Rack Focus

A Collection of 2005 Academy Award Nominated Short Films
(Magnolia)

As its painstakingly accurate title informs us, this disc collects some but not quite all of last year's Oscar-nominated shorts. All five live-action nominees are included: Best of the bunch are the supermarket night-shift reverie Cashback (later expanded to feature-length by its director, Sean Ellis) and the Irish winner, Martin McDonagh's Six Shooter, a darkly funny meditation on violence and loss. John Canemaker's autobiographical animation winner The Moon and the Son is a tough slog; a better choice would have been Anthony Lucas's moody Jules Vernian adventure The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, which achieves an intriguing retro futurism.

Inside Man
(Universal)

Spike Lee scored one of his biggest critical and commercial hits to date with this thriller about an NYPD officer (Denzel Washington) trying to defuse a hostage situation at a Wall Street bank. Special features include deleted scenes, a making-of doc, and commentary by Lee.