A solid handful of indie titles vie for your attention on the DVD shelves this week. I've already written about the marketing for Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs, my pick of the week, but that shouldn't overshadow the intrinsic quality of the film itself. The DVD from IFC includes Thanks for the Add!, a short film by Swanberg, an audio commentary by Swanberg and actors / co-writers Greta Gerwig and Kent Osborne, behind the scenes footage, and SXSW video production diary spots.

I watched Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage (pictured) with expectations set perhaps too high. I thought it would be a thrilling Spanish ghost story; instead it's a rather pallid drama about a mother and a lost son with just a smidgen of suspense and supernatural overtones. Jette Kernion had a response similar to mine, but others liked it much more, including our own Scott Weinberg, who praised it as "entirely captivating from start to finish." The DVD from Picturehouse includes three featurettes and something on the somewhat misleading marketing campaign.

Family dysfunction and elder care may not sound like sexy subjects, but Tamara Jekins "simply takes us into the story of her fascinating characters, and the integrity with which she handles it makes it ring true throughout." That was the reaction of Kim Voynar to The Savages; she was especially impressed by the performances of Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman. The DVD from Fox Searchlight includes an extended scene, director's snapshots, and a featurette entitled "About the Savages."

Riding a wave of near-unanimous praise, Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening began its box office sojourn at the top, earning an estimated $11,610 per screen at seven theaters, according to Leonard Klady at Movie City News. Wagner previously made the fascinating dysfunctional family comedy drama The Talent Given Us, which starred his own family, but this time performances by non-family members Frank Langella and Lauren Ambrose have been roundly acclaimed. (Check out reviews by Cinematical's James Rocchi and Ryan Stewart.)

Todd Haynes' I'm Not There has received some ecstatic critical response, which translated into "encouraging but less than superlative response," in the words of Mr. Klady. By the numbers, the film made an estimated $5,310 per screen at 130 engagements, which actually sounds pretty good for an unconventional film that even the critics have had difficulty getting a handle on. (Read more: Cinematical reviews by James Rocchi and Jeffrey M. Anderson.)

The third new specialty release, Izuru Narushima's Midnight Eagle, barely opened, earning an estimated $1,630 per screen at two theaters. The action thriller also opened the Tokyo Film Festival but is probably most notable because it's the first time in memory that a Japanese film has opened day and date in Japan and the United States. Sadly, it was slaughtered by the few US critics who saw it, as recorded at Rotten Tomatoes.

Margot at the Wedding expanded from two to 35 theaters and continued to perform well, raking in $11,200 per screen, while No Country for Old Men jumped out into 860 theaters and made an estimated $9,000 per engagement. Mr. Klady pointed to three holdovers: Sean Penn's Into the Wild ($1,920 per screen), Alejandro Monteverde's Bella ($1,970 per screen) and Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead ($3,190).

When Independent Digital Entertainment (InDigEnt) was founded in 1999, DV filmmaking was still fairly new, although not unknown or unused. The problem was that it wasn't yet recognized and respected enough to be taken seriously in the film market. This was three years before George Lucas delivered the DV-shot Attack of the Clones and changed many minds about the capability of digital cinematography. Today, a great percentage of indie and Hollywood features are made digitally, and InDigEnt may be somewhat obsolete. It comes as no surprise, then, that co-founder Gary Winick has announced the production company will be put to rest come 2007.

Winick, who directed the upcoming Charlotte's Web, got the idea for InDigEnt from the Dogma 95 movement and started the company with John Sloss as a way for indie filmmakers to finance small, cheap projects. Many of the movies produced by InDigEnt aren't too appealing to the eye, but a few of them were great showcases for actors, such as Aaron Stanford, who broke out by appearing in Winick's Tadpole, and Patricia Clarkson, who received an Oscar nod for Pieces of April. But while the company started off well, gaining notice for decent pics like Tadpole, Pieces of April, Personal Velocity: Three Portraits and Richard Linklater's Tape, it eventually fell to near-obscurity with forgettable titles, such as Kill the Poor, Puccini for Beginners and Steve Buscemi's Lonesome Jim (which I still say is hilarious, if not substantial).