My DVD Report for more than a year has been basically about what is and isn’t available on DVD by Oscar year. Although these reports have been sprinkled with my personal opinions here and there, they have mostly been of historical, rather than critical, perspective. Now it’s time to get back to telling you what I really think of the films I write about.

I have had a very tumultuous year revolving around my mid-year move from Northern California to the Jersey Shore. Although the move itself happened rather quickly – a little over a month from my decision to sell my home of just eight years to moving to the place I planned to spend my golden years – settling in has taken a lot longer than I anticipated. From an air conditioner that had to be moved at some expense due to kinked pipes to a garage door that had to be replaced after it came slamming down behind me one fine day to water in the basement, first from a hurricane and then from a burst bladder in a boiler expansion tank on Thanksgiving Eve, and various other issues in-between, it has been anything but an easy transition. Dealing with life’s little problems, some of which are still not quite resolved, have taken up so much time that I have yet to see a film in a theatre since I left California. Not to worry, I have seen several of this year’s theatrical released on DVD. I can report that I haven’t missed much. I have yet to see one that I wished I had seen in the theatre first. It’s been a mostly dismal year for film, although I am excited by a number of year-end releases which I hope to start catching up with beginning this week.

The best new film I’ve seen so far this year is Xavier Beauvois’ Of Gods and Men, the Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix winner in 2010 which was the French submission for last year’s Oscar, albeit one that was not selected by the Foreign Film Committee.

The film tells the true story of a small group of French Trappist monks in a monastery in Algeria in 1996 faced with prospects of leaving their home and the needs of the locals whom they attend. They are not there as missionaries to convert the Muslim population to Christianity, they are there simply to do good deeds and to pray, but at the height of the Algerian Civil War they must consider relocating for their own safety. Several want to leave, several want to stay, and several are undecided, but in the end all decide to stay with their neighbors who can’t afford to leave even under the threat of terror. The inevitable happens. Seven of the nine monks are kidnapped by the Armed Islamic Group, held for ransom and beheaded when negotiations break down.

The film was pieced together from the eyewitness accounts of the two monks who survived; the accounts of their neighbors; diaries they left behind and letters they wrote to family members. It’s all beautifully done, so much so that by the end you feel they made the right decision; that if you were among them you, too, would have come to the same one.

The film is exceptionally well acted, particularly by Lambert Wilson as the leader of the group and Michael Lonsdale as an elderly monk who is the only doctor around. Director Beauvois is also an actor and will next appear on screen as Louis XVI in Benoit Jacquat’s Farewell, My Queen opposite Diane Kruger as Marie Antoinette.

Susanne Bier’s In a Better World, the Danish film which won the Best Foreign Film Oscar is the second best film I’ve seen so far this year. Highly reminiscent of such 1950s films as Forbidden Games and Little Fugitive in its depiction of children getting by in a cruel world, this meditation on friendship under duress is constantly moving and surprising. A subplot involving mayhem and murder in an unnamed African country is compelling but an unnecessary diversion from the main story. The performances are excellent, especially those of the two boys, Elias and Christian, played by Markus Rygaard and William Johnk Nielsen.

There have been so many Holocaust films over the years that they practically perform a sub-genre of their own. One of the best is Gilles Pacquet-Brenner’s Sarah’s Key, which comes to DVD just as it is ending its theatrical run. The French film follows American born magazine writer Kristen Scott Thomas as she investigates the history of the Jewish family that was forcibly taken from the Paris apartment her French husband and her family subsequently purchased.

Her investigation slowly uncovers the tale of a ten year-old girl named Sarah who locked her three year-old brother in a bedroom closet so he wouldn’t be discovered by the French collaboration officials, telling him not to move until she comes back, not realizing she isn’t supposed to be coming back. The film sheds new light on the shameless 1942 incident in which 10,000 Jews were rounded up and removed to French camps, 8,000 of them eventually transported to the German death camps. It wasn’t the Nazis who rounded them up, but the French.

Although a very sad story, both in the present and the past, it ends on a hopeful note as Scott Thomas, excellent as usual, and Aidan Quinn as Sarah’s son, meet several years after initially being at odds with each other.

This is one of several new films that focus on the anti-Semitic duplicity of others than the Nazis during the Holocaust. Polish director Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa has a film vying for a Best Foreign Film Oscar this year called In Darkness. It’s about an anti-Semitic sewer inspector who hides Jewish refugees in the sewers for a fee until his conscience makes him choose between the people he has been helping and his best friend, a newly appointed Jew hunter. Park Diary of Anne Frank, part Schindler’s List, it’s based on a true story.