Despite seven Academy Award nominations, we cannot in good faith recommend Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel. However, the film comes out on DVD today, and now you know. Also: Sofia Coppola's epic failure Marie Antoniette, which, like the music videos it resembles, might work better on a TV screen.
Now for our choices: Criterion's restored release of De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, the music documentary Shut Up and Sing, and the Astoria drama A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints.
1. Bicycle Thieves
Hailed around the world as one of the greatest (and saddest) movies ever made, Vittorio De Sica's Academy Award-winning Bicycle Thieves has been released (and subtly retitled) in this two-disc Criterion Collection special edition. In postwar, poverty-stricken Rome, a man, hoping to support his desperate family with a new job, loses his bicycle, his main means of transportation for work. With his wide-eyed young son in tow, he sets off to track down the thief.
2. Shut Up & Sing
The Dixie Chicks recently scored a major triumph with big wins at the Grammys. Their career, however, took a major setback when lead singer Natalie Maines had the audacity to criticize President Bush on the War in Iraq long before it became fashionable. Two-time Oscar winning director Barbara Kopple and Cecile Peck follow the band the year after the controversy.3. A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints
Dito Montiel adapts his autobiography to the big screen with this tale of an Astoria, Queens neighborhood boy returning to his old haunts and old loves. Robert Downey Jr. and Rosario Dawson play the present-day incarnation of the kids we watch brawl and bawl in flashbacks, most of them on the way to jail or the graveyard. With Chazz Palminteri and Dianne Wiest as Dito's parents.