Second chances

Now is the fallow season, movie-wise, but antennae should be up, because the best movies you never saw in 2010 have hit DVD and on demand, and couching with them could carry you through February and Oscar season. (Nominations will be announced Tuesday 25.) Start this week with Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth (Kino DVD; available Tuesday 25), an unnerving art-house freak-out centered on a family with teenage children fanatically sheltered from any knowledge of the world outside. Hence, incest, dementia, violence, rebellion—all metaphor all the time. Shot with an appalled observational style, the film is as much totalitarian science fiction as 1984, and as much a prison-breakout drama as the 1947 classic Brute Force.

You could eat up a whole winter week with The Red Riding Trilogy (IFC; Netflix Watch Instantly). This three-film, five-hour-plus Balzacian monster from Yorkshire covers two decades, uses three directors and a motley cast of legions (including Rebecca Hall, Andrew Garfield, Peter Mullan, Paddy Considine and Mark Addy) and essays a corrupt landscape of uncounted dead children, venal cops, moldering cellar secrets and struggling righteousness. It’s exactly what DVDs were invented for: The intersecting mysteries hidden and revealed from film to film reward backtracking, and the Northern accents can be impenetrable, necessitating the hearing-impaired subtitles. (Don’t feel guilty—Brits do it, too, and even Yorkshire natives have to lean in.)

Lots of critics championed Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet (Sony Pictures Classics; Amazon Video on Demand, Netflix Watch Instantly) and Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love (Magnolia; Amazon Video on Demand, Netflix Watch Instantly)—respectively, a French prison seat-edger that beats all comers, and an Italian May-September l’amour fou drama that bets on Tilda Swinton and lets it ride. But don’t overlook Yaron Shani and Scandar Copti’s Ajami (Kino; Amazon Video on Demand, Netflix Watch Instantly), the best and most convincing Israeli-Palestinian quilt-drama ever made (and made completely with non-pros who live the life). Few saw Claudia Llosa’s The Milk of Sorrow (Olive), which never made it to Chicago. In this Oscar-nominated Peruvian dream film, a gorgeous, paranoid young woman embeds a potato in her vaginal canal rather than be raped like her dying mother (and scores of women like her in the years of political strife). Likewise, aging Italian lion Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere (IFC) was sadly overlooked by nearly everyone this year. It’s a gorgeous, movie-drunk flashback, probing the early days of Benito Mussolini and the fate of his lover–revolutionary comrade Ida Dalser. Vincere scrambles history with this new thing called cinema, reframing the 20th century as if it were one giant, crazy newsreel.

Things get stranger, and conventions get used for toilet paper, in Kim Jee-won’s lo mein western The Good, the Bad, the Weird (IFC), a breathless scramble of Hong Kong action, Korean mordancy, Chinese landscapes and Sergio Leone ludicrousness that must’ve given Quentin Tarantino some major oak. Even odder is Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take (Kino), a repurposed-footage essay-fiction–speculation thing that reimagines Alfred Hitchcock as a kind of demiurge commenting on and slyly responsible for the Cold War history of the ’50s and ’60s. Reality wobbles, too, in Michel Gondry’s The Thorn in the Heart (Oscilloscope; Amazon Video on Demand, Netflix Watch Instantly), which is a straight family-memoir doc except when it invents, and in Gareth Edwards’s Monsters (Magnolia; Amazon Video on Demand), shot on the shoulder in Central America amid oblivious locals but managing to evoke a full-scale extraterrestrial infestation. Arguably the year’s best indie, it’s coming to disc February 1.

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