Neil Barsky’s new documentary about the cantankerous former New York mayor (who perhaps not so ironically died the morning the film opened last Friday), Koch—pronounced “kotch,” not “coke,” unlike some crazy right-wing billionaires we know—is an indelible portrait of the man’s long career of public service.

While sympathetic to its chatty subject, it’s not a mere hagiography: Barsky brings up the corruption scandal that nearly sank his administration, his excruciatingly slow response to the burgeoning AIDS crisis in the early ‘80s and, the long-held rumor that he was a closeted homosexual. The intensely private Koch—as part of a lively interview that takes up a large chunk of the movie—barks, “It’s none of your fucking business!” in response.

Koch paints a vivid picture of New York City from the time Koch got into politics though his dozen years as mayor to his later years as commentator and lionized city icon. Koch first won the mayoral election in 1977, and through the choice archival footage married to interviews with friends and foes alike, we see how he remade his beloved city in his image: a no-nonsense, prickly, pugnacious survivor. When he lost the 1989 Democratic primary to David Dinkins, his standard line was “the people have spoken—let them suffer” in response to those who said they missed him.

There’s touching—and now prescient—footage of Koch visiting his own tombstone in a non-Jewish cemetery in Washington Heights in northern Manhattan. He wrote the epitaph himself: he wants to be remembered as serving his country in WWII, in Congress and as mayor of the greatest city in the world. As cinematic epitaphs go, Koch is satisfying.

A devastating piece of cinematic advocacy that rarely becomes strident, How to Survive a Plague powerfully documents how AIDS activists not only helped get the reality of the deadly epidemic into the sights of an inattentive government—both in large cities and in Washington—but also enabled themselves to live on despite the death sentence the disease gave them.

Director David France extensively—and adroitly—intercuts vintage footage with new interviews with the most valuable players in the fight by ACT UP (the most prominent AIDS victims’ group) over so many years of fighting both the disease and the government. France also analyzes the intergroup conflicts that arose and caused splintering at the worst possible time: the politics of this crisis goes beyond Presidents Reagan and Bush doing nothing because the victims were not constituents.

To anyone living in New York City in 1989—I had moved there a few months earlier—The Central Park Five will dredge up unpleasant memories of the infamous “Central Park jogger” case, in which a group of rampaging teenagers nearly killed an innocent woman after beating and gang raping her.

A city-wide lynch-mob mentality had spread from the police to the media to the public—I was immediately convinced of their guilt, as were most other New Yorkers—so no one was surprised by their guilty verdicts. Of course, it turned out that the five teens weren’t guilty—a serial rapist-killer finally confessed to the crime years later, with his DNA positively linked to the victim—and they were belatedly exonerated after four had served out their terms and one was still doing time.

This collaboration of acclaimed documentarian Ken Burns, his daughter Sara Burns and her husband David McMahon looks closely at the evidence (or lack of it) that led to trumped-up charges and convictions in what was, after all, a high-profile case that would have been an municipal embarrassment if no one was caught and punished. More than two decades later, the five men—four were interviewed on camera, the other one only heard, not seen—are awaiting the outcome of their lawsuits against the city for misconduct by the police department (who coerced false confessions) and prosecutors (who ignored evidence exonerating them) over a miscarriage of justice.

The film makes clear that the five accused teens were certainly not angels—there was a lot of thuggish behavior in the park that night by dozens of kids, and they just happened to get caught. And even though their confessions contradicted one another, that didn’t stop them for being found guilty: bungled chronology and contrary physical evidence didn’t matter.

Too bad that no one from the police or prosecution agreed to be interviewed: the film at times seems one-sided for that reason. But its critique of complicit media and political leadership remains disturbing all these years later.

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Bob Fosse won the Best Director Oscar for his decidedly adult 1972 adaptation of the classic Kander & Ebb musical about pre-Nazi Germany, as did Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey for their indelible performances. (The film lost Best Picture to a crime drama named The Godfather.)

For its belated 40^th anniversary Blu-ray edition, Warners has released a rewarding hi-def transfer with an appropriately dark and grainy look. In addition to a perfect film, the disc includes historian Stephen Tropiano’s commentary and new and vintage featurettes with cast and crew extolling the virtues of director Fosse.

