

The disc: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

The details: The first film Rawson Marshall Thurber directed was the raucous, hilarious Dodgeball. The second is the measured, extremely serious The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, from the novel by Michael Chabon.

Go figure.

Dodgeball made a lot of money and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh has been rushed to video after a bare nod to movie theaters, but it’s worth seeing, if for entirely different reasons than Dodgeball. Read the full story

The disc: Husbands

The details: Your feeling about John Cassavetes’ Husbands probably depends on your tolerance for overgrown man-children. Once you get past the hurdles that Cassavetes perversely erects for his audience — there are a couple of scenes in the first third of the picture that go on past the point of self-parody, not to mention endurance — the film settles down to a character study with teeth that almost overcomes the initial wave of self-indulgence.

Cassavetes, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara play three friends whose best pal suddenly dies. Bereft but unable to process anything in the conventional way, they go off on a binge and then head for London, leaving their families and lives flat. After more long nights of the soul involving alcohol and women, two of them return home, and one stays behind to (presumably) start a new life. Read the full story

The disc: Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer

The details: In Bert Stern’s great documentary Jazz on a Summer’s Day, shot at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958, Anita O’Day comes on in a beautiful hat, white gloves and a smile and proceeds to slay the audience with a killer set including Tea for Two and Sweet Georgia Brown. She makes you realize that there are great singers but very few who also embody immense sexual possibility. Read the full story

The DVD shelf:

The disc: Paris 36

The details: Paris 36 purposely recalls movies by Renoir (French Can-Can), Carne (Children of Paradise) and Truffaut (The Last Metro). It’s not as good as any of those pictures, but, as long as your expectations aren’t jacked up too high, it’s very pleasant nonetheless.

As the title indicates, it’s 1936 and Paris is full of communists trying to organize unions and fascists trying to kill communists. The story centers around an old vaudeville theater called the Chansonia, which is closed because nobody is going. But it reopens as a sort of communal enterprise, and is yet again teetering because the acts are all terrible. But things perk up when a beautiful young girl (Nora Arnezeder), the protégé of the landlord, turns out to be a great singer, and audiences once more begin to flock to the Chansonia.

At this point, the film offers up a couple of delightful song-and-dance numbers in the spirit of Warner Bros. and Busby Berkeley, which are slightly out of tone with the drama of the rest of the movie, which involves adultery, suicide and at least one murder. But the film is so eager to please that it largely dissolves doubt.

The cast is made up largely of unknowns, at least on this side of the Atlantic, but the production is very stylish, and Montmartre locations are nicely mixed in with studio work and even some old-fashioned miniatures. Paris 36 is hampered only by a certain self-consciousness at the heart of the picture, but if you’ve been in need of a French fix lately, this is the movie for you.

The extras: The Sony DVD offers several featurettes about the production and a commentary track with director Christopher Barratier.

Out this week:

Dwayne Johnson: Race to Witch Mountain

Jamie Foxx-Robert Downey Jr.: The Soloist

Beyonce Knowles: Obsessed

TV on DVD: Flight of the Conchords: The Complete Second Season; Project Runway: Season Five

On the horizon:

Tuesday: I Love You, Man; 17 Again; Michael Jackson: Moonwalking; The Class; Katyn; Gigantic

• Watchmen (Director’s Cut) (2008): Zack Snyder’s long-awaited adaptation of the groundbreaking graphic novel excises much of the striking peripheral material that made the genre-smashing comic by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon so deeply layered and compelling. But it still follows the plot, almost panel by panel. Snyder (300, Dawn of the Dead) uses a spectacular series of opening credits to set the stage. We witness the evolution of the superheroes, from the Minutemen circa World War II to the more modern Watchmen to Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. The Watchmen’s best days are behind them, though, since Richard Nixon, president in 1985 when the story is set, won the Vietnam War with the help of big, blue superhero Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) and his grinning, gun-toting amoral sidekick The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). But despite the rising threat of nuclear holocaust, Congress has outlawed superheroes, so the former masks tend to keep a low profile. One exception is Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), a flashy-dressing entrepreneur who seems bent on cashing in on every version of himself as action-hero figure. But then The Comedian is murdered, and the sociopathic Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) steps up to investigate whether some villain is knocking off superheroes with a big End Times endgame in mind. Warner. $34.98, $35.99 Blu-ray.

– CONNIE OGLE

• Coraline (2009): The best children’s stories aren’t afraid of the dark. Henry Selick’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s novel is essentially a horror movie for kids, but it is so gentle, funny and whimsical that even in its darkest moments, it never forgets its target audience. When little Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) opens a secret door behind the wallpaper in her bedroom, a glowing tunnel opens. When she explores the mysterious otherworld beyond — essentially a duplicate of her real, drab world, except that everyone is a lot nicer and happier — the viewer understands why she would be tempted never to return home. Except for one, exceedingly creepy detail: All the people in this other world, including Coraline’s parents (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman), have buttons for eyes. ”You could stay here forever if you wanted to,” the sweet, doting alternate mom tells her. ”There’s just one little thing we need to do.” Cue the thread and needle. Selick is the only animator left in Hollywood still making full-length, stop-motion films, and he’s so good at his craft that the film is worth seeing just for its visuals. Besides, what kid won’t sit still for a story in which the magical place on the other side of the rainbow turns out to be a nightmare? Universal. $29.98, $34.98 two-disc edition, $39.98 Blu-ray.

