"Chris Cooper made his film debut in John Sayles's Matewan," writes Sean Axmaker, introducing his interview with the actor. "In the 20 years since, his career has been defined by a remarkable wealth and variety of interesting characters and intense performances in films as diverse as Lone Star, American Beauty, Seabiscuit and Capote. He won an Oscar for Adaptation and his unsettling incarnation of CIA traitor Robert Hanssen in Breach was mesmerizing. He takes another rare leading role in Ira Sachs' Married Life [out on DVD today], an unusual genre mix that combines period style and a story of adultery and one man's plot to murder his wife with a comedy of manners approach and a serious conversation about love and desire and marriage and relationships." Read Full Article >>

RepriseRent 

Norwegian director Joachim Trier's debut "is kissed with the breath of French New Wave sensibility," wrote EW's Lisa Schwarzbaum, "sweet with verve and a love of forward movement. The mood of joy in the midst of youthful pain is enhanced by the freshness of the first-time lead actors. " Adds the NY Times' Manhola Dargis: "An exuberant, exhilaratingly playful testament to being young and hungry -- for life and meaning and immortality, and for other young and restless bodies... a blast of unadulterated movie pleasure."

Married Life Rent  

"A goof on Hitchcock and Sirk - a period (late forties) soap opera with nasty sexual undertones and the omnipresent threat of murder," wote David Edelstein in New York of Ira Sachs' film. "This is the sort of gallows humor that Hitchcock relished drawing out in cruelly amusing cat-and-mouse games, not to be taken too seriously," adds Stephen Holden in the NY Times. Read more >>

Also out today: Then She Found Me; The Boys in Company C; Itty Bitty Titty Committee; The Office: Season Four; Outsourced (see more below); Before I Forget; Lagerfeld Confidential; Workingman's Death; Monster Camp; Remembrance of Things to Come; The Sensation of Sight; War Requiem; Water Lilies; Kings; Beyond Belief; The Wolves; *Strawberry Panic Volume 4: Fourth Refrain; Yu Gi Oh GX: Rise of the Sacred Beasts Part 1.

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Outsourced Rent 

John Jeffcoat's film, out on DVD today, about cross-cultural conflict in India is a real sleeper, "bursting with affection for its characters and for India," wrote Roger Ebert. "It never pushes things too far, never stoops to cheap plotting, is about people learning to really see one another. It has a fundamental sweetness and innocence." It's a "sweetly acted and neatly executed social comedy," adds Wesley Morris.

More like this Local Hero | Monsoon Wedding

Jamie Rich on DVDTalk wrote what you will probably thinking: "It's too bad that this 1948 crime picture has to share its title with a Patrick Swayze movie, because it just seems wrong that a well-made movie like this would ever be confused with wrongfully venerated crap like that...Directed by Jean Negulesco from a script by producer Edward Chodorov (The Mayor of Hell), this Road House [out on DVD today] is a solid noirish tale about backwoods romance and double-crossing." The fact that it stars Cornel Wilde, Ida Lupino and Richard Widmark probably automatically qualifies it as classic noir.

More like this On Dangerous Ground | High Sierra

Medium Cool  Rent  

For some reason this one just seems relevant to us again. Haskell Wexler's cinema verite is set around the chaos of the '68 Democratic convention in Chicago. Vadim Rizov wrote this year, "If any movie aspires to capture What It All Meant, you can't get much more assertive than Medium Cool, which tried to sum up the Summer of '68 in Chicago less than a year after it occurred. This has to be some kind of response-time record: we couldn't get 9/11 going on-screen 'til about three years later. The reason, of course, was that Wexler had heard—like anyone else with half an ear to the ground—that the convention would probably blow up in a big way, and shot his climactic footage accordingly... Forty years later, Medium Cool seems like one of the most ambivalent political films ever, which is both good and bad."

More like this The War at Home | Sir! No Sir!

Toronto, Telluride and, most voluminously, Venice: All three major film festivals are happening and GreenCine Daily is there, including with a fresh report on the brand new Hayao Miyazaki film, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea.