Bravo, once again, to maverick distributor Olive Films for releasing yet another brave, cinephilic film for a microscopic but dedicated audience.

For many of my movie-obsessed brethren, the release this month of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema ($44.99) is the most exciting home-video news of the calendar year, a monumental achievement in experimental self-reflection and the perfect Christmas gift for the jaded avant-gardist.

Histoire(s) du Cinema is an eight-part video series, with the individual movies running between 23 and 52 minutes. Godard filmed the first two (which are probably the most impressive) in the late 1980s and finished the others in 1997 and 1998. The films comprise the story of cinema’s history through Godard’s unconventional lens; for Godard, this history is decidedly nonlinear and global, with images from Griffith and Murnau rubbing elbows with Hitchcock, Rossellini and Godard’s own New Wave classics (and the occasional, jarring blip of hardcore pornography, of which no complete history of moving pictures can do without).

The Histoire(s) videos – bearing subtitles like Fatal Beauty, The Coin of the Absolute and Control of the Universe – are essentially essay films more fit for the endless loop of museum exhibition than the straightforward projection system of movie theaters. You can approach them from the beginning, middle or end and appreciate them equally, which is appropriate for a director who famously said, “A story should have a beginning, middle and end … but not necessarily in that order.”

Godard himself appears in several of the videos in static shots, whether he’s cutting film in a projection room or flipping through film-theory books, and he’s perpetually puffing on a stogie. But mostly, these works are comprised solely of film clips – some still, others moving – jumbled together with other movie images in a state of epileptic intercutting, and overlaid with seemingly unrelated text and more seemingly unrelated narration from Godard himself. Occasionally, we get an evocative score from the likes of Bernard Hermann, Beethoven, Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits, yet another element adding to the audiovisual clutter.

In this continuous status of information overload, the film clips rarely last longer than a few seconds; this is cinema at its most ADD-like. Godard deploys slow-motion effects on standard-speed movies and creates irises around images where none exist, manipulating iconic art-house visions to fit his agitprop history. This flurry of joy expressed for Godard’s most cherished artistic medium is inspiring, even if some of his messages are so personal as to be inscrutable (“A 35mm rectangle saves the honor of reality.”).

And it’s all the more impressive given that it was made in a pre-Internet, pre-Final Cut Pro age. The best corollary I can conjure for Godard’s sample-heavy remixes is the trend of mash-up music created by deejays like Danger Mouse, Girl Talk and Avalanches, and Godard, in typical trailblazing fashion, beat them to it by decades.

Occasionally, Godard corralled big-name actors and critics for this series. In part three, titled Only Cinema, he has a conversation with influential movie writer Serge Daney about the French New Wave and its role in the history of movies; it’s the only approximation of a coherent conversation in the 266-minute totality of the project. He uses Julie Delpy and Juliette Binoche in two of the other videos, but the results are not particularly exciting.

He has them read obscure poetry, echoing his employment of Woody Allen in his revisionist film version of King Lear. Their star power is demystified, as it should be, leaving us to focus solely on the film clips and the relationships and contexts Godard creates through their collisions.

An overriding obsession running through these videos is cinema’s origins and its distinction from painting, photography, theater and literature, and some of the most moving passages detail the medium’s role in fostering escapism, developing mind-numbing television programs and colluding in war propaganda.

Godard’s narration and editing choices may wander now and then into dense thickets of esoterica, but when he’s at his most focused, he’s a master of polemical expressionism. He ends the last video on an apocalyptic dissection of a world overrun by global, abstract tyranny, while finding pleasure toiling in a world fraught by “inexorable decline.” Say what you want about Godard’s increasing inaccessibility in the 20^th and early 21^st centuries, but one thing is for certain: The guy certainly hasn’t mellowed.

DVD Watch: Dec. 6: There may be no better gift for the sophisticated cinephile on your list (can I be that person?) than Design for Living (Criterion, $35.99 Blu-ray, $26.99 DVD), Ernst Lubitsch’s pre-Code 1933 sex comedy, adapted from a Noel Coward play, about a woman and two men who decide to live together in a “gentleman’s agreement” to discover which of them will end up together. It’s Gary Cooper and Frederic March fighting over Miriam Hopkins with a risqué suggestiveness on which the moralistic Hayes Code would soon clamp down. The bonus features are excellent, including a Lubitsch short film taken from the 1932 omnibus movie If I Had a Million and a British television production of the play Design for Living.

