4 EYE OF GOD (Peachtree, R)
A small, still slice of American pie, Tim Blake Nelson's debut skirts art-house/heartland pretensions to end up as a translucently moving vision of faith and bad luck. An Oklahoma burger waitress (Martha Plimpton) marries the born-again ex-con (Kevin Anderson) to whom she's been writing and--so gradually that it's almost invisible--Mr. Right turns into Mr. Righteous. Meanwhile, a mournful teen rebel (Nick Stahl) aimlessly drives the back roads by night, spiraling in toward their conjoined fates. Like an infinitely sympathetic surgeon, Nelson intercuts between past, near past, and present, circling around a hideous act of violence until we can no longer look away--and then slips us a scene of overpowering grace in its place.
5 EASY LIVING (Universal, unrated)
Why has this sidesplitting 1937 entry in the Preston Sturges canon been unavailable on video until this year? Perhaps because Sturges only wrote the script, while the witty, sophisticated, criminally neglected Mitchell Leisen directed it. No matter: Easy Living's a scream from the moment that fur coat falls on Jean Arthur's head as she rides a double-decker bus down Fifth Avenue. Its merciless satire of Wall Street's lemming mentality makes even more sense in these days of Internet IPOs, and Sturges freaks, take note: It was Leisen who concocted the Automat riot that is the film's slapstick high point. All the more reason for Universal to get off its butt and release such Leisen classics as Arise, My Love and Hold Back the Dawn.
6 A PERSONAL JOURNEY WITH MARTIN SCORSESE THROUGH AMERICAN MOVIES (Miramax, unrated)
Scratch any filmmaker (or film critic) and you'll find a kid pale from sitting in darkened movie theaters, trembling with discovery. Martin Scorsese, bless him, is still in daily contact with that kid, so his nearly four-hour tour plays like a clip-happy lecture series given by your best friend from college. Produced for and originally aired on British TV in 1995, Journey focuses on tormented geniuses (Nicholas Ray, Orson Welles) at the expense of comic geniuses (Howard Hawks, W.C. Fields), but that's to be expected for a man who himself is a querulous industry outsider.
7 THE KILLERS (Universal, unrated)
Previous movies may have lined up the pieces of film noir, but this hard-hearted 1946 thriller added the miracle ingredient of post-WWII despair and arguably stands as the first perfect example of the genre. Expanding on an Ernest Hemingway short story, director Robert Siodmak creates a shadowy, ulcerated view of American life where no friendship is safe from the double cross and where no woman--especially not Ava Gardner--is who she seems. Burt Lancaster made his film debut as the doomed Swede, and it's startling to see the actor's rueful, bottled-up machismo already fully formed.
8 L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (Warner, R)
Want to convert hesitant friends to the wonders of DVD? Invite them over to sample the best film of 1997 (you heard me, and no arguments) in the format it deserves. You get your wide-screen imagery in crystalline detail--but you also get behind-the-scenes swag that includes an interactive map of L.A. highlighting historical locations, director Curtis Hanson re-creating the "photo pitch" by which he sold the studio on the film, and (drooler alert!) a no-dialogue version of the film featuring only the music track's pop songs and Jerry Goldsmith's score. Oh, and you get a film with richer characters, better plotting, and more interesting notions about loyalty than anything released in 1998.
