The sequel to the hit live-action supernatural movie Death Note, based
on the 15-million-selling manga series written by Tsugumi Ohba and
illustrated by Takeshi Obata, Death Note II: The Last Name is once again directed by renowned
monster filmmaker Shusuke Kaneko, and focuses on the conclusion of the
titanic struggle between two geniuses trying to win ultimate control of a book that brings death to those whose names are written in it.

After quickly re-establishing some of the parameters of the film’s universe, and rules for the use of the special notebook with the power to kill — the death must happen within 23 days; if no
specific cause of death is noted in the notebook, the victim will suffer a heart
attack; and users have six minutes and 40 seconds (?!) to pen details
after first naming their victim, among others — Death Note II picks up with Light Yagami (Tatsuya Fujiwara) joining an investigative team in pursuit of the serial killer known as Kira. While L (Kenichi Matsuyama) still strongly suspects that Light is in fact Kira, Light continues to seek out the real name of L so that he can kill him with his Death Note. Making things even more unpredictable are the “Eyes of Death” that the second Kira possesses, enabling the owner to know the true identity and lifespan of any person. Light soon learns the identity of the other Kira, and wants to join forces to get rid of L. Will L be able to catch “Kira” before he gets killed? Who will be the last name written in the Death Note?

The Death Note manga and TV series are sensations in their Japanese homeland; the 37-episode animated cable series is seen by
millions each week, and also
distributed on DVD Stateside by VIZ Media, the releaser of this film. Even without a connection to the hardwired cultural mores and customs that ground the spookier elements of this material, it’s easy to grasp its popularity. Death Note II uses some canted stylistic tricks, but not to an obnoxious or wearying degree. Overall, there’s a nice mix of special effects work and real, match-cut hallucinatory images; the film’s mood is nicely sustained. Somewhat interestingly, the Red Hot Chili Peppers again contribute the movie’s opening theme song, “Dani California,” as well as other tunes.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Death Note II comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with superlative English language Dolby digital 5.1 and 2.0 sound mixes dubbed by the outstanding voice cast of the animated series. The original Japanese version of the movie is also included, obviously with English subtitles. The only problem here is that the subtitles don’t completely match the dubbed version of the movie; one assumes the latter is more accurate, but can’t be entirely certain. DVD bonus features consist of a special 21-minute making-of featurette (also set to tunes from the Red Hot Chili Peppers), in which cast and crew all sit for subtitled interviews. Also included are the original Japanese theatrical trailer for the film, as well as an English language version. For more information on both of the Death Note live action films, as well as other VIZ Pictures films, click here, or visit the film series’ namesake web site. For more information on the Death Note manga and animated series, meanwhile, click here. B+ (Movie) B- (Disc)

Adapted from John Boyne’s award-winning novel of the same name, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas opens with a quote that characterizes childhood as being a carefree period before “the dark hour of reason grows.”
While generally true, there’s not much of that apple-cheeked optimism
in this well-crafted World War II drama, told from a child’s-eye view.
The quote, rather, serves as counterpoint for a prism through which
prejudice, dehumanization and corrupted innocence are all assayed in
quasi-fabulistic fashion.

The film unfolds through the eyes of eight-year-old Bruno (Asa
Butterfield, above), son of Nazi commandant Ralf (David Thewlis) and
Elsa (Vera Farmiga), a stay-at-home mother who embraces willful
obliviousness with regards to her husband’s soldierly duties. Largely
shielded from the realities of war, and certainly his father’s
complicity in its grim prosecution, Bruno grumbles at having to move
away from his friends and out to the country, where his family settles
into a large house with a distant view of a commune-style barn where all the “farmers” wear strange pajamas.
With no children with which to play, Bruno befriends a kitchen worker
named Pavel (David Hayman), a pitiful, shuffling older man who in
another life was a doctor.

