For IFC, Michael Atkinson reviews 1965's Paris vu par... (Six in Paris), a "New Wave experiment for producer Barbet Schroeder - six filmmakers, six arrondissements, cheap 16mm cameras, non-pro actors: go.... [T]he coalescent upshot of Paris vu par... is as both a fascinating time capsule (at a moment when, according to Rohmer in the DVD's liner notes, 'Paris is being destroyed') and a New Wave primer, prioritizing the fleeting textures of life over story, and making the real places in which characters find themselves epically vital." Also: Lewis Milestone's Arch of Triumph (1948), an unjustly neglected romantic epic of postwar Hollywood (from a novel by Erich Maria Remarque), set in a 1939 Paris awash with refugees of the rising Nazi machine. The film glowers and broods like a noir on barbiturates." Related: The Observer's Philip French on Ingrid Bergman.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan

Rating (out of 5): ***½

On last Sunday's episode of This Week with George Stephanopoulos, reporter Katrina vanden Heuvel mentioned during the journalists' roundtable that a lack of polling place preparedness could sway the outcome of the 2008 presidential election and she was nearly laughed off the stage. I repeat, the very notion of compromised voting eight years after the supreme court appointed a president and just four years after the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (in a joint decision with Congress) deemed it necessary to send international observers to monitor our elections for the first time, was immediately discarded by a group of prominent political writers from the most widely read news sources in the country. It's possible there's never been a clearer illustration of the mainstream media's apathy to question status quo that has served us so well for the last several years. This void has left a public more primed than ever for the chaos and clumsiness of blogs, talk radio and agit prop documentaries.

A popular misnomer about documentaries is that they are objective, or somehow at their best when they are striving to be objective. But documentaries are meant to communicate ideas and that is most easily borne from a strong point of view (though preferably one with a curious mind). Or in the case of Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections, a very strong sense of outrage.

First stop will have to be the Parallax View, where you'll find Richard T Jameson's lengthy 1975 piece on Nashville for Movietone News and another, this one from 1979, on Apocalypse Now for Seattle's Weekly.

"It's a rare and welcome event when merchandisers get product so good as to sell itself," writes John McElwee. "Witness for the Prosecution was that kind of gift for United Artists. They actually gave away tickets (seven thousand in NYC) so as to generate what they knew would be positive word-of-mouth. The offer was floated on Times pages other than amusement oriented ones in hopes of luring viewers not otherwise inclined to follow movies.... Witness for the Prosecution had class and mass appeal."

In the New York Times, Dave Kehr looks back on early British cinema, specifically, "the era of the 'quota quickie,' cheap little movies made solely to fulfill the demands of the 1927 Cinematographic Film Act, which required that 5 percent of the movies on British screens actually be British.... Like American B movies, the quota quickies were, among other things, perfect training grounds for those crucial directorial virtues of speed and economy."

Paul Matwychuk has caught up with Speed Racer, "and to my great surprise, I found it every bit as thrilling and delightful as Dennis [Cozzalio] did. I'm quite frankly baffled by the critical drubbing it received, especially from someone like Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, who in the past has been one of the biggest defenders of Brian De Palma, whose ability to convey plot information through complicated visuals instead of dialogue has a lot in common with the Wachowskis' approach to storytelling in Speed Racer."

Talking with Francis Ford Coppola for the London Times, Ed Potton revisits Apocalypse Now. Meanwhile, Glenn Kenny has a fascinating update on how the restoration of The Godfather's been going.

Read more below.