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Children of Men

Starring: Clive Owen, Julianne Moore

Directed by: Alfonso Cuaron

RS: 3.5of 4 Stars

Just in case you're one of the deprived who let Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men slip by at the multiplex, grab this DVD and hold on for rock-the-house image and sound. It's a ride, but not quite what you expect. This tale of a futuristic dystopia is the anti-Blade Runner. The focus isn't in the action up front, it's there in the background where the film's themes take root. Cuaron, filling every frame with his passion and intellect, takes on a 1992 novel by P.D. James set in 2027 in battle-battered England, the only country left to soldier on in the face of massive terrorism, immigrant invasion and global infertility (no child has been born since 2009). Hope is the first casualty among survivors. Theo (a superb Clive Owen) is a shell of a man until his former lover (Julianne Moore) begs him to help the refugees who are tortured and kept in cages. That's when Theo takes on Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), who is eight months pregnant and a target for special-interest groups with lethal motives. Those motives can be murky, but seeing the film again on disc fills in the gaps. Cuaron, invoking shattered cities from Beirut to Baghdad, is dedicated to locating shards of humanity among the ruins. That he does, not just in the person of Jasper (a hilarious and heartfelt Michael Caine), a former political cartoonist, but in the small details that measure what our planet has lost. No movie in the last year is more redolent of sorrowful beauty and exhilarating action.

DVD EXTRAS Forget the deleted scenes (they're minor), but Cuaron's documentary, The Possibility of Hope, features philosophers, including the outspoken Slovian culture critic Slavoj Zizek, digging deep into the film's issues. In a world of DVDs loaded with promotional filler, this is it's own kind of utopia. So is the behind-the-scenes stuff. You don't just watch the sequence in which a car is attacked from all sides -- you live inside it, ducking each fresh, ferocious assault. Seeing how it was done is a revelation. Cuaron's chief collaborator is director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki, a weaver of visual miracles. Lubezki, known as Chivo, didn't win the Oscar for best cinenmatography this year. Chivo was robbed.