After a week of hanging around the
house, Bruno sneaks out through the back garden in search of adventure.
He finally stumbles across Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a mousy Jewish boy at
the nearby fence-ringed farm — which is of course plainly evident to
the audience a concentration camp under Ralf’s newly expanded oversight
— and a forbidden friendship develops between the pair. A visiting
tutor hired by his father lectures him that all Jews are evil, and his
older sister Gretel (Amber Beattie) eagerly drinks the nationalistic propagandistic Kool-Aid,
but Bruno is conflicted. As he steals food for his new friend, and plays games with him, his bond with Shmuel grows deeper, awakening
senses of moral impulse that Bruno didn’t even know he had. How will this
secret friendship play out?

Photographed by Benoit Delhomme (The Proposition), The Boy in the Striped Pajamas isn’t designed in as crushingly bleak a fashion as something like Lajos Koltai’s monochromatic Fateless,
a fellow Holocaust tale told from the perspective of a young boy. With
wide angles and uncluttered frames, screenwriter-director Mark Herman (Little Voice) aims for a more naturalistic palette, to underscore the movie’s humanistic tone. What most helps the film, though, is the wide-eyed Butterfield. Physically resembling a cross between a young Elijah Wood and Son of Rambow‘s
Bill Milner, Butterfield wonderfully captures Bruno’s naivete without ever
tipping over into affected cuteness. The rest of the performances are
nicely modulated as well. The pitfall of many World War II films is
that they try to retell a grand story on a cramped canvas, but The Boy in the Striped Pajamas tells a discrete, moving, standalone tale from a specific point-of-view, and just tells it quite well.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with an accompanying cardboard slipcover, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas comes presented in 1:85:1 widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English and Spanish subtitles. An audio commentary track with Herman and author Boyne anchors the supplemental bonus features, and the two are quite complimentary of the other’s work. The same pair also offer brief, optional interjections over a small clutch of deleted scenes, most of which expand upon the movie’s set-apart rural setting and young Bruno’s increasing boredom in only rudimentary ways. Finally, there’s a 20-minute behind-the-scenes featurette which intercuts cast and crew interviews about the production, and shows how Herman, in tweaking the perspective of the novel, balanced the personal tale of Bruno and the sensitive reality of one of the darkest periods in world history. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) B- (Disc)

What do movie special effects, the stock market, heart attacks and the
rings of Saturn have in common? They all consist of fractals — irregular
repeating shapes found in cloud formations and tree limbs, stalks of broccoli and craggy mountain ranges, and even in the rhythm
of the human heart. With its latest superlative hour-long documentary release, NOVA takes viewers on an intriguing scientific exploration of this radical new branch of geometry, shining a spotlight on the man who pioneered the field.

For thousands of years, classical math was used in the cause of human creation and advancement, whether to build the pyramids or study the Parthenon. The patterns of nature, however, proved more elusive to distill to numbers. Fractals: Hunting the Hidden Dimension looks at a group of pioneering mathematicians determined to decipher the rules that govern fractal geometry. At the center is Benoit Mandelbrot, a Yale professor who grew up as a hunted Jewish civilian in Nazi-occupied France, and hooked on with IBM in 1958, tackling myriad problems associated with data transfer during the early stages of the development of computers. His groundbreaking work on the 1960s and ’70s, building on Georg Koch’s namesake curve — used to describe the “finer indentations” of national coastlines, and how smaller units of measurement yielded ever larger estimates — opened up important new threads of discussion and thought about longstanding “mathematical monsters.”

Though Mandlebrot’s theories were met with predictable scorn at first, the remarkable and interesting thing is how these findings about fractals — in addition to deepening our understanding of nature — are also shown to have stimulated a new wave of scientific, medical and artistic innovation stretching from the ecology of the rainforest to Jhane Barnes’ fashion design. Industrial Light & Magic’s Willi Geiger even demonstrates the importance of fractals in a scene from Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith. Other lively interview subjects like UC-Santa Cruz professor Ralph Abraham, as well as Mandlebrot himself, make this title an engaging treat.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Fractals: Hunting the Hidden Dimension is presented in anamorphic widescreen with a static menu screen, its picture suitably clear and its English 5.1 stereo audio mix crisp and free from any background buzz or hiccups. It includes English SDH subtitles and described video for the visually impaired, along with a spare collection of DVD-ROM materials and activities for educators, and a reference link to the NOVA web site. The title is also available on Blu-ray, a first for any home video release from WGBH Boston Video. To purchase any DVD release from WGBH, including Fractals, phone (800) 949-8670, or click here. A- (Movie) C (Disc)