Ciaran Foy’s routine thriller is set in a run-down apartment complex where a widowed new dad gets revenge for a vicious attack that left his poor (and pregnant) wife with fatal wounds.

With its shadowy darkness, fancy camera angles and standard-issue villains, the movie tries to obscure the less than compelling storyline, acting and thrills: even the explosive finale fizzles. The actors can’t do much with the thin gruel they’ve been fed. The movie looks good in Blu-ray; extras comprise interviews and an on-set featurette.

(Criterion)             

Wim Wenders’ affecting elegy for modern-dance choreographer Pina Bausch (who died in 2009) alternates between reenactments of signature pieces—like a scintillating Rite of Spring—and touching reminiscences from colleagues, a truly international group: German, French, British, Spanish, Russian, Japanese.

Wenders intercuts among Bausch’s dances, staged in a theater and outdoor places ranging from Berlin street corners, public transit and even a picturesque hillside. Shot in 3D—which looks marvelous on the Criterion Collection’s first 3D Blu-ray release—Pina is a lasting memorial from one artist to another. Extras include Wenders’ commentary and interview, deleted scenes with Wenders’ commentary, 45-minute making-of featurette and behind the scenes footage.

In this fantastical animated film, director Michel Ocelot tells a series of folk tales set in different cultures and eras—from Tibet to Africa to Medieval Europe—with a stunning, highly original visual style.

The characters’ silhouettes are set against fabulous backdrops that are a riot of color: this is the jumping off point for a memorable trip into several glorious new worlds. Needless to say, on Blu-ray, the movie looks absolutely dazzling; extras are two director interviews.

Luis Bunuel’s final film, from 1977, was among his least interesting, even more so than the overpraised ones that preceded it (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of the Liberty).

The arbitrary surrealism palls early on, and though suave Fernando Rey tries hard as an ambassador who falls hard for a beautiful young woman—played alternately by Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina, an unfunny conceit less amusing and more pointless in execution—this is probably the most forgettable Bunuel film in a storied but checkered career. The Blu-ray image is decent; extras include interviews with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, Bouquet, Molina and director Carlos Saura, and a Bunuel featurette.

Bryan D. Hopkins’ documentary startlingly documents the aftermath of the infamous BP Gulf oil spill, and—through interviews with those most affected by the disaster—arrives at the conclusion that there was a massive cover-up.

Based on this film, it seems indisputable that BP’s grievous misdeeds were covered up by a complicit government which did not want the corporation look bad in everybody’s eyes. Extras include an update, Three Years After the Spill, and a gulf shrimp featurette.

Although it often flounders badly, with too many pratfallish scenes of its divorced (and depressed) heroine’s overtly physical responses of her difficulties, Todd Louiso’s portrait of a 30ish woman regaining her self-esteem through an affair with a much younger man—and keeping it from her busybody family—is certainly not the disastrous indie flick it could have been.

In the lead, Melanie Lynskey is frisky and endlessly resourceful, while Blythe Danner is a powerhouse as her overbearing mom. Extras include Louiso and Lynsky interviews.

Martin McDonough returns with another twisted tale of crazy gangsters, this time with a dollop of dog napping. McDonough’s problem (as in In Bruges) is that what works onstage in his plays (notably A Behanding in Spokane) sits inertly onscreen as various idiots out-mock one another before shooting one another dead.

It’s a yuckfest in both the comic and violent senses that its cast obviously enjoys—in a better movie, Christopher Walken, Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell and Woody Harrelson would not quickly turn annoying, while invaluable Abbie Cornish and Olga Korylenko are mercilessly wasted. Extras include featurettes and interviews.

Based on a true story of a group of Massachusetts high school students who got pregnant around the same time and scandalized their town, sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin’s debut film relocates to their grubby hometown of Lorient in northern France.

Although Jean-Louis Vialard’s photography gleamingly captures the lives of those stuck in this nothing town, the sisters’ insistence on refusing to take a stance (moral or otherwise) on their naïve teen protagonists prevents 17 Girls from taking flight. Their actresses, led by The Class’ Louise Grinberg, are superb, but they can’t overcome stereotypes.

In this scrupulously non-judgmental examination of prostitutes across several continents and cultures, director Michael Glawogger simply records how these women are treated by johns and madams alongside how they perceive one another outside of work.

