The Baader Meinhof Complex, a 2009 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee, continues this introspection, charting the rise and fall of the Baader-Meinhof Group, the inner circle of the hard-left terrorist organization The Red Army Faction, which besieged Germany and much of Europe from the late 1960s through the late ’70s.  

I’ve been complaining for years about Nicolas Cage’s slide from subversive, unpredictable actor (see Valley Girl or Vampire’s Kiss, among other ’80s gems) to the checkcashing Hollywood joke he appears to be today. An entire generation of moviegoers has essentially come of age thinking of Cage as the guy in big-budget mediocrities like The Rock and National Treasure movies.  

Because of the gentle family sitcoms of the period like Leave It to Beaver most of us think of the 1950s as a golden era for life in middle-class America. But the movies had a different view (as did literature), one suggesting that underneath the pleasantness not everything was perfect.  

Penelope Spheeris knows youth culture. From her notorious Punk and Metal docs to big studio successes like Wayne’s World, she has made a mark as a filmmaker with an eye for the looks, tastes and attitudes of America’s young.  

A scruffy, harelipped guy runs a lit candle across his naked body. The flame makes him wince in pain and whisper laughter. The laughs continue as he begins to masturbate furiously, eventually ejaculating a stream of fire high into the air. This shock opens Hungarian director György Pálfi’s Taxidermia, and it sets the tone perfectly.  

More than 30 years ago, Werner Fassbinder protégé Ulli Lommel set up camp in New York and became ensconced in the city’s burgeoning Punk movement. The experience inspired him to make a movie about the disaffected youth who were sneering at the music industry’s status quo at top volume with only the barest concern for structure, melody and convention.  

Tim Burton’s latest has catapulted Lewis Carroll’s most famous creation back into the cultural limelight. Capitalizing on this, Infinity Entertainment Group has released a bare-bones single-disc assemblage of related shorts and features that span the history of cinema — some adhering closer to Carroll’s vision than others. Though raggedy, the collection contains a few gems.  

Plenty of music fans have been waiting decades for this 1964 concert film — the greatest Rock concert film of all time, in many people’s opinion — to finally come out on DVD in its entirety. (A weird, truncated version called That Was Rock came out on video in the 1980s.) Here, finally, it is in all of its newly mastered glory — and is it ever terrific!   

Five years after the original, martial-arts whiz Tony Jaa returned to the world that made him famous, co-directing a follow-up with Ong Bak scripter Panna Rittikrai. Though touted as a prequel, Ong Bak 2: The Beginning holds zero ties to its progenitor — other than being a first-class martial-arts showcase.  

Jane Campion’s love letter to the brief but passionate romance between poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and his neighbor Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) does its best to combat the inherent limitations of the biopic genre, breathing life into characters whose unfortunate fates are known from the get-go.  

Charles Bronson is Britain’s most dangerous prisoner. No, not the badass American actor of Death Wish fame. Charles Bronson is the nickname of Michael Peterson, a criminal incarcerated in the British penal system for the past 34 years — 30 of which have been spent in solitary confinement.  

Year-end “best-of” lists give me the jitters. Yes, I know: poor Phil. It’s true, though. Ranking 12 months’ worth of DVD releases is an overwhelming task. Worse still is the mad rush to watch as many as possible as the year fades in an effort to catch an overlooked title. The stacks of unwatched screeners that skyscraper over my desk only compound the nerves.  

Australia immediately stirs the imagination. Outback regions populated by Aborigines and exotic animals. Free spirits devoted to surf and sand. Apocalyptic, anti-authoritarian warriors tearing up the landscape with hellcars.  

There are many reasons why you might not have heard of this fine sitcom. It initially ran on Showtime, before pay cable was a hip destination for original programming. A broadcast outlet picked it up, but FOX was only two years into its existence and audiences were still finding out about the “fourth network.”  

Every now and then, some entertainment publication tries to come up with a list of the funniest sitcom episodes of all time. There are a lot of great choices to be sure. “Soup Nazi” (Seinfeld), “The One Where Everybody Finds Out” (Friends) “Turkey’s Away” (WKRP in Cincinnati), the list really could go on and on...