Jeong Jun-hwan's Save The Green Planet! (Koch Lorber) dedicates most of its first hour to the torture of a corporate executive by a mentally impaired man who's convinced that his victim is an infiltrator from the Andromeda galaxy. The movie looks kind of goofy until the violence starts, at which point it appears to be tonally off. But like a lot of the new Korean directors, Jeong freely mixes genres and moods, building to a succession of astonishing setpieces, simultaneously gruesome and gorgeous…
The first few scenes in Paul Haggis' Crash (Lion's Gate) have an audacious sting, but once it becomes clear that every scene will be choked with heavy-handed commentary on racism in America, its connection to reality seems increasingly distant. And that's before all the relentlessly programmatic irony kicks in, with racists redeemed and the tolerant tarnished…
In a strong rebuke to reality-TV dominance, last year the networks produced several uncommonly ambitious dramas, none better than J.J. Abrams' Lost, which was ironically inspired by the reality-TV standard Survivor. Lost: The Complete First Season (Buena Vista) includes a few deleted flashback scenes and something called "The Art Of Matthew Fox," but it's most useful for viewers who don't want to wait until next week for a cliffhanger to be resolved. The bad news: This show is all cliffhangers…
The former "bad boy" of new Korean cinema—and that title takes some doing to achieve—Kim Ki-duk threw a curveball with his serene Buddhist reverie Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… And Spring, and he continues to mature with 3-Iron (Sony), a curious and mesmerizing love story. If nothing else, the film's hero may be the most considerate squatter ever conceived: His home invasions leave places looking spiffier than they did when he arrived…
Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel (La Ciénaga) doesn't play by the rules: Rather than clearly establish the conflict within a scene or even dramatize it to any great degree, she'll just plop the camera down in the middle of the action and soak in all the incidental details. Her superb second feature, The Holy Girl, (Warner Bros.) takes place largely in a second-rate hotel, and the tight interiors contribute to a thick mood of suffocated eroticism. It also features the year's most ambiguous ending.