Taqwacores

College freshman Yusef (Bobby Naderi) gets a lot more than he bargains for when he moves off-campus into a house full of the most unorthodox young Muslims he’s ever known. And that’s a good thing, for him and for the audience of this energetic look at what it’s like to be young, angry and deeply religious Muslims living in Buffalo, New York. Director Eyad Zahra uses the hardcore Muslim punk music scene called Taqwacore to frame his story, but the music takes a back seat to the passionate debates the characters have between themselves about what it means to be Muslim in this day and age. It’s a discussion that needs to be heard wrapped in a movie that needs to be seen.

500 Days of Summer

It’s hard not to fall in love with 500 Days of Summer … even if the movie does everything it possibly can to remind you that it is not a love story. Directed by Marc Webb, 500 Days of Summer chronicles the romantic lifespan shared by Tom and Summer, two coworkers at a greeting card company who meet, date, fall in love and then … well, why spoil it. Rather than use a straightforward story line to tell us how the lives of Tom and Summer intertwine, the film uses a sort of cinematic roulette wheel for its narrative: Numbers from 1 to 500 spin on the screen and we see what happened on the day that comes up when the numbers stop. One day we see them blissfully staring into each others’ eyes and – spin the wheel – the next time we see them it’s months later and they are ready to tear each others’ eyes out. It takes a little while to get used to the pacing such a device sets for the story, but the scenes are so delicately layered against each other that you’re able to sit back and get a much fuller impression of the ups and downs of their romance than you would in a more traditional style.

Sunshine Cleaning

The worst part about Sunshine Cleaning is the ending. It’s not that the story ends badly – in fact, it ends on an almost perfect note. It’s just that after 90-minutes of watching this great cast tell such a good story, you don’t want it to end at all. Directed by Christine Jeffs (Sylvia), Sunshine Cleaning stars Amy Adams as Rose Lorkowski, a single mom who makes her living as a maid at a home cleaning service. To make enough money to get her son into a private school (he’s been kicked out of three public schools), Rose decides to switch careers and open her own business as a special kind of cleaning service, cleaning crime scenes. Anyone looking for some sort of CSI experience watching the movie will be sorely disappointed, but fans of quirky independent films that serve up a satisfying slice of life will fall in love with Sunshine Cleaning.

Upstairs, Downstairs Complete Series: 40th Anniversary Edition

Don’t be afraid at the size of this 21-disc box set; think of it as an investment that you will be enjoying for 57 hours (not to mention 25+ hours of extras). And you won’t be bored for a single minute of it.  This landmark BBC series perfectly captured life in Edwardian England by telling the stories of the rich and powerful — those who lived ‘upstairs’ — and those of the people who served them — the ones who spent their lives ‘downstairs.’ What made it so engrossing is the way each episode reveals how the two classes interacted with each other, formally and informally, and how those exchanges changed their lives no matter what class they represented.

Girls, Guns and G-Strings

OK, so maybe they aren’t the greatest movies ever made, but that all depends on what kind of criteria you measure them against. Andy Sidaris, the legendary filmmaker responsible for the 12 movies in this set, will never be mentioned in the same breath as Scorsese or Spielberg, but so what? Like Roger Corman before him, Sidaris knew what he wanted to make (movies for guys) and he made them. Some of the films are better than others (Malibu Express is a classic), but none of them ever fail to deliver what the title of the box set promises to show you.

Apocalypse: World War II

You may think you’ve already seen just about every documentary ever made about World War II, but there’s enough declassified, colorized and restored footage in this fascinating series to prove how wrong you can be. The set is more than just as series of amazing images, though. By concentrating on the people who fought the war (the soldiers and the politicians) as well as their victims, it humanizes the conflict in fresh and unexpected ways.

Dirty Pair TV Series DVD Collection 2

The intergalactic adventures of Kei and Yuri continue in this excellent collection of original TV shows first aired in Japan in 1985. The adventures are boiler-plate detective stories, but the way these scantily clad young women solve them is anything but predictable. The shows in this second set are more imaginative than the ones in the first, particularly in terms of the visual style. The adventure where Kei gets trapped in a computer program that controls her mind is downright trippy.