If you missed The Host during its theatrical run, now you can catch up with one of the best movies of the year. it's been well covered at Cinematical (reviews by James Rocchi and Jeffrey M. Anderson, interview with director Bong Joon-ho by Scott Weinberg, brief comments by yours truly) and Magnolia has issued a collector's edition, packed with features, on DVD, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. The single-disk regular edition on DVD includes only deleted scenes and an audio commentary by the director. Don't expect a straightforward monster movie; there's plenty of dysfunctional family melodrama and a cracked sense of humor popping up at unexpected moments.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'll again beat the drum for Sean Ellis' Cashback, which I mentioned yesterday in the Indie Weekend Box Office report. It's also from Magnolia, but unlike The Host, Cashback is part of Magnolia's 'limited theatrical release slightly in advance of the DVD to generate some publicity' program; I don't know how successful the program has been, but I'm glad that more people may be checking out this dryly humorous, dreamy fantasy of a young single man. The disk includes the short film that the feature was based on, as well as a "making of."

Tom Tykwer's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer struck me as a pretty picture whose glittering charms lay entirely on the surface. But Kim Voynar had a different reading altogether, calling it "a deeply mesmerizing exploration of one man's desperate search for his own humanity ... very much more than your average serial-killer story." On balance, I think this is a film that generates discussion; therefore I recommend it. The Dreamworks DVD is skimpy on the features, with only "The Story of Perfume" on board, so a rental may be best.

From surfing through the early mixed reviews, I had the impression Danny Boyle's meditative science fiction drama Sunshine was not generating much excitement, a feeling reinforced by Nick Schager's Cinematical review ("a gorgeously crafted intergalactic saga sorely lacking in originality or profundity"). While it may not be winning unqualified raves, Rotten Tomatoes estimates that 68% of reviews were positive, more than 12,000 IMDb readers have rated it as 7.3 out of 10 and US theater-goers flooded into the ten theaters where Fox Searchlight opened it on Friday. Leonard Klady at Movie City News estimated that Sunshine earned $223,400 over the weekend for a healthy $22,340 per-screen average. It will expand to more than 400 screens next Friday.

Sicko expanded even wider into "scores of cities that never have a documentary come to their local theater," according to director Michael Moore; it dropped only 30% from its previous week of release and has now grossed more than $19 million, overtaking Waitress to become the top-grossing "limited grosser" for the year. Sicko is playing more than 1,100 locations. In its second week of release, Talk to Me averaged a very good $9,250 per-screen average, dropping just 17% while adding three theaters.

Cashback played on nine screens and earned an estimated $12,800 for Magnolia before its DVD release on Tuesday. As Kim Voynar wrote in her review, it's a funny movie well worth seeing, and I was glad I got to see it at a festival screening last fall. Among the other new limited releases, Klady estimates that the French-language comedy My Crazy Aunt had the second highest per screen average ($4,030), playing on 35 screens -- looks like it's only playing in Quebec, Canada. Distributor IDP sent Goya's Ghosts out onto 49 screens; Milos Forman's biographical costume drama starring Stellan Skarsgård, Javier Bardem and Natalie Portman pulled down an estimated $150,000.

A couple years ago at the Seattle International Film Festival, I attended a screening of a set of short films. I don't recall now what the topic of the set was, but the funniest of them was a cute little short called Cashback, about a group of hapless night employees at a grocery store and the various ways in which they fight off the relentless boredom of their jobs.

One of the guys -- an aspiring artist -- could stop time. And he used his boring night job to freeze time, turning the customers in the store into models so he could strip them and practice drawing nudes. It was a well-done little short altogether (even nominated for an Oscar), and when the screening was over, they mentioned that it was being made into a feature. Now here we are, two years later, and one of the funniest films I've seen at SIFF this year is Cashback -- the feature-length version ( which had its debut last year at Cannes).

In order to flesh out a short into a feature, you have to add in some details like more plot and characters. The challenge is in taking a well-made short like Cashback (which really stood alone just as it was) and trying to turn it into a bigger story, without losing any of the charm that made the short successful. Writer-director Sean Ellis (who, according to the "trivia" section on the film's IMDb site, wrote the feature-length script in just seven days, including the entire short within the feature ) backs up a little from where he started with his short, fleshing out the back story of the main character, Ben (Sean Biggerstaff, who has kind of a Brit Zach Braff vibe going here), who develops a terrible case of insomnia after a painful breakup with his girlfriend.