Released in 1984, this widescreen actionfest/drug-addiction drama was the final film of only three directed by longtime action choreographer Tang Chia — and one of the last films ever released by the legendary Shaw Brothers movie studio, which in its heyday made dozens of movies every year but by this time was struggling to keep up with the popular trends ushered in by Bruce Lee and expanded upon by Jackie Chan and friends.

Crummy by mainstream standards, this low-budget martial-arts programmer has lots of charm, starting with the opening shot depicting the inside of a church with saloon-style swinging doors banging against the wind and dust outside, and Tarantino fans will make note of some of the source elements he appropriated for his Kill Bill revenge pastiche. But the real attraction here is Yumi Higaki, playing a talented but reluctant martial-arts disciple seeking payback for injuries to the body and pride of her master (Sonny Chiba, in an extended cameo at the film's beginning). I had seen her previously in Sister Street Fighter, released two years earlier, but her poise and confidence has improved here. A prototype for any number of femme videogame ass-kickers, from Chun Li down the line, she has an overgrown-kid look to her that makes her determination and eventual triumph in the violent coming-of-age scenario more rousing.

Dawn (Jess Weixler), the protagonist of writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein's playfully gynephobic black comedy Teeth, is a high-school abstinence advocate whose no-sex-before-marriage stance masks her deep discomfort with her own body. Because Teeth is also a horror movie, the root of her fear is physical, not psychological -- as Anne Carlisle put it in the druggy downtown classic Liquid Sky, "this pussy has teeth."

Tim Burton may not seem like the ideal adapter of a Stephen Sondheim musical, but when you consider the wry ghoulishness of this throat-slashing tragedy, the aptness of Burton’s dark flamboyance is clear. With input from Sondheim himself, Sweeney Todd has been smartly and ruthlessly condensed to fit a two-hour template — some songs cut entirely, several more liberally pruned — without completely gutting the original musical. Burton’s re-conception of the material is where the bigger changes have taken place. The casting of Johnny Depp, performing a brooding character study that shaves the comic surface from his famous pirate Jack Sparrow, is a stroke (turns out he can sing, too!), but Helena Bonham Carter, in strung-out goth mode, is never quite able to nail down her character (or maybe it's just difficult to imagine such an anti-Angela Lansbury in the role). Alan Rickman and the rubber-faced Timothy Spall can play comic adversaries in their sleep, and the anatomically enhanced Sacha Baron Cohen steals each scene he appears in as the barber Pirelli. The bloodletting is copious and graphic, but executed with a theatrical flair that softens the grisliness. Finally, Burton’s vision of the aspirationally romantic “By the Sea” is a riot — a perfect mini-movie with a stone-faced Depp channeling Buster Keaton. It’s a terrific musical in an uncommonly good year for movie musicals. (A version of this review originally appeared in the White Plains Times.)

Buy it from Amazon.com: Sweeney Todd - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street or Sweeney Todd - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Two-Disc Special Collector's Edition)

No Country For Old Men is, probably, the single most critically lauded film of the Coen Brothers' career. It's also a departure, especially in that it largely subjugates their own exhibitionist hallmarks of style and characterization to those established in the source material – in this case an expertly grim genre potboiler by Cormac McCarthy. No Country gets great benefits from the outstanding performances at its center – Javier Bardem's cold-blooded killer the kind of outsized stereotype that self-identifies as a Coen creation, but paying dividends in counterpoint to Josh Brolin's quiet desperado and Tommy Lee Jones's mournful good-ol-boy sheriff. I was yanked out of the story when vibe-busting reminders of the old-school Coen Brothers' schtick appeared on screen, especially the straight-out-of-central-casting types who inhabit the film's smaller speaking parts – the motel clerk who woodenly insists Brolin select from a menu of room choices, the mama who dodders through her scenes like a Spike Jonze Jackass parody of the elderly, and even the gas-station proprietor whose highly directed performance almost wrecks that crucial early, mood-setting scene with Chigurh. In a broad comedy like the wonderful paean to country folk and bluegrass O Brother Where Art Thou or the bountiful ode to stoner lifestyles The Big Lebowski, they'd be welcome, maybe even show-stealers. But juxtaposed with No Country's sad-eyed hero performances, they feel forced, inauthentic, even (here's that accusation so often lobbed at the Coens) crudely condescending. That's not to say that the Coens' style is a liability; they make consistently smart decisions in condensing and adapting McCarthy's novel, especially when it comes to packing the gist of Ed Tom Bell's lengthy monologues from the printed page into snatches of dialogue on screen. They work the story for suspense, fully exploiting the conventions of crime drama in a narrative (McCarthy's) that, eventually, deliberately flouts genre convention to terminate in a meditation on aging and mortality and maybe nostalgia. And they invent a scene that has the sheriff and the killer coming almost eyeball to eyeball across the portal of a motel-room door with a blasted-out lock cylinder, their simultaneous proximity and distance a necessarily cinematic expression that vaults beyond the source material. But the irony remains: two of our greatest cinema stylists have made the most critically lauded film of their career by ruthlessly corseting their formidable drive and vision into the literary strictures dictated by a great American novel. Seeing it a second time, at home, the melancholy grandeur of the film's final cut to black became even more apparent — reassurance that I wasn't simply bowing to conventional wisdom by placing it on my top-10 list. No Country For Old Men is a triumph for sure. But for the Coens, it's also something of a capitulation.

Buy it from Amazon.com: No Country for Old Men or No Country for Old Men [Blu-ray]

Waitress takes on an unavoidable added poignancy when you know the story behind it. (Actress Adrienne Shelly, a staple of the New York indie film scene since the late 1980s, was poised for a breakthrough as a director with this romantic dramedy. After the film was completed but before its Sundance premiere, Shelly was murdered in Greenwich Village. Waitress therefore plays as valedictory — a gently feminist celebration of love, life and motherhood.) Keri Russell stars as a great waitress and pie-maker stuck in a bad marriage (to a scruffy, clueless Jeremy Sisto). She falls for her gynecologist (Nathan Fillion) and struggles toward independence. Russell carries the film pretty well, and the deadpan Fillion (Serenity, Slither) is an odd but endearing choice as her romantic foil. The men in the film are completely out of focus, anyway, except for Andy Griffith (!), who appears in several scenes playing a creaky old plot device. The biggest problem is that you’ve seen this story many times before — woman with bad marriage and spunky friends finds the courage to make a new start. If this sounds like your idea of a good time, relax and enjoy.

Day Night Day Night (IFC)

I think of Day Night Day Night in some ways as a companion film to United 93. One is about a real event, one is imagined. One uses handheld camera and fast edits to convey a sense of urgency and naturalism, one gets much the same effect through long takes and subjective camerawork. Both are utterly gripping studies of how people react in high-stress situations — one is about the victims of terrorism, the other about the perpetrators. The protagonist of Day Night Day Night is an unnamed young woman (Luisa Williams) who has chosen to leave her life and her family behind to carry a bomb into Times Square in a backpack and detonate it. Writer/director Julia Loktev keeps all this material non-specific — the masked men who prep her for the job seem American; the guy who drives her into the city looks Korean; the folks who make the bomb look ... Jewish, maybe? It doesn't matter. Loktev forces audience identification with her as a frightened woman looking for redemption, not as a symbol of any specific political beef, by keeping the camera close to her face and body, and in certain moments showing us exactly what she sees. (Cinematographer Benoît Debie, who also shot Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, knows a thing or two about the subjective camera.) It's a slow-paced, methodical film, and also a very smart and instructive one that's sympathetic to its sad bomber without forgiving her her intentions.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Day Night Day Night

Spider Baby (MTI Home Video)

This is a week late, but the folks at MTI Home Video were kind enough to send me a review copy of their September 25 release of Spider Baby, a movie whose reputation I knew well but had somehow managed to avoid until now. To my delight, it's an entirely excellent B-grade horror comedy that exhibits director Jack Hill's trademark good-natured humor but also manages to crank up an impressive creep factor in a couple of scenes and fulfills its disturbo potential without being self-consciously transgressive. (This was strong material for the mid-1960s.) The cast, including Lon Chaney Jr. and latter-day Rob Zombie stalwart Sid Haig, is generally very good — and Jill Banner, the big-eyed newcomer who played the arachnophilic slasher Virginia (pictured), is sexy as all hell. The DVD image quality is excellent and "The Hatching of Spider Baby," a new short documentary consisting of latter-day interviews with the stars and filmmakers, is good fun as well. There's also an audio commentary with Hill and Haig. My only quibble is with the audio track, which starts to exhibit a droning noise that sounds like digital distortion in the film's midsection. (Whether this artifact was introduced by this particular DVD transfer I can't say.) Otherwise it's an excellent release.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Spider Baby (Special Edition)

Red Road (Tartan)

In a contemporary Glasgow where surveillance cameras seem to be trained on every square meter of public real estate, Jackie (Kate Dickie) is a CCTV operator -- she watches the cameras, looking for suspicious activity -- who turns stalker when she spies a recently released ex-con (Tony Curran) on one of her umpteen video screens. Director Andrea Arnold's feature debut is a subdued but tense character study placed in the framework of a thriller. The suspense is generated by the film's close scrutiny of Dickie herself: her previous relationship with the man is unclear, as is her ultimate motive in tracking him down at a dingy flat on Red Road. And Arnold makes something interesting out of the repeated transitions from public spaces, where urban interactions can be observed and preserved via videotape, to private ones where relations can turn dicier and more intense. The result is an engrossing study of ambiguity, and human lives frustrated by circumstance, that turns unexpectedly provocative -- and sexually explicit -- before beating a hasty retreat. The film feels more ordinary as it progresses, leaving behind the intriguing bank of video screens with its implications of Rear Window-style voyeurism, and eventually overexplaining itself. There's a deliberate indie-film cleverness to the psychology and a tidiness to the emotions that lessens the essential mystery at the heart of Jackie's behavior. Still, it's satisfyingly unsettling viewing.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Red Road

Dexter: The First Season (Showtime/Paramount)

Premium cable's answer to C.S.I. is this comic crime drama about a forensics expert at the Miami police department who moonlights as a serial killer. Dexter is a real crowd-pleaser, in large part because the show's writers have figured out how to walk a fine line between condemning Dexter's actions and making him thoroughy likable. His victims, you see, are already guilty of their own heinous crimes -- in many cases, Dexter just has to track them down before his colleagues actually get to them, or even realize what they're looking for. The central performance by Michael C. Hall is a make-or-break proposition, veering between hammy affability and high-strung sadism. If you don't appreciate Hall's smirky, snarky approach to the material, Dexter is a tough sell. But Dexter boasts a strong supporting cast as well as a glossy visual style (I interviewed the HD cinematographer, Romeo Tirone, last year for Film & Video), a propulsive story arc that'll push you easily from episode to episode, and a winning playfulness about fairly heavy psychological issues.

Buy it from Amazon.com: Dexter - The First Season

The Lives of Others (Sony)

The German film The Lives of Others is about the East German secret police, but it doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to suggest certain parallels between the Stasi's eavesdropping and intimidation tactics and certain post-9/11 tendencies in the contemporary U.S. government. Writing for the White Plains Times earlier this year, I noted that "Ulrich Mühe plays Captain Wiesler, a surveillance and interrogation specialist with big eyes and a serious, perpetual glare.... [He] is terrific as the conflicted functionary who mounts a covert, one-man struggle against the orders he's meant to follow." (As it turns out, Mühe -- who also appeared as the father in Michael Haneke's Funny Games -- died last month of stomach cancer. He was 54.) I also complained then about writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's "mile-wide sentimental streak," but I've softened a bit on that count. This is really solid filmmaking, and it should translate well to DVD.

Buy it from Amazon.com: The Lives of Others

Here's the bad news: it's not as good as Dead & Buried. But it's still pretty good. Director Gary Sherman's 1972 feature, known in the U.S. as Raw Meat, is a spooky subway movie that takes place in the London Underground but features images of tunnelled emptiness that should send at least a mild shiver of recognition down the spine of any big-city dweller without the coin to take taxicabs every damn place under the sun. Like Dead & Buried, it involves a cop in over his head, but this time the cop — played in typically amiable style by Donald Pleasence — isn't in any real danger. Instead, the protagonists are a hip young couple (their shared pad displays poster tributes to Hendrix and Che Guevara) who trip over an unconscious man on their way up the subway stairs after the last train departs the station. She wants to find help; he doesn't want to get involved. And before a constable can be summoned, the body disappears.