The Best Straight-to-DVD Films of 2008

Our official "B-movie" distribution stream -- straight-to-DVD releases -- grows in number and variety every...

6. “Le Deuxième Souffle”
Jean-Pierre Melville, France, 1966

Starting with an abstracted prison break and graduating to a successful heist that nevertheless spirals into disaster, this neglected wedge of Melvillian gangster angst continued to deepen the filmmaker’s trademarked terrain: rainy urban mazes peopled by lost men in fedoras, facing the inevitable uselessness of their lives. Melville owned the neo-noir.

7. “Kz”
Rex Bloomstein, Great Britain/Germany, 2006

This philosophically fluent documentary casts a gimlet eye on the ways the Holocaust is considered today — as a consumerist tourist trap. On the grounds of Mauthausen, a guide plainly tells us that industrialization in Austria at large only began around 1938, and was a product of concentration camp slave labor. Then the well-fed, middle class, camera-happy new-millennium tourists disembark for a guided tour of the most notorious death camp in Austria.

8. “The Free Will”
Matthias Glasner, Germany, 2006

Temperamentally restrained, Glasner’s unblinking, almost three-hour sojourn follows a German rapist from crime to prison release to recidivism and, strangely, romance. The film hits on themes larger than masculinity and sex criminality, but at the same time dares you to sympathize with the devil.

9. “Kilometre Zero”
Hiner Saleem, Iraq, 2005

Saleem is an Iraqi Kurd long expatriated to France, and his seventh film takes on the memories of the Saddam regime, as experienced on the road with a corpse in tow by a luckless Kurd during the Iran-Iraq War of the ’80s. It’s a discombobulating jaunt for anyone expecting any kind of definitive Kurdish-state-of-mind movie, much less an “Iraqi” film made amidst an ongoing occupation and civil war.

10. “Under The Pavement Lies the Strand”
Helena Sanders-Brahm, West Germany, 1974

The fiery, dogged, despairing feminist voice of the New German Cinema, Sanders-Brahms debuted with this classic, sexy new-waver, a kind of frau reimagining of Godard’s “Masculin-Feminin,” in which the failure of a post-1968 romance corresponds to the failure of all idealism, as it also liberates the woman.

Runners-up: “Please Vote for Me” (Weijun Chen, China/Denmark, 2007), “Quiet City” (Aaron Katz, U.S., 2007), “Her Name Is Sabine” (Sandrine Bonnaire, France, 2007), “Team Picture” (Kentucker Audley, U.S., 2007), “The Witman Boys” (Janos Szasz, Hungary, 1997), “No Mercy, No Future” (Helena Sanders-Brahms, West Germany, 1981), “Water Lillies” (Céline Sciamma, France, 2007), “Dance Party USA” (Aaron Katz, U.S., 2006), “The Substitute” (Ole Bornedal, Denmark, 2007), “Klimt” (Raul Ruiz, Austria/France/Great Britain, 2006), “The World Sinks Except Japan” (Minoru Kawasaki, Japan, 2006).

[Additional photos: "Shadow," 1956, POLART; "Under the Pavement Lies the Strand," 1975, Facets]

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