– RENE RODRIGUEZ

The details: This is a strange, strangely affecting documentary about the one-time movie producer and chronicler of rich and infamous murderers for Vanity Fair. The filmmakers shadow Dunne as he covers the Phil Spector trial for Vanity Fair, jumping back and forth from his past to his present.

The disc: Dominick Dunne: After the Party

The outlines of Dunne’s story are well-known, but in telling it, and in offering up a full panoply of snapshots of his past, the full extent of his identification of he and his late wife Lenny as some sort of latter-day Scott and Zelda becomes clear, complete with a tragic Tender is the Night ending. Also unusual is Dunne’s own ambivalence about his life and its meaning, which is matched by the filmmakers’.

Dunne seems proud of his work covering trials and continually blowing the whistle on various rich malefactors, but he also seems very close to a guilty self-loathing. At one point, Dunne alludes to his prostate cancer, and the fact that he told his doctor he couldn’t care less if he lost his functioning sexuality as a result of surgery. The doctor told him he was the only patient he ever had that said that.

Dunne is more a scourge/scold/chronicler than a journalist, with a strange fixation on latching on to whatever tidbit he’s just been told by an invariably anonymous source as the bona fide truth, which led to a considerable embarrassment when he broadcast ridiculous assertions about the Chandra Levy murder case.

The film was shot on several different kinds of video, from state of the art to fairly low-tech, but the difference in textures keeps things interesting and the film moves along very well. Extras include a trailer and interviews with the films directors, Australians Kirsty de Garis and Timothy Jolley.

Paris Hilton arrived at the Ferguson U.S. Courthouse in downtown Miami at 8 a.m. Friday to testify in a lawsuit accusing her of not doing enough to promote her 2006 flick National Lampoon’s Pledge This!

She is scheduled to take the stand in her own defense Friday.

Hilton, who arrived with her attorneys and body guards, was wearing a sleeveless, slightly pleated black dress with a bow at the waist and black platform pumps. Her hair was in a bun, and she used a simple black head band.

In the movie, the 28-year-old heiress starred as a hottie sorority president at the fictional South Beach University.

On Thursday, Hilton showed up for her first day in court a little jet lagged after arriving in Miami on a flight from Dubai at 11:30 p.m. Wednesday.

She eschewed her traditional micro-skirt for a staid (for her) sleeveless, black-and-white tea-length number and black pumps, along with a Chanel handbag, sedate jewelry and a not-so-sedate flapper tiara in her hair.

Her blond extensions were put up into two long ponytails, which she fiddled with the entire time she was in the courtroom.

The lawsuit brought by movie investors seeks more than $8 million. They claim Hilton reneged on a contract to promote the film, including its DVD release. They say she refused interviews and other promotional opportunities.

Defense attorney Michael Weinstein countered Thursday that between December 2006 and May 2007, Hilton ”promoted the hell out of this movie,” in which she had her first starring role (unless you’re counting her infamous One Night In Paris), and for which she received a cool $1 mil salary.

She stopped promoting the film in June 2007, when she entered a California jail after a DUI conviction. Hilton ”fulfilled the norm of what most Hollywood actresses do,” and attended the film’s premiere, Weinstein said.

Chief Judge Federico A. Moreno cracked jokes during the arguments. ”How long does she have to promote this thing? Like, would Ronald Reagan promote a movie from the 1940s? It would be ridiculous,” Moreno said.

Moreno seemed to be leaning toward a settlement, telling the attorneys where the lounges were so they could “iron things out.”

Moreno also had another suggestion: “While Paris is here, why not promote it now? All weekend will be a lot more than 35 minutes in Tokyo.”

Hilton contends she plugged the movie extensively and met the contract’s requirements. She said the producers made unreasonable demands for appearances when her schedule was full.

The movie cost $7.5 million to make but earned only about $2.9 million.

Hilton will be in town through Tuesday to defend herself. No word on where she’s staying.

–TIM CHAPMAN AND MADELEINE MARR

Miami Herald staff Marice Cohn Band and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

HOLLYWOOD — Michael ’n’ Hope. Elliot ’n’ Nancy. Melissa. Ellyn. And poor Gary.

You knew them once, and you can know them again. After 18 long years, the hand-wringing, self-reflecting, yuppie Philadelphian boomers of Thirtysomething will enter the (legal) home video market: Season 1 of the seminal drama is scheduled for DVD release Aug. 25, with its three subsequent seasons coming out at an approximate rate of every six months. Read the full story

Get funky with Lauren, Travis and Courtney…

The rhythm is gonna get ya, couch potatoes. If you haven’t taken advantage of the exercise option in our So You Think You Can Dance drinking game, put down yer snifter and grab your sweats.

Starting July 21, you can get in shape with popular finalists from previous seasons in two new DVDs called SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE: get fit, each offering three types of workouts and bonus interviews with the dancers.

On “Cardio Funk“, featuring Lauren Gottlieb, Courtney Galliano and Travis Wall (who’s hard to recognize in the cheesy cover photo; you know he had NOTHING to do with THAT outfit) you get:

o Introduction
o Warm-Up

Workouts
o Hip Hop – Lauren
o Contemporary – Travis
o Disco – Courtney
o Cardio Funk Bonus Workout
o Cool Down

Bonus Features:
o Interview with executive producer Nigel Lythgoe
o Interview with Lauren
o Interview with Travis
o Interview with Courtney

Read the full story