edited by Jonathan Doyle

Mafioso (The Criterion Collection, 3.18.2008) Nino Badalamenti is a supervisor in a car manufacturing plant who hasn't taken a vacation in over two years. On his way out the door to visit his beloved childhood hometown of Sicily -- with his blonde wife and daughters -- Nino is handed a package by his boss and asked to deliver it to a powerful and influential Sicilian gangster named Don Vincenzo. Once in Sicily, Nino has a hoot seeing friends and family, but his wife has trouble fitting in and is unfairly dismissed as a snob by Nino's family. Even more worrisome, Nino finds himself entangled in an intricate web of secret mafioso dealings and is eventually sent on an unexpectedly... elaborate errand. (continued)

Upcoming

July 2

Hancock

July 3

The Whackness

July 4

Diminished Capacity

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson

Holding Trevor

Kabluey

We are Together

July 9

Full Battle Rattle

July 11

A Man Named Pearl

August

Eight Miles High

Garden Party

Harold

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Meet Dave

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired

The Stone Angel

July 18

A Very British Gangster

Before I Forget

The Dark Knight

The Doorman

Felon

Lou Reed's Berlin

Transsiberian

July 22

Two Tickets to Paradise

July 23

Boy A

Emotion in Truth

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There are more to movies than just form -- content counts for a lot. I could list 100 well-regarded movies off the top of my head, docs and features alike, that you could arguably call boring or so-whatty in the way they're shaped and/or paced, and yet they're compelling as hell because of the current inside them. And yet here's a columnist saying Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth is "boring" and "not a movie", "feels like it was pretty much assembled, not directed", "Castor Oil is good for you...but that doesn't make it taste any better" and so on. Sam Fuller often said the essence of a good movie is emotion, and it stuns me to consider that some can see Truth and just not feel it. As the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland put it in today's edition, this film is "extraordinarily gripping...those who have known the arguments [about global warming] for years, intellectually, suddenly find themselves moved emotionally by Gore and stirred into action." An emotional response to a portrait of a world being climactically suffocated and only ten or fifteen years shy of total devastation is not required of anyone -- by all means, fly your blase flag, it's a free country -- but honestly...