Here’s a look at the notable films that are opening or expanding this weekend, with links, where applicable, to our previous coverage:

• No Country For Old Men: If every Coen Brothers film is never anything less than a perfectly-wrought genre exercise, is it ever anything more? That’s the question that I’ve been grappling with since seeing the Coen Brothers’ ultra-violent revisionist Western. Judging from No Country For Old Men’s almost-perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes, I’m alone in thinking it’s anything less than