Just as exciting is the home video release of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea (Entertainment One, $19.99 Blu-ray, $16.99 DVD), one of the Italian auteur’s most aesthetically rigorous films. A nearly wordless take on the oft-staged Greek epic, it’s remembered as the only film ever made starring opera diva Maria Callas. Also, check out a pair of modern French actioners that harken back to the ‘70s American genre pictures of Frankenheimer and Friedkin: Point Blank (Magnolia, $21.99 Blu-ray, $15.99 DVD) and Rapt (Kino Lorber, $31.49 Blu-ray, $26.49 DVD).

Dec. 13: Speaking of John Frankenheimer, one of his most unusual films arrives in DVD from Shout! Factory this week. 99 and 44/100 Percent Dead ($15.99) – one of the most cumbersome movie titles in film history – is an underrated, blackly comic gangster flick from 1974 starring Richard Harris. It’s packaged in a double-feature DVD alongside The Nickel Ride, another 1974 crime film from Robert Mulligan. On the newer front, Daddy Longlegs (Zeitgeist, $26.99) is a critically acclaimed independent dramedy by first-time feature filmmakers Ben and Joshua Safdie, about a manic, irresponsible but tragically human father and his sparse relationship with his two young sons.

Otherwise, this is a great week for Blu-ray reissues of modern and classic titles, including Vincente Minnelli’s lavish (and occasionally subversive) musical masterpiece Meet Me in St. Louis (Warner, $25.99), the kinetic art-house hit City of God (Lionsgate, $14.99), Peter Jackson’s cult film Heavenly Creatures (Miramax Lionsgate, $14.99) and Todd Haynes’ eye-popping, fictionalized account of the glam rock movement, Velvet Goldmine (Miramax Lionsgate, $14.99).

Dec. 20: This week marks the home-video debut of one of the year’s most enjoyable movies, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (Sony, $22.49 Blu-ray, $17.99 DVD), as well as the Blu-ray premiere of William A. Wellman’s Nothing Sacred (Kino Lorber, $21.99), a 1937 journalism comedy with a brilliant Ben Hecht script and a characteristically wonderful lead performance from Carole Lombard.

TCM Watch: A tribute to tough, hard-boiled studio director Edward Dymytrk on Dec. 10 includes two rarities: Obsession (10:15 p.m.), a thriller about a psychiatrist plotting revenge on his wife’s lover; and Till the End of Time (3:45 a.m.), a Robert Mitchum vehicle about returning war veterans that sounds remarkably similar to The Best Years of Our Lives, released the same year.

At 8 p.m. Dec. 14, as part of a lineup of rare films dedicated to the preservation efforts of the George Eastman Film Archive, TCM will present the world television premiere of Stanley Kubrick’s unreleased debut film, the antiwar drama Fear and Desire. This is a big deal. Ditto to John Ford’s The World Moves On, a 1934 reflection on the Great Depression that runs at 2:45 a.m. that night.

Lastly, at 7:15 a.m. Dec. 21, check out The Chapman Report, a George Cukor comedy with Jane Fonda, Shelly Winters and Claire Bloom that hasn’t seen a DVD release.

If any one theme connects the recent documentaries of Werner Herzog, it’s that the director, narrator and inevitable participant in his films boldly goes where few have gone before – whether it’s engaging with the few human inhabitants of the North Pole (Encounters at the End of the World), flying above rarely seen rainforests in a helium-fueled contraption (The White Diamond) or filming the primitive art of France’s Chauvet Cave, a place few humans outside of the sciences have seen, in three dazzling dimensions (Cave of Forgotten Dreams).

With a prestigious cinematic career spanning almost 50 years and 62 titles, Herzog has been granted access to many a no-man’s-land, completing his best reportage in far-flung contours of space, be they physical or psychic nooks. His latest release, Into the Abyss, explores a little of both.

A solemn meditation on capital punishment in modern America, its journalistic centerpiece is an interview with convicted killer Michael Perry just eight days before his execution in the spring of 2010 – yet another rare Herzog coup. But the entire film is taxing on deep emotional and mental levels.

The crime took place in Conroe, Texas, in 2001, when Perry and Jason Burkett slaughtered a mother, a her son and her son’s best friend in a posh, gated community, all in the name of stealing a car. The meat of the film is the director’s interviews with friends and relatives of both the criminals and victims.

The most heartbreaking footage comes courtesy of the sister of the murdered teenager Adam Stotler, who runs through the laundry list of family members lost to murder, suicide and natural causes over a year’s time – and who speaks about disconnecting her phone service because she couldn’t handle another call informing her of a dead relative.

