Recommended DVDS: September 2, 2008

Aspiring writers are going to want to watch Joachim Trier's debut Reprise. The film follows the close and sometimes tortured relationship between friends Erik (Espen Klouman-Hoiner) and Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie), young men with dreams of literary glory. One man hits it big, only to suffer a nervous breakdown, the other writes in his shadow. There is also a girl, the beautiful Kari (Viktoria Winge). As a writer of the female persuasion, I would have liked if this fictive depiction of the Dutch literary world included some female literati, but that's my only complaint about this nuanced, intelligent film.

Helen Hunt's directorial debut Then She Found Me is a lovely adaptation of Eleanor Lipman's bestselling novel. It's a romantic comedy, it's a mother-daughter drama, and most importantly, it's an unpretentious, gentle, moving film. Hunt, who co-wrote the screenplay, also stars as April Epner, a vanity-free thirty-nine-year old schoolteacher who wears sandals and old sweaters and desperately wants to have a baby.

The title is the worst part of Jamie Babbit's (I'm Not A Cheerleader) second film, a comedy about amiable lesbian anarchists in Los Angeles. Itty Bitty Titty Committee was awarded Best Feature by the audience at the 2007 South by Southwest Film Festival. The enormously appealing Melanie Diaz (terrific this year in Be Kind Rewind and Hamlet 2) plays Anna, a receptionist for a plastic surgeon's office whose life is turned upside down when she falls in love with the girl who spray-paints the front office window. Women studies majors will enjoy the feminist theory in this charming if formulaic little film.

Jacques Nolot stars and directs in Before I Forget a rivetting tale of a downward spiraling gay gigolo, struggling to cope with his advancing age, poverty, loneliness, writers block, and the increasing complications of HIV disease.