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What I’m watching

By Chris Garcia | Thursday, May 21, 2009, 11:39 AM

Wherein our movie critic periodically shares what DVDs he’s been viewing in his spare time …

“The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (1973; Peter Yates): A terrific, taut crime drama about informers and their pals. Robert Mitchum plays a sad-sack ex-con who doesn’t want to return to the pen, so he sets his “friends” up for the cops. But a misunderstanding messes everything up. A noirish, hardboiled pleasure, co-starring ’70s stalwarts Peter Boyle and Alex Rocco.

“Stranded: I’ve Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains” (2007; Gonzalo Arijon): Utterly engrossing. Two hours is on the long side for a documentary, but this masterly recollection of the famed 1972 plane crash in the Andes (which inspired the book and movie “Alive”) whizzes by. You watch in a trance as survivors and judicious re-enactments relate a painfully and shockingly intimate story of survival, which of course demanded cannibalism. A knockout.

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“Soylent Green” (1973; Richard Fleischer): I dodged this movie for a very long time, and now I know why. It’s not horrible, but these low-budget Charlton Heston sci-fi flicks (see: “Omega Man”) are rickety contraptions not made for longevity. Heston’s teeth-gritting detective stumbles upon a ruling corporation’s dirty little secret, and I don’t care that I’m doing a fat spoiler here: The nation is feeding its people green wafers made of its dead. “Soylent Green … is … people!” Cue chills. And chortles. (Factoid: The name Soylent is a combo of soy and lentils.)