Some day they may make a good movie about Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, but Anne Fontaine’s Coco Before Chanel isn’t that movie.

Oscar nominated for its gorgeous costume designs, the film looks pretty and is better constructed than last year’s TV movie, Coco Chanel, but is still a vacuous conceit that plays footsy with the truth.

The real Chanel worked her way up the food chain through a series of stints as rich men’s mistresses, but the several films made about her life portray those liaisons as love affairs. By ending this one with the death of her British lover, Boy Capel, this one at least doesn’t have to skirt the issue of whether or not Chanel was a Nazi collaborator during World War II.

Audrey Tautou has come a long way since her gamine portrayal in 2001’s Amelie split critics down the middle. Although something of a fish out of water in The Da Vinci Code, she is grandly at home here in her native language whether singing and dancing in nightclubs, designing dresses or playing at romance.

Alessandro Nivola does his usual competent work as Boy Capel.

Coco Before Chanel is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

One of the most harrowing films of recent years, newbie director Steve McQueen’s Hunger, previously reviewed here in its Region 2 release, has now been given the deluxe Criterion treatment.

Not an easy movie to watch, the film chronicles the 1981 IRA prison hunger strike led by Bobby Sands, who pushed his body beyond its limits and died of starvation for the cause.

The film, which had an Oscar qualifying run in Los Angeles in December, 2008 was not nominated for any Oscars but did appear on numerous ten best lists in 2009, the year of its general release.

Michael Fassbender gives a gut-wrenching performance as Sands, especially in the scenes in which his body is just wasting away. Fassbender, who was born in Heidelberg, Germany and raised in Northern Ireland, has a German father and Irish mother. He currently resides in the U.S. and made a big impression as one of the Jewish U.S. soldiers in the Oscar nominated Ingourious Basterds.

Hunger is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. Extras include new video interviews with Fassbender and McQueen, a documentary on the making of the film and a contemporaneous BBC documentary on the actual hunger strike from 1981.

One of the funniest films ever made, Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers was a huge hit all over the world in 1956. Its 2004 Hollywood remake is probably better known today, but it isn’t half as funny, or half as good.

The term “lady killer” means a man who is irresistible to women or has the reputation of being so. That is not the derivation of the term used in the title of the film, which refers to a gang of crooks who kill women, or least try to!

Alec Guinness, in one of his most delightful performances, heads the gang of five (Cecil Parker, Herbert Lom, Peter Sellers, Danny Green) professional thieves in a planned robbery executed from the rented attic of an eccentric little old lady (Katie Johnson). She unwittingly assists them in the crime. When she discovers what they’ve done, she insists they turn themselves in to the police. The nutty lady must die! The five bungling thieves draw straws to determine which of them gets to do the dirty deed. One by one they find they can’t, and are instead killed themselves by the remaining gang members.

If this one doesn’t strike your funny bone you probably don’t have one.

The Ladykillers is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD and contains typically splendid Criterion supplements including an introduction by Terry Gilliam and video interviews with various filmmakers on the career of director Mackendrick.

An Oscar nominee this year for Best Documentary, Louie Psihoyos’ The Cove is a fascinating look at the secret world of Japanese fishermen who methodically kill the dolphins they can’t sell to theme parks and other venues. The killings average 23,000 per year in Taiji’s infamous cove. The dolphin meat, which is then sold to restaurants and schools, is passed off as whale meat and other delicacies. The mercury level in dolphins is toxic.

The Cove is available on standard DVD only. Extras include an equally fascinating 18 minute interview with Robert Kennedy, Jr., in which he links the mercury used in the making of vaccines in the U.S. to the increase in autism in the U.S. population born after 1990.

Richard Barthelmess was a hugely popular silent screen star, most notably in D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms and Way Down East and Henry King’s Tol’able David. He was one of the three actors nominated for an Academy Award in Oscar’s first year, along with Charlei Chaplin and Emil Jannings, who won.

The two films he was nominated for were The Patent Leather Kid and The Noose. The former is an epic fight film, the latter a routine crime saga. Both are extremely rare films that are seldom shown.

Of Barthelmess’s talkies, 1930’s The Dawn Patrol (aka Flight Commander) and 1939’s Only Angels Have Wings, both directed by Howard Hawks,are the best known. He is the star of the former and has a role in support of Cary Grant and Jean Arthur in the latter.

Now the Warner Archive has made available four more Barthelmess films.

Frank Lloyd was an Academy Award nominee for 1929’s Weary River, a part talkie that was a hybrid between a prison drama and a musical in which Barthelmess’ voice was scandalously dubbed singing the title tune.

Lloyd directed Barthelmess again in 1930’s Son of the Gods, in which he is the son of a wealthy Chinese banker with Caucasian features. Constance Bennett is the woman who loves him until she learns of his heritage. Their jaw-dropping confrontation is one of the most wince inducing scenes of all time.

Frank Albertson has a nice bit as Barthelmess’s college buddy and prolific child actor Dickie Moore has an interesting bit as Barthelmess as a boy.

John Monk Saunders, who wrote the first Best Picture winner, Wings,and won an Oscar for doing the same for The Dawn Patrol, supplied the source material for 1931’s The Last Flight, directed by William Deiterle, a last minute replacement for Wings’ William A. Wellman.

The narrative closely follows that of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which was first published in 1926. Barthelmess, David Manners, Johnny Mack Brown and Elliott Nugent are four former World War I flyers now drifting through Europe as part of the lost generation. Helen Chandler is the girl who follows them from Paris to Lisbon with tragic results. All five leads are excellent.

Wellman finally got a chance to direct Barthelmess himself in 1933’s Central Airport, in which he plays a World War I veteran flyer who turns to barnstorming aerial tricks to make a living after the war. Sally Eilers is the daredevil parachutist with whom he falls in love, only to lose her to his younger brother, Tom Brown. The climax of the film is Barthelmess’s rescue of a downed plane piloted by Brown and co-piloted by John Wayne. The film contains all the action and suspense we’ve come to expect from Wellman.