NEW YORK: The Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual Film Comment Selects series (February 20 - March 5) offers the chance to catch up with a wide variety of movies, old and new, that have been judged as neglected by the country's leading serious movie magazine. This year, the recent stuff includes Michael Almereyda's latest dispatch from New Orleans, Paradise, Jean-Claude Brisseau's controversial A l’aventure, Paul Schrader's Holocaust-survivor story Adam Resurrected with Jeff Goldblum and Willem Dafoe, the South Korean thriller The Chaser (Chugyeogja), John Boorman's The Tiger's Tail, a doppelganger story starring Brendan Gleeson, and Lake Tahoe, Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke's follow-up to his small-scale charmer Duck Season. The older selections include some real buried gems, including two documentaries by Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines: the notorious Demon Lover Diary, which is about the making of a zero-budget mid-1970s horror movie that ends with the documentary makers fleeing the scene in apparent fear for their lives from their subjects, one of whom mangled his hand so that he could use the insurance money to finance his movie and somehow arranged with Ted Nugent to use ol' Wango Tango's house for a location; and Seventeen, a look at teen culture in Muncie, Indiana that was made in 1983 for public television but deemed too raw for broadcast. There are also rare screenings of films by Situationist International founder Guy Debord and Robert Aldrich's seldom seen The Killing of Sister George.

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Ben Crair at Slate writes that "One way to measure the approach of the new year is to count the Holocaust films at your local multiplex. The holidays arrive just as studios begin wooing academy members with serious dramas, and there's nothing more serious than genocide." This year has certainly filled theaters with a bumper crop of Nazi slash Holocaust movies, including Bryan Singer's Valkyrie, Stephen Daldry's The Reader, Edward Zwick's Defiance, Paul Schrader's Adam Resurrected, Good, which is based on C. P. Taylor's play and which opens in select cities today, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which was sent from Hell by the devil in lieu of a new STD. Crair breaks these kinds of films down into various categories, such as the ones hailing the courage of "Good Germans", such as Valkyrie (as well as earlier films such as The Desert Fox, starring James Mason as Rommel, Marlon Brando's Nazi of conscience in The Young Lions, and, of course, Schindler's List; tributes to the bravery of "Resistant Jews", such as the ones in Defiance, who have the good fortune to be led by someone played by the actor currently employed as James Bond, Daniel Craig; "Redemption Stories" about survivors trying to find their way back to normal life and human feeling, such as Adam Resurrected or the Sidney Lumet film The Pawnbroker, starring Rod Steiger, which yesterday was inducted into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. Crair also has a category called "The Fable", which may be just because he had to come up with something to call Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, and Slate he couldn't have called it what I would have called it because Slate does not carry an "Adults Only" advisory.

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