The Best DVDs You've Never Seen, Just Missed or Almost Forgotten: A Guide for the Curious Film Lover

We produce a radio feature [...] that recommends great indie, documentary, and foreign films to rent. Toward this end, we are always looking for recommendations to watch and review. This book had several suggestions that reminded us of films that we loved and wanted to revisit. Though the descriptions are short and not particularly insightful, there were several reminders of films that we want to revisit. It is a cool reference.

The title explains the rationale of this guide pretty well and, for my taste, its admittedly quirky list came out about right. The five New York Times writers picked movies that I remember fondly and would like to see again, some that I had missed, and a few that I hadn't heard of at all -- a nice mix. Only a few on the list were what I'd call duds. Each film title is followed by a three or four paragraph plot description, plus the film's date, running time, MPAA rating, and a list of the director and lead actors. Except for the longer plot description, that's less information than you'll find in the Leonard Maltin or Videohound guides, so clearly this book's usefulness lies in the selection of recommended films. That, of course, is a matter of taste and preference: the connoisseur who wants an extensive list of Theo Angelopoulos' films will likely be as disappointed as someone looking for Michael Bay masterpieces. There's only so much you can do with a 500-film list aimed at a wide readership. As one reviewer correctly pointed out, this book does not include the most obscure art house features. Neither does it include Hollywood's biggest blockbusters. Most readers, I think, will find the film descriptions free of spoilers but detailed enough to make decision-making easy -- an advantage this book has over the larger guides with much briefer descriptions. Unfortunately, the book lacks an index. Films are listed alphabetically by title but there's no direct way to look up the works of favorite actors or directors. This, then, will be a great guide for some and less useful for others. Scorsese's AGE OF INNOCENCE and Almodovar's ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER are recommended, as are (flipping through at random) BLUE VELVET, BOB ROBERTS, LES DESTINEES, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, GODS AND MONSTERS, THE GOOD GIRL, A HISTORY OF BRITAIN, HOFFA, MIAMI BLUES, A MIDNIGHT CLEAR, THE PAPER, PEEPING TOM, RUN LOLA RUN, RUSHMORE, 13 CONVERSATIONS ABOUT ONE THING, THIRTEEN DAYS, WAKING LIFE, and WALKABOUT. The Adrian Lyne LOLITA is here but the Stanley Kubrick version is not. If you thought BAD SANTA was vulgar, vile, loathsome, and misogynistic (which it was), this might not be your book. If you thought it was the funniest Santa Claus movie ever (which it also was), this book could be the perfect companion to your Must See list.

Tired of wandering the aisles of the video store, only to succumb to yet another film made for teenage boys? Then pick up this new guide, which boasts 500 wide-ranging reviews of everything from art films, small-scale indies and foreign-language films, to coming-of-age comedies and thrillers that "flourish on the far side of respectability." The one-page reviews, all organized alphabetically, are sure to enthuse even the staunchest cinephile - but especially fans of "The New York Times." You won't agree with everything, to be sure. But there's definitely something for everyone here. A great gift book for a cinephile.

I had high hopes for this guide, as I generally respect the reviews of A.O. Scott and the New York Times movie review crew. However, this book disappoints in several ways: 1) The movies are heavily skewed towards those released in the last 10 years. The more recent a movie, the less likely I am to have "almost forgotten" it. Sure, Metropolis is in here, but very few other movies until the 1990s. What I'm looking for in a book of this title is more older movies that I am more likely to never have heard fo. 2) Some of the recommended movies are pretty questionable, in my book. I understand there is bound to be difference of opinion, but I doubt that flicks like "Drumline", and "Freddy got Fingered", rank amoung the best movies I've never seen.

Peter Nichols (ed.), The Best DVDs You've Never Seen, Just Missed, or Almost Forgotten (New York Times, 2005) This is a book whose stated aim is to bring to light obscure titles now available in America on DVD. A. O. Scott says in the preface that this is a guide to those movies "you may not have even known you were missing." Then you get to the actual movies. It's a weird, weird universe where even the casual film buff has somehow forgotten About a Boy, Adaptation, Almost Famous, American Beauty, American Psycho, Angels in America, or Atlantic City. Many of them were nominated for Oscars, most of them won. (The two exceptions in that list were a TV miniseries that swept a number of Emmys and one of the most controversial mainstream films of the past twenty years.) And that's just the As. You'll see a lot of Oscar nominees in this book. None of them, I think, is all too terribly obscure. And yet while Scott also alleges that the book tends towards the "art film", which in America often translates to "flicks that aren't in English", this compilation glosses over the most celebrated foreign directors-- Kieslowski, Almodovar, Inarritu, Kusturica, etc.-- and manages to completely ignore a number of only slightly more obscure directors celebrated pretty much everywhere on the planet except America (for example, not a single Theo Angelopoulos movie makes an appearance). Not bad if you consider that the title should have been The Best DVDs You've Just Never Gotten Around to Seeing After Hearing a Whole Lot of Hype About the Movies They Contain. ***