But the families of the killers earn your sympathies, too. Burkett’s father is a career criminal serving his latest 40-year sentence, and he all but collapses into a puddle of shame as he expresses his regret over the choices he has made and how they affected James’ upbringing. In fact, just about everybody who fills Herzog’s frame has a history of violence and/or drug abuse; one man remained illiterate until he learned to read and write in prison, which we learn through one of the film’s many conversational sidetracks (one of Herzog’s strengths as an interviewer has always been that he asks the peculiar questions of an outsider, and his films usually contain diversions as compelling as their main subjects).

Into the Abyss is as much a tragic diagnosis of an entire city and its neighboring towns – such as Cut and Shoot, whose very name portends grisliness – as it is the crimes of Perry and Burkett, or the death penalty in general.

I was most struck by Herzog’s interview with a former state executioner whose sober description of the protocols of his job segues into a recollection about the emotional upheaval he experienced around Execution No. 120, which made him abandon his post, retirement plan included. The sequence is at first detached, then personal, and it ultimately reflects the kind of “Turn the other cheek” New Testament humanism Herzog himself endorses.

That said, Herzog is too gentle an interrogator to stir up much in the way of controversy, and critics and defenders of the death penalty will each find their champions in the tragic souls who speak with disarming candor in front of his camera. Into the Abyss will probably change no one’s ideological stance on the issue; Herzog makes clear his opposition to state-sanctioned murder without preaching on behalf of his viewpoint, and that alone separates his movie from the temptation of propaganda that has swallowed too many social-problem films.

Instead of telling viewers what to think, he achieves the opposite, lingering on his subjects for beat after beat after they’re done speaking, encouraging introspection. Through Herzog’s own voice, Into the Abyss has the soothing, deliberate, Teutonic demeanor of a grown-up attempting, through extended shots, to gaze into the souls of his troubled cast – whether or not every member has one.

INTO THE ABYSS. Director: Werner Herzog; Rating: PG-13; Distributor: Sundance Selects; Opens: Friday at Regal Shadowood in Boca Raton, Regal Delray Beach and Living Room Theaters at FAU.

For an actor as compelling as George Clooney, he’s the kind of matinee idol who has been asked only on the rarest of occasions to stretch his abilities behind his chiseled-hunk personality type.

My two favorite performances of his – in Michael Clayton and Up in the Air – were both Clooneyfied: minor deviations from his smooth, fast-talking persona. Even his Batman was less Batman than George Clooney.

So, in a career that can best be described as variations on a theme, Clooney’s leading role in The Descendants is a true breakthrough. Never has he played a man so unconfident, so unsure of himself, so emotionally fraught with conflicting emotions dancing across his harried face simultaneously.

His gray hair prominent, he’s gangly and disheveled in more ways than one, poised perpetually at his tether’s end. When he says to his 17- and 10-year-old children, “It’s like you kids don’t respect authority,” it’s a flaccid revelation, perfectly delivered without any authority whatsoever.

His character is Matt King, an affluent real estate-transaction lawyer in Honolulu whose wife Elizabeth, we’re told in the opening narration, has been rendered comatose after a boating accident. Her condition deteriorating, Matt has to prepare for the worst, and breaking the news to his pair of frequently delinquent children is only the beginning. New revelations surface that make Matt, whose marriage was already on the rocks, rethink his relationship with Elizabeth, ultimately prompting a flight to Kaua’i.

Adapted from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants is the first feature from Alexander Payne since 2004’s Sideways, and it’s well worth the wait. This is a deliberately paced studio movie for grown-ups, the kind of film Lawrence Kasdan used to make in his prime, operating irrespective of genre and even audience accessibility.

It turns every convention of the funereal weepie on its head, finding humor in sorrow and pain in love. Payne revels in the frailties, hypocrisies and hidden courage of his characters, and all of them emerge as three-dimensional people, even the ones that seem, at first, to be comic props.

I’m a little shaky on the use of voice-over narration, on which Payne relies a bit too much (it’s the most obvious nod to the film’s novelistic origins) in the opening third of the picture, because it tends to spell things out for an unthinking audience. But by the time Payne abandons that device, it’s smooth, brilliant sailing.

As for the film’s location, I can probably count all the Hawaiian-set movies I’ve seen on fewer than two hands, and of them only a small fraction view the islands as anything more than tourist playgrounds. Here, Phedon Papamichael’s sometimes gorgeous, postcard cinematography belies the basic ordinariness of the film’s recurring locales: anonymous highways, hospital interiors, suburban housing developments, tony private residences that just as easily could have been the domain of a Boca country club.

The Descendants’ soundtrack is just as unconventional – which is to say authentically Hawaiian – with lovely, Hawaiian-language acoustic music by Gabby Pahinui and Keola Beamer underscoring the action.

Sideways was one of the more mature movies of the past 10 years, but it’s almost infantile compared to The Descendants. This proves more than ever that Payne is a deft handler of changing emotional tides; he explores multiple moods and textures with lived-in effectiveness. It’s no shock, when assessing the totality of this affecting picture, that he has elicited from Clooney the performance of his life.

When the actor finally turns on the water works, it’s natural and beautiful, never calculated in that familiar “Show me the Oscar” expressiveness. Don’t be surprised if they grant him one anyway.

THE DESCENDANTS. Director: Alexander Payne; Cast: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller, Nick Krause, Matthew Lillard, Beau Bridges, Matt Corboy, Robert Forster; Distributor: Fox; Rating: R; Opens: Wednesday at most area theaters

Back in January, Ramin Setoodeh wrote a memorable article for Newsweek titled “Crazy Chick Flicks,” which pointed to the tendency for actresses to go psycho to win Oscars.

Natalie Portman, who scored an undeserved statuette for Black Swan, was the most prominent example at the time. Her character was also typical in that she expressed a sexual mania along with her schizophrenia: She was the kind of bonkers that straight men love, the kind that sell movie tickets. If we relied on Hollywood for the latest mental-health dispatches, we’d think all women who suffer breakdowns inevitably accompany them with hypersexuality. Who cares if they’re destroying themselves and their loved ones when they’re so wild in the sack?

Of the many things to love about Martha Marcy May Marlene, the feature-film debut from writer-director Sean Durkin, its attitude toward its increasingly untethered heroine is the most admirable. There are many opportunities for Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), a refugee from a destructive cult, to act in ways that place libidinous sexual confusion above all else. But Durkin demythologizes this convenient prurience for a story, and a character, that are more grounded in tragic, tactile reality.

Fleeing a cult in the Catskills, Martha phones the only family she has left: sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson), who transports Martha to her country house in Connecticut. After two brainwashed years in the communal cult, Martha has to relearn everything she once knew about decorum. Her actions -- jumping naked into the pond behind the house, climbing onto her sister’s bed while Lucy is having sex with her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) -- are those of a savage who has not been acclimated to civil society, and Martha’s uncouth flubs reveal just how much these incestuous cults detach themselves from societal parameters; they might as well be sovereign nations.

As quickly as Martha has abandoned her former home -- she’s escaped through the woods after a couple of minutes of screen time -- the movie slingshots jarringly back to her life in the cult. The rest of the film flashes back and forth between past and present, with Martha’s current associations triggering her memories until the memories become her reality. This subjective structure is elegant in its narrative architecture and believable in its emotional progression (or regression, as it were); we have to live exactly what Martha has to relive, which is enough to drive anyone insane.

The cult leader, Patrick, is played by John Hawkes, who, a year after Winter’s Bone, is independent cinema’s embodiment of the backwoods junkie. His charisma is disputable, but he apparently has enough charm (and intimidation) to attract a growing contingency of wayward nubile girls to his farm. An initiation-by-sodomy from Patrick himself is just the beginning of the personal and psychic terror Martha will be subjected to.

And yet she stays, for two years, mastering her chores, learning the protocols and ushering Patrick’s newest strays into the fold. Martha Marcy May Marlene (the title refers to the other monikers Martha is forced to assume in the cult) is a film of concreteness and immediacy; it doesn’t dwell on the psychological underpinnings that lead a girl from being tearfully raped on a hard floor to becoming a model cult member, in the manner of Ondi Timoner’s great documentary Join Us.

But in some scenes, we understand the cult’s appeal: For once, Martha is part of a loving family, and in Patrick she finds a father figure who sees greatness in her: “You’re a teacher and a leader,” he tells her with pride.

Durkin shot the movie in the 2:35:1 Scope ratio, but his images practically subvert the widescreen panoramas. Martha Marcy May Marlene has the aesthetic constriction of a Dreyer or Bergman film; it’s all close-ups, and most of them are of Martha or her appendages. If some cameras caress their actresses, Durkin’s surveys his subject with a nature photographer’s detachment, resulting in a complete anatomical fascination that transcends vulgar eroticism.

Olsen, known more as being the younger sister to twins Mary-Kate and Ashley than for her scant on-screen resume, is astonishing, giving a tour de force performance of fear, vulnerability, defiance and finally acceptance, if forever haunted by the cult’s presence around every corner. And hey, she may even earn an Oscar nod for it without her character having to screw her sister’s husband. That’s progress.

MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE. Director: Sean Durkin; Cast: Elizabeth Olsen, Sarah Paulson, Hugh Dancy, John Hawkes, Brady Corbet, Louisa Krause; Rating: R; Distributor: Fox Searchlight; Showing: Now playing in select theaters

When I was a kid, before I knew who J. Edgar Hoover was, I associated him with cross-dressing. I’m not alone.

“Cross-dressing” is the seventh-most-popular Google search accompanied with the phrase “J. Edgar Hoover,” behind “movie,” “biography,” “trailer,” “building,” “president” and “black” (something about Hoover’s rumored African-American ancestry). It tops even “FBI” in public interest.

Yet this apparently alluring facet of Hoover’s controversial life takes up all of one minute of Clint Eastwood’s 137-minute biopic J. Edgar, and it’s the most unconvincing moment of an otherwise credible feature. Slipping on his immediately expired mother’s pearls and frock before collapsing to her bedroom floor like a sack of shameful potatoes, Hoover’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) breakdown is supposed to be a catharsis – with his disapproving mom (Judi Dench) no longer silencing his urges, he can finally be the person he always knew he was inside.

It’s all very neat and tidy and screenwriterly; Robert McKee would attest that it holds up soundly as a dramaturgical device. But it feels nothing like life. Are we to believe that Hoover never fancied himself in women’s attire until the very moment his mother’s corpse turned cold?

And Eastwood leaves the subject at that – no more questions, please; nothing to see here. That’s because, by the looks of it and considering Eastwood’s oeuvre, he wasn’t comfortable with the subject matter. Say what you want about the liberal, antiwar nature of some of Eastwood’s movies in the 2000s, but the man is an old-fashioned, conservative filmmaker.

Rather than take a definitive stance on Hoover’s sexuality, his policy is closer to “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” The relationship between Hoover and longtime (business) partner Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) is suggested in a few moments of furtive glances, PG-acceptable dialogue and vanilla hand-holding, with just one moment of very effective physical intimacy that leaves us, like Tolson, wanting more.

I can’t imagine this seemingly tepid final product meeting the full approval of screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who has specialized in similar docudramas about gay figures; he wrote Milk and Pedro. The only facet of Hoover’s life that makes this a personal project for Black was thus given short shrift.

Where Eastwood does succeed is in providing a multifaceted, warts-and-all portrait of Hoover’s strengths and weaknesses, his innovations and embarrassments, in the Old Master style of technical flawlessness he’s honed over four decades of storytelling. You may be disappointed at times, but you’ll never be bored.

The film alternates between two time periods: The 1920s-30s, when the upstart Hoover becomes the first head of the nascent FBI, and the 1960s and early ‘70s, when Hoover was an aging, paranoid coot still assailing the bogeymen of bygone eras – Bolsheviks, gangsters, etc. It’s a solid structure, even if it omits a huge swath of Hoover’s FBI tenure.

DiCaprio’s performance is Oscar-angling, and he may finally get one; his Hoover is the actor’s best portrayal of a crazy, privileged eccentric since The Aviator.

A word about the makeup, however: J. Edgar is only the latest Hollywood film to Benjamin Buttonize its characters, with DiCaprio’s “old Hoover” never appearing to be anything more than the illusion it is. At first we’re so distracted by the hours of pre-production to create this magic trick that is takes away from the performance. Even worse is the elderly makeup applied to Hammer, whose Tolson is an unintentionally unsettling human freakshow extracted from Tales From the Crypt.

There’s no question that J. Edgar is a work of evenhanded quality. You’ll walk away with an understanding of Hoover’s accomplishments -- he’s credited with creating the foundation for police fingerprinting, nobly battling government forces resistant to science and technology -- and his deep character flaws: He was a delusional, megalomaniacal perjurer who employed insidious tactics to slander anyone who opposed him.

As for the more sordid details of Hoover’s sex life, I would like to see a movie that takes a bolder stance -- perhaps a Hoover film written and directed by Todd Haynes -- as opposed to Eastwood’s delicate game of dodgem. For now, this enigmatic figure will have to remain in the celluloid closet.

J. EDGAR. Director: Clint Eastwood; Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer, Naomi Watts, Judi Dench, Dermot Mulroney, Josh Lucas, Ed Westwick; Rating: PG-13; Distributor: Warner Bros.; Opens: Friday at most area theaters