Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ***

It's not yet clear if "mumblecore" is an exclusive club, or if it's a subgenre that just any movie can jump into. If it's the latter, then indie screenwriter-producer turned director Bradley Rust Gray's new feature The Exploding Girl -- which had a brief theatrical opening in March -- is at least partly there. It's about a handful of twentysomethings, back home in New York on summer break from college. Sometimes they come right out and say something that's on their mind, but most of the time, they do that particular "mumblecore" thing in which they talk and talk and never quite manage to say anything. And yet they say everything.

Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***

Can you learn much about a particular society from watching a narrative film featuring a few characters from that society? My companion and I argued this point after watching A Call Girl, a Slovenian film from Damjan Kozole making its DVD debut this week and deals with the life of a college student/call girl, her family, friends, boyfriend, teacher and -- most frighteningly – two pimps who want her in their service. (Slovenia by the way, is the tiny country bordered by Italy, Croatia, Hungary, Austria and the Adriatic Sea, whose history, as is true of many eastern European countries, particularly in the area of the Balkans, is full of competing cultures, wars, border disputes and uneasy truces.)

 Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson 
Rating (out of 5): ***

Scandar Copti, a Palestinian, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew, teamed up to direct the crime drama Ajami. It received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language film, which seems more a result of that behind-the-scenes achievement than anything that occurs onscreen. Indeed, comparing it to some of Amos Gitai's better films (Yom Yom, Kadosh, etc.) it feels rather graceless, and compared to something like City of God,Ajami feels practically inert.

And yet the film is still effective in its own, small way. It follows several characters in five overlapping chapters, all set in one multi-ethnic section of Jaffa, near Tel Aviv. It begins as a man working on a car is gunned down in the street. It turns out that the real target was the neighbor who sold him the car, Omar (Shahir Kabaha), an Arab Israeli. Worse, Omar is in love with Hadir (Ranin Karim), who is the right race, but the wrong religion; they can't be together. There's another revenge shooting, a botched drug sale, a cop searching for his missing brother, and another illicit romance, between a Jew and a Palestinian.

Reviewer: Steve Dollar
Louie Bluie; Crumb Rating (out of 5): ****½ (both)

Consumed and driven by the bawdy vigor of good old American vernacular culture, the artists who lend their names to this pair of documentaries are such dynamos of idiosyncrasy that no one could have made them up. Newly reissued in a simultaneous one-two punch by the Criterion Collection, Louie Bluie (1985) and Crumb (1995), concern but can barely contain the outsized, wildly original personalities of charismatic African-American string band legend Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong, and the cranky underground cartoonist Robert Crumb. These were the first two films made by Terry Zwigoff, a San Francisco government office-worker and obsessive enthusiast for 78 rpm recordings of pre-war American music, who also happened to play saw, mandolin and fiddle in Crumb's own string combo, R. Crumb and His Cheap Suit Serenaders.

Zwigoff is now more widely known for his later features, Bad Santa and Ghost World, which further articulated the director's kinship with irascible iconoclasts and socially awkward connoisseurs of cultural arcana. Fans of those entertainments checking out Zwigoff's back-catalog classics for the first time will find the square root of his aesthetic, with all its irreverence, political incorrectness, and rude zest charging up every frame. They'll also discover a passion for storytelling and a gift for directorial self-effacement, one that allows these natural-born originals to narrate their own lives so compellingly that its easy to forget there's a camera and crew involved - even as Zwigoff thoughtfully embroiders the narratives.