I’ve Loved You So Long centers around recent parolee Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas), who has for 15 years been estranged from
what remains of her family, and has a drab wardrobe of
browns and greys to match her battered psyche. Lea (Elsa Zylberstein, below left),
her younger sister, picks up Juliette at the airport and subsequently
takes her into her Parisian home, which she shares with her husband
Luc (Serge Hazanavicius), his mute father, and their two adopted little Vietnamese girls. As
Juliette is slowly reintegrated into society both at large — she even bags a one-afternoon stand — and in miniature, a slow thaw occurs, with unanticipated consequences for all
involved.

There’s a pinch of self-conscious
Franco-genuflection to the directorial debut of novelist and literature
professor Philippe Claudel, most particularly in the form of a dinner scene in which the assembled parties debate and praise filmmaker Eric Rohmer.
For those who’ve sampled even a bit of French cinema, the emotional
contours of this tale are familiar, and in that regard the movie feels
a bit like a stacked deck, daring one to rebel against its
slow-developing appraisal of confinement and regret. The studied warmth and unfussy sincerity of its superb, aching telling, though, wins out; I’ve Loved You So Long
is a movie about familial silences and the great, tilled-earth spaces
in between, both in relationships and in one’s head. The slow reveal of
the full reason behind Juliette’s incarceration gives the film some
extra emotional heft (doleful drags on cigarettes don’t hurt, either), but this is
first and foremost an Oscar-level showcase for Thomas, as a woman who
learns to purge herself of the swallowed self-loathing that has soured
her soul. Think of it as a French, secular rebirth drama, about
self-forgiveness and learning to walk looking at least partially
forward, and not always backwards.

Housed in an Amaray plastic case, I’ve Loved You So Long comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with melancholic motion menus and complementary French and English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround audio tracks; Thomas even provides the alternate dubbed voiceover for the latter track. Somewhat interestingly, the case itself features a hollowed-out spindle roughly the size of the DVD itself on each side, meaning that much less plastic is used to produce the case. The only downside of this otherwise laudable environmental consciousness is that the disc is a bit harder than normal to affix on its stabilizing button.

Apart from these cosmetic issues, I’ve Loved You So Long is unfortunately otherwise largely a case of a great but small film getting the bum’s rush DVD treatment from studio powers-that-be much more concerned with padding out that double-disc version of Hancock or Ghost Rider. Seven deleted scenes with optional subtitled French commentary from Claudel — who does speak English, it must be noted — run about five-and-a-half minutes. Many of the scenes, Claudel notes, including one of Juliette sitting next to an old woman at the police station, were trimmed because of what he deems his own poor on-set composition or blocking decisions, leaving him unsatisfied with editing bay choices. In another sequence, Luc observes Juliette; Claudel characterizes this scene, and a separate chat between Luc and Lea, as showing Luc being too forceful about his sister-in-law’s presence. Unfortunately, apart from these scenes, there are no other supplemental features of note, save the requisite theatrical trailer and previews for Blu-ray technology and a dozen other Sony home video releases. Given how much of an awards push this film was (rightly) given for its leading lady, it’s shocking that there isn’t at least some sort of interview material with Thomas. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) C- (Disc)

The third installment in one of the more bizarre and improbable adventure series out there
arrives on DVD just in time to give Noah Wyle fans some double-feature fodder, something
to counterbalance his return to the small screen for an arc on the final season
of ER.

The TBS-incubated Librarian series began in 2004 with The Librarian: Quest of
the Spear, followed by The Librarian: Return to King Solomon’s Mines. They’re sort of like The Da Vinci Code crossed with Indiana Jones, if that movie (or series) were to star Brendan Fraser, be written by a very enthusiastic community college instructor with only a single credit of Xena fan-fiction to his name, and then overseen by a very budget-conscious producer. It’s all air-quote tongue-in-cheek, in other words, meaning that its very chintziness is held up as a baked-in self-defense, and example of why it doesn’t aspire to more.