Similar to Frederick Wiseman, Glawogger simply sits back and observes, although by film’s end, 120 minutes of much repetitiveness makes the whole much less than the sum of its parts.

This fine recording of a trio of Benjamin Britten’s most enduring compositions—the song cycles Les Illuminations and Serenade and the orchestral Frank Bridge Variations—begins the Britten centenary (he was born in 1913) auspiciously.

Soprano Barbara Hannigan sounds exquisite in the lovely Illuminations, tenor James Gilchrist and horn player Jasper de Waal wax lyrical throughout Serenade, and the Amsterdam Sinfonietta under Candida Thompson’s leadership give the  Bridge Variations a great workout. The spacious surround sound underlines Britten’s orchestral writing genius.

In the 90s, Entartete musik (degenerate music)—by composers killed or displaced by the Nazis—was in vogue with dozens of welcome recordings: this new CD of works by four of them returns their vital voices to listeners.

Hans Krasa’s delightful suite from his children’s opera Brundibar, Viktor Ullmann’s piercing String Quartet No 3, Gideon Klein’s playful String Trio and Pavel Haas’s absorbing and monumental String Quartet No. 2 are brilliantly played by members of the immensely talented Nash Ensemble, which brings this forgotten music front and center again.

Two dramatically economical French films have their New York premieres at Anthology Film Archives: provocateur extraordinaire Bruno Dumont’s latest, Hors Satan; and writer-director Valerie Massadian’s debut feature, Nana.

Dumont has made a career of making alternately hypnotic and infuriating dramas about individuals approaching states of grace in their singular ways; in that sense, he’s a legitimate successor to Robert Bresson. Dumont’s best films—Ma Vie de Jesus, Humanite, Hadewijch—find specific locales and situations in which to play out his dissections of spiritual malaise, while his unsuccessful films—Twenty-nine Palms, Flanders, now Hors Satan—find themselves between the Scylla of dime-store psychology and the Charybdis of absurdity.

Satan plays like a straight-faced parody of a Dumont film: I’d say it’s self-parody but Dumont seems incapable of humor. Set in the rough-hewn seaside of northern France—the magnificent, captivating Cinemascope photography is by Yves Cape—the movie follows The Guy (David Dewaele), a mysterious stranger, and The Girl (Alexandre Lematre), who follows him around the countryside as he arbitrarily alternates between Good and Evil: he both heals and kills. He also meets a hitchhiker, with whom—in the most unsettling sequence in a movie filled with them—he has a weird sexual encounter.

Dumont might be saying that The Guy is The Girl’s guardian angel—but then again, he might not. Even in his bizarro-world moments, however—and Hors Satan is packed with them—Dumont makes movies that provoke responses. Despite this confused and inscrutable jumble, one looks forward to his next move: a biography of sculptor Camille Claudel with Juliette Binoche.

Nana is set on a rural French farm, where a grandfather, his daughter and her young daughter Nana live their everyday existence. For 68 minutes, we watch the goings-on in their lives: a pig is slaughtered, granddad and Nana play with piglets in a barn (she presciently calls them “little roasts”), daughter gathers sticks for firewood and later reads a bedtime story to Nana. Then one day, Mommy is gone and Nana is suddenly alone: and nothing much is made of it.

The young girl—survival instincts already firmly in hand—very matter of factly goes about her own business of changing her clothes, starting a fire, bringing home a captured rabbit (she watched her grandfather set the trap in the nearby woods), having milk and cookies, and reading to herself. Red flags go off when she curses like a trucker while re-reading a story her mother earlier read sans expletives: could the swear words she tosses off be her simply parroting exchanges she heard between the adults in her life? The director tantalizingly never obliges us with an explanation.

Massadian’s visual and narrative rhythms are impeccable—the lustrous camerawork comprises long, static, confident takes. But Nana is mainly memorable for the appearance of little Kelyna Lecomte, with whom the director worked for nearly two years: with a lot of improvisation, the barebones of a script giving an broad outline of the story. Young Lecomte responds with a miraculous performance that is less acting than simply existing: and she’s riveting throughout this remarkably honest and stark portrayal of a young girl in a violent and difficult world.