Film

A new Criterion four-DVD box set — Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist features several of Robeson's films and an abundance of documentary material.

Mike Binder has directed nine feature films, although before his last, The Upside of Anger, he was best known as an actor and for the television series The Mind of the Married Man.

In Reign Over Me, he gives a serious — an extremely serious — part to the comic Adam Sandler, who plays a man whose life is destroyed by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In the year 2000, a civilian employee of the U.S. military in Seoul, South Korea, ordered a Korean subordinate to dump a large amount of formaldehyde into a sewer pipe leading to the Han River. The incident aroused violent anti-American sentiment in Korea, and led to the birth of a monster — a monster movie, called The Host.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. The new movie Amazing Grace is about the British abolitionist movement, focusing on the man who led the fight in Parliament. It's a story that can lead to introspection.

The new movie 300 is adapted from a graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley. The movie centers on an ancient battle between the Spartans and the Persians.

The unsolved Zodiac murder cases of the late sixties and seventies became the inspiration for the modern serial-killer movie genre. There's a new thriller about the crimes: Zodiac. Director David Fincher's film stars Jake Gyllenhall, Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo.

The story of FBI agent-turned-spy Robert Hanssen is told in the new film Breach with Chris Cooper as Hanssen and Ryan Phillippe and Laura Linney as his pursuers.

A review of the German film The Lives of Others.

A review of the movie Venus, starring Peter O'Toole and Vanessa Redgrave. It was written by Hanif Kureishi, the writer of the films My Beautiful Laundrette and London Kills Me.

Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews The Rodgers & Hammerstein Collection, a 12-disc DVD set of musicals created by composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II.