The movie’s stories revolve around Flynn Carsen (Wyle), a bookish chap drafted into archeological adventures, via his employer, as part of a larger battle between good and evil. This time it’s a deadly mission to recover the Judas Chalice; in tracking it down, Carsen is saved by, and falls in love with, a mysterious French woman, Simone Renoir (Stana Katic), who hides a terrifying past. When double-crossed by the respected Professor Lazio (Bruce Davison) and ambushed by a ruthless gang, Flynn realizes Simone’s secret, his true mission and a shocking discovery are all lying within a decaying New Orleans crypt — a crypt that may be holding Count Vlad Dracula, whom the world has feared for centuries.

The film benefits, one supposes, from some surrounding consistency off-screen. Director Jonathan Frakes is back at the helm, along with much of the same production team of the series, and reprising their supporting roles from the second film are also Bob Newhart and Jane Curtin (3rd Rock from the Sun). Series writer Marco Schnabel, though, isn’t able to till much clever ground in the dialogue department, and the crimped production means undercut what are supposed to be some of the film’s more cathartic, involving adventure sequences. A simple rule that The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice forgets: if you can’t afford it, don’t write it, write around it.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 audio mix and, somewhat curiously, optional subtitles in English only. (One presumes, given the swashbuckling nature of the material, that there would be a slightly bigger international audience for this type of programmer, but the narrow range of its language options seems to be a silent concession of its cheesy narrative faults.) Bonus features arrive in the form of some behind-the-scenes footage and three deleted scenes, running just over seven minutes. The biggest of the excised scenes is an extended sword fight, rightly snipped because of its awkward blocking and pacing, in which Carson gets his rented tuxedo slashed, and parries around and through sculpture and paintings. An additional seven minutes on the movie’s visual effects showcases tweaked material (it’s mostly background material) via comparative split-screen wipes. Finally, there’s 150 seconds of edited together rehearsal footage from a monastery scene within the movie. Rounding things out are previews for Termination Point and a handful of other Sony home entertainment releases. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) C- (Disc)

The Bible’s Buried Secrets is a landmark two-hour NOVA special taking viewers on a fascinating scientific journey that began 3,000 years ago and continues to this day. The film presents the results of more than 100 years of excavation and centuries of biblical scholarship, digging deep into the origins of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament.

A reasoned, well mannered archeological detective story, the documentary tackles some of the biggest questions in biblical studies. Where did the ancient Israelites come from? Who wrote the Bible, when, and why? How did the worship of one god — the foundation of modern Judaism, Christianity and Islam — actually emerge over polytheism? The film’s roster of interviewees is wide and varied, including The Gift of the Jews
author Thomas Cahill and academicians like P. Kyle McCarter of John
Hopkins University, Michael Coogan of Stonehill College and Manfred
Bietak of the Austian Academy of Sciences. The result is a powerful intersection of science, scholarship, and scripture; The Bible’s Buried Secrets provides unique insight into the deeper meaning of the biblical texts and their continuing resonance through the centuries.

Perhaps most interesting are the movie’s clear contextual framings. Several other films, including Walking the Bible, have delved into the archeological history of the Bible, but The Bible’s Buried Secrets is upfront about the lack of historical reference and support, for instance, for the Israelites’ desert wandering, which would have had to have been sometime between 1275 and 1208 B.C. Side-by-side discrepancies between accounts of the Great Flood and Noah’s Ark are also spotlighted (“40 days and 40 nights” is the most popularly recited length, but the Bible also tabs the event as lasting 150 days), and linguistic analysis supports the argument that the first five books of the Bible, also known as The Torah, was written not by Moses, but many generations of scribes, spanning 100 or more years.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Bible’s Buried Secrets comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen with optional closed captions and described video for the visually impaired. Unlike most other WGBH Boston Video titles, there are bonus features included — this time in the form of a half hour of extra scenes/excised material. Materials and activities for educators are also spotlighted via a link to the NOVA web site. To order any DVD or VHS release from WGBH Boston Video, including the aforementioned Walking the Bible, phone (800) 949-8670 or click here. B+ (Movie) B- (Disc)