DVD Picks for the week of October 12, 2009

Tim Disney's American Violet is based on the true story of Dee Roberts (Nicole Behari), a single black mother from a small Texas town who is dragged out of work in handcuffs for trafficking drugs during an aggressive raid on a housing project. Dee's true story effectively documents a legal system that systematically prosecutes and imprisons an extraordinarily high percentage of the nation's most vulnerable citizens -- for a profit. But just as important, American Violet is a fine film.

A high school boy (Devon Bostick) writes a story for French class, claiming his dead father is a terrorist -- a terrorist who packed a bomb in his pregnant wife's suitcase when she traveled alone to Israel. The story might be true but it also might be a fabrication of a fertile imagination. Arsinée Khanjian, an Atom Egoyan regular (and also his wife), plays the boy's inscrutable French teacher, who has hidden motives of her own. Scott Speedman, Rachel Blanchard also star.

Yugoslavian filmmaker Dusan Makavejev's 1960's movies about political and sexual liberation were revolutionary, raucous, and ribald. Across these, his wild, collagelike first three films, Makavejev investigates—with a tonic mix of earnestness and whimsy—love, death, and work; the legacy of war and the absurdity of daily life in a Communist state; criminology and hypnosis; strudels and strongmen. The Criterion box set includes Man Is Not A Bird, Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator, and Innocence Unprotected.