“California Dreamin’” and “Tetro” on DVD

Cristian Nemescu's "California Dreamin'" and Francis Ford Coppola's "Tetro" ride respective New Waves.

Francis Ford Coppola always said the future of filmmaking was low-budget self-expression — the proverbial teenage girl with her video camera, as he put it once — and since his last official Hollywood job, 1997′s “The Rainmaker,” he has been true to his word in his autumn years. Both “Youth Without Youth” (2007) and “Tetro” (2009) were made using the filmmaker’s own wine money, and so their glories and problems are Coppola’s and Coppola’s alone. “Tetro” is a palm-sized affair befitting an aging giant (think Kurosawa’s “Madadayo,” or Bergman’s “Saraband”), and the best of it oozes with Coppola’s bear-sized passions, from Italian-style family psychodrama to experimental theater to Argentina to movies themselves — particularly Michael Powell’s “The Tales of Hoffman,” which is not only excerpted as a pivotal flashback, but then reinvented in a new, lovely, digitally-decorated ballet suite that punctuates the primary story.

Which isn’t the best part: Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich), a waiter on a cruise liner, is stranded for a few days in Buenos Aires, and surprise visits his older brother (Vincent Gallo), who exiled himself from the family years earlier (and renamed himself Tetro). His reasons are shrouded in mystery and angst, and he’s also more than a little psychotic, held together by a fetching psychologist (Maribel Verdú) Tetro met (in flashbacks) at a very odd open-air group therapy hospital. Bennie knows almost nothing about his mother, or the boys’ monarchal famous-conductor father (Klaus Maria Brandauer), so he snoops, stays on in his brother’s charmingly disheveled garret, and triggers revelations, as you’d expect.

It’s not a ferociously compelling narrative hook, but the tug of war between brothers — between how they’re separate and yet help to define each other — is obviously a knot Coppola has always tried to untie, from the “Godfather” films to “Rumble Fish” (1983), of which “Tetro” is, in many ways, a remake. (Coppola’s brother August, Nicolas Cage’s father and by all accounts a brilliant, rangy and much-married man, just died this past October, four months after “Tetro” opened in the U.S.) The movie also resembles “Rumble Fish” in the fact that it is a stunningly inventive and unignorable piece of black-&-white cinematography (shot by Mihai Malaimare Jr.); virtually every Fellini-Ansel Adams image makes you thumb through the movie-memory Rolodex in your head searching for equivalents, and often come up wanting. But besides Verdú and the impossibly DiCaprio-esque Ehrenreich, who are both wickedly lovable, the most seductive thing about “Tetro” is its New Wave spirit, dictated as it is not by story logic but by obsession and passion and whim, unafraid of quasi-Beat sentiment (reportedly, Coppola is producing an adaptation of Kerouac’s “On the Road”), doped on the hot-tempered, fusing extremities of family, theatrics and Latin emotionalism.

“California Dreamin’” (MPI Home Video) is now available on DVD; “Tetro” (Lionsgate) is now available on DVD and Blu-ray.

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