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"Moonlight Mile" (2002)

Jake Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Susan Sarandon, Holly Hunter, and newcomer Ellen Pompeo star in this hard-hitting drama about dealing with grief. In 1970s Massachusetts, Joe Nast (Gyllenhaal) is a young man whose fiancée is murdered. After the funeral, Joe continues living with his fiancée's parents, Ben (Hoffman) and JoJo (Sarandon). Then it eases Ben's pain when he brings Joe into his commercial real estate business. But soon Joe meets an attractive young woman named Bertie (Pompeo) whose boyfriend has been missing in action in Vietnam for three years. Even as they grieve, Joe, Bertie, Ben, and JoJo must come to grips with getting on with their lives. Meanwhile, a prosecutor (Hunter) proceeds with the case against the murderer, and this raises other issues that must be dealt with.

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"White Oleander" (2002)

Adapted from Janet Fitch's novel, this drama is about a teenage girl who lives in a series of foster homes after her mother commits murder. Astrid (Alison Lohman) is the daughter of an artist (Michelle Pfeiffer) who falls for a man, then murders him. With her mother in prison, Astrid is sent to a trailer park foster home, where her foster mother is a born-again former stripper (Robin Wright Penn). Astrid's next foster home is a Malibu beach house, where her foster mother is a former minor actress (Renée Zellweger) who needs a friend. Astrid's third foster home is with a Russian émigrée (Svetlana Efremova) who puts her foster kids to work finding and picking up junk for resale. As Astrid works her way through the foster homes, she periodically visits her mother in prison and tries to find her own identity.

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Eminem stars in this drama directed by Curtis Hanson. Young Jimmy Smith Jr. (Eminem) is a low-paid blue-collar worker in Detroit who has just broken up with his girlfriend and moved in with his trashy mom (Kim Basinger). Jimmy would like to be a hip-hop artist, but he's reluctant to pursue his passion, partly because he's white and nearly all rappers are black. But a black friend called Future (Mekhi Pfifer) encourages and helps Jimmy, who eventually meets with some acceptance as a hip-hop performer going by the name "Rabbit." Along the way, Rabbit forms something of a relationship with an attractive young woman (Brittany Murphy). As Rabbit copes with living at home, the dreariness of his day job, and the uphill struggle of becoming a hip-hop artist, he begins to find himself.

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This biopic chronicles the strange life of Bob Crane, star of the old TV sitcom "Hogan's Heroes." The movie opens in 1964 with Crane (Greg Kinnear) living in the L.A. area with his wife and kids and working in radio. Soon Crane's agent (Ron Leibman) gets him the lead role in a new TV series, and "Hogan's Heroes" becomes a big hit that runs for several years. While doing the show, Crane meets video technician John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe), and the two men start videotaping their sexual encounters with numerous women and later watching them. Eventually, Crane gets divorced and marries a co-star. After "Hogan's Heroes" ends, Crane works the dinner theater circuit, but he and Carpenter continue their videotaping of hundreds of sexual partners. In 1978 Crane was murdered in a motel room.

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"The Grey Zone" (2001)

Set almost entirely at the Auschwitz death camp, this grim Holocaust drama is based loosely on historical events. The story centers around Sonderkommandos, squads of Jewish prisoners who help the Nazis carry out exterminations in exchange for better treatment and extra months of life. Some of the Sonderkommandos plot a daring uprising, during which they will blow up the crematoriums using gunpowder provided by munitions factory workers. This will at least temporarily slow the exterminations. But a major hitch arises when a teenager is found alive under a pile of corpses in the gas chamber where she was supposed to die. Among the actors in the film are David Arquette, Daniel Benzali, Steve Buscemi, David Chandler, Allan Corduner, Harvey Keitel, Natasha Lyonne, and Mira Sorvino.

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"Personal Velocity" (2001)

Rebecca Miller, daughter of playwright Arthur Miller, wrote a collection of short stories that were published under the title "Personal Velocity." Later Ms. Miller wrote and directed this digital video movie, which contains three of the stories. In the first story, Delia (Kyra Sedgwick) is a working-class woman who once used sex to manipulate guys, then married an abusive husband. She flees and uses her sexuality again to get what she needs. In the second story, Greta (Parker Posey) is a married cookbook editor who's coasting. But when she works with a literary figure, she gets her ambition back. In the final story, Paula (Fairuza Balk) is a pregnant woman who's unenthusiastic about her boyfriend. But after a tragic accident, she picks up a troubled hitchhiker and gains greater self-knowledge.

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"Roger Dodger" (2002)

Most critics liked this character-driven indie comedy-drama. Roger Swanson (Campbell Scott) is a glib Manhattan advertising copywriter who was nicknamed "Roger Dodger" because of his ability to talk his way out of jams. A Lothario, the cynical Roger is always searching for women he can bed. But when the movie opens, Roger's lover (Isabella Rossellini) is in the process of dumping him. Then Roger's innocent 16-year-old nephew Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) shows up unexpectedly from Ohio, and the young man is eager to get some experience with women. Roger takes Nick on an after-dark adventure, during which they encounter two attractive young women (Elizabeth Berkley and Jennifer Beals). Over the course of their outing, things happen that cause both Nick and Roger to grow up a little.

Selected Special DVD Features:

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This drama is about two Sioux brothers who reside in South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, which is near Mount Rushmore, the mountain that has monumental heads of four U.S. presidents carved on its face. Rudy Yellow Lodge (Eric Schweig) is a policeman, but since most of the reservation's inhabitants live in abject poverty, he's sometimes more like a social worker than a cop. Rudy's brother, Mogie Yellow Lodge (Graham Greene), is an alcoholic who buys his booze at white-owned stores just outside the reservation. Overcome with rage and despair, Rudy badly beats two whites he's pretty sure committed murder, and then he torches the booze store that Mogie usually patronizes. Most of the movie chronicles the interrelated tragedies of the two brothers.

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More New Video/DVD Releases for March, 2003