James Toback’s documentary should be subtitled Mike on Mike: It’s 90 minutes of a recently interviewed Tyson speaking directly to the camera — a single-minded perspective that proves both frustrating and fascinatingly intimate. Rambling, emotional and often surprisingly articulate, Tyson ruminates on everything from his troubled childhood and meteoric rise as a boxer.  

In a distant future, competing corporations have divided the Earth, turning it into a non-stop war-field of nationalistic, Orwellian proportions. Battles rage across the globe, and during one particularly brutal frontline assault, an ancient, dormant race of mindless killer mutants is unknowingly unleashed from a prison deep within the planet’s bowels.  

At first glance it’s easy to dismiss The Big Bang Theory. Some might have no time for what appears to be clichéd aspects of geekdom. Indeed, there’s lots of video game playing, comic book collecting and Star Trek references to be had here.  

The career of French auteur Jean-Luc Godard can be viewed in stages: a celebrated debut with the Nouvelle Vague; a controversial, confrontational, Maoist phase; and an uncompromising, artistically vibrant period that runs into the present and finds the onetime enfant terrible of the press working far from the spotlight.  

Just before making Zabriskie Point, Michelangelo Antonioni — one of cinema’s great existential modernists — had paired his view that the world makes little sense but has great beauty with the swinging London of the 1960s, resulting in the enduring masterpiece Blowup. So the next logical step was to put the Italian filmmaker’s vision up against California youth culture of the day.  

Just when you thought there couldn’t be any more really interesting buried places, Don Wildman is back sinking to new depths. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist). The 11 episodes of season two find Wildman returning to Germany, this time to explore Berlin’s hundreds of World War II bunkers. In New York, it’s secret societies, not unlike his trip to Boston in season one.  

Andy Warhol’s “screen tests” — in which he used a stationary 16mm Bolex camera to shoot silent, black-and-white 100-foot rolls of film studying guests to his Factory between 1964-1966 — are among his most mesmerizing and beautiful (and painterly) work. They have been too rarely seen. Plexifilm has partnered with Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum for this first-ever official DVD release of 13 of the choicest screen tests, paired with a newly commissioned soundtrack by Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips.  

Flicker Alley, a leading curator, restorer and distributor of lost and forgotten cinema gems, digs up a particularly niche bunch for its latest collection. Under Full Sail: Silent Cinema on the High Seas details early celluloid depictions of the grand vessels that sailed the world’s waterways at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The five films (one full-length and four shorts, all excellent transfers) are snapshots of a forgotten time when mammoth ships with masts to the heavens took seafarers to adventure.  

Maybe it’s because the fad hasn’t worn off, but prequels seem to be far less objectionable than sequels. It makes sense in that with a prequel you have to be somewhat loyal to an end point, whereas a sequel has to make up a bunch of new stuff that might or might not live up to the original. So is the situation the producers of Battlestar Galactica found themselves in when their series recently wrapped up. The notion of Carpica telling the back-story to BSG was formulated in the latter’s second season and came to fruition late last year.   

It’s tempting to label this melancholy wisp of a film as a wake-up call for a nation gone bankrupt (in more ways than one). But Wendy and Lucy is far too subtle for that: It makes Marley and Me look like Porky’s. Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to the excellent Old Joy tells the simple story of a girl, Wendy (Michelle Williams, whose compelling, vanity-free performance is the film’s glue), and her dog, Lucy (Reichardt’s own dog).  

Japanese filmmaker Seijun Suzuki opens his 1963 yakuza actioner with a literal bang as sharply dressed gangsters battle on a dark backcountry road in the Tokyo outskirts. Bullets fly. Autos careen off the road. Bodies pile up. A glorious screen-engulfing car explosion ends this out-of-control melee but kick-starts a dirty Rock & Roll number.  

The macho superstars of the 1950s and 1960s had a tough go of it in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Times were changing, they were too old for the hip youth culture of the New Hollywood and their kind of virile, iconic acting had lost favor for the more eccentric and idiosyncratic approaches of Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino.  

A piece of legendary television history, long considered lost but discovered and restored by the Archive of American Television, makes its DVD debut with its crackling, electrifying energy intact. Budd Schulberg wrote What Makes Sammy Run?, a portrait of venal and ignorant but desperately striving, hustling Hollywood studio boss Sammy Glick, way back in 1941.  

Herk Harvey’s classic 1962 low-budget horror flick Carnival of Souls is twisted into an odd, disquieting but ultimately unsatisfying thriller in the new effort from German filmmaker Christian Petzold. Nina Hoss stars as the titular Yella, who decides to flee her abusive husband in the countryside for a new life and job in the city.   

Walt Disney ran into roadblocks with Bambi. Struggling with the script and overall structure, he delayed its release and began work on Pinocchio — a story from Italian author Carlo Collodi about the adventures of a wooden puppet who becomes a real boy. But Disney again strained over the script, revising and tweaking a story that was episodic in nature.