By BRUCE DANCIS, Scripps Howard News Service

Reviewing "The Reader" in The New Yorker last December, Anthony Lane described the film as "pernicious" and "a low-grade musing on atrocity, garnished with erotic titillation." Manohla Dargis of The New York Times was equally contemptuous of the film, calling it "another movie about the Holocaust that embalms its horrors with artfully spilled tears and asks us

"Doubt," the excellent movie that John Patrick Shanley adapted and directed from his Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning play, works on many levels. Like the play, the film is set in 1964 in a Catholic church in the Bronx.

Considering that it was one of the epochal events in world history, the French Revolution has been somewhat neglected by filmmakers.

Francois Truffaut's "The Last Metro" and William Wellman's "Heroes For Sale" and "Wild Boys of the Road," each out on DVD this week, offer powerful dramatizations of how people have dealt with political, social and economic crises.

There always seems to be a shortage of good, mature movies for adults. And by "adult," we're not talking about porno films, but about movies that treat sex as both a natural part of human life and as just one part of that life.

Released within a few months of each other during the winter of 1939-40, Max Fleischer's "Gulliver's Travels" and Walt Disney's "Pinocchio" had the distinction of being the second and third animated feature films made in the United States.

Two dramas starring top-notch actors and written by popular novelists highlight this week's DVD releases, but with very different results.

Not all Britons were spared from being conquered by the Nazis during World War II. The British Channel Islands were deemed by the British government to be undefendable -- they are much closer to France than England -- and were occupied by the German army for five difficult years.

When President Obama said in his inaugural address that "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers," satirist Bill Maher and others fitting into the last category must have been pleased to be included.

Two of the most powerful films of 2008, movies that stay with you long after their final credits roll by, are out this week on DVD. Yet "Miracle at St. Anna" and "Frozen River" are different in many ways, from their disparate scopes to the dissimilar experience and fame of their directors.