CINEMA 16: EUROPEAN SHORT FILMS (Warp) The biggest names in this shorts collection are Christopher Nolan and Ridley Scott, but with all respect to said Oscar-nominated Brits, the real highlights lie elsewhere. Before Dawn folds an expansive sociopolitical critique into a single, astonishingly complicated 13-minute camera movement, with Hungarian director Balint Kenyeres giving countryman Bela Tarr a run for long-take supremacy. London-based animator Run Wrake’s Rabbit unfurls a cautionary tale of greed using vintage children’s reader illustrations — it’s sui generis and deeply freaky. And then there’s Swedish master Roy Andersson’s canonical 1991 effort World of Glory. The back end, with its meticulously framed deadpan vignettes, plays like a rehearsal of sorts for Songs From the Second Floor, but it’s the legendary first shot — a gut-twisting tableau of genocide and its mutely complicit witnesses — that will stay with you as long as you live. EXTRAS: commentaries on many films.
THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (Criterion) This loose adaptation of The Arabian Nights (produced by Alexander Korda and co-directed by Michael Powell) is a supremely dreamy fantasia — it doesn’t suspend disbelief so much as float blithely overtop of it. Nearly 70 years later, the handcrafted visuals still register as miraculous: each outsized sequence is a lush mini-masterpiece of technical innovation. EXTRAS: audio commentaries (including one with Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola), effects documentary, stills gallery, The Lion Has Wings (a propaganda film produced by Korda), trailers, more.
Also out this week
MAMA’S BOY (Warner) Anna Faris helps Jon Heder cut his apron strings in this clumsy comedy, which gains points for incorporating Morrissey’s lovely “America Is Not the World” into a climactic Say Anything parody — and loses them for resorting to a Say Anything parody in the first place. EXTRAS: director commentary, deleted scenes.
MEET THE SPARTANS (UNRATED PIT-OF-DEATH EDITION) (Fox) If you’ve ever wondered what a live-action version of Family Guy would look like, here it is: pop culture satire masquerading as satire. EXTRAS: cast and crew commentary, “Know Your Spartans” pop-culture trivia, music featurette, “Prepare for Thrusting,” set tour, gag reel.
SHARK SWARM (Genius Products) According to the Hallmark Channel’s website, this is “the thriller that pits small-town values against big-buck deceit and (here comes the bold-face type) hundreds of man-eating sharks!” To which all I can add is: finally! EXTRAS: none.
Out June 10
The Bucket List, John Adams, Jumper, The Other Boleyn Girl and Larry the Cable Guy in Witless Protection, which, tragically, never got a Canadian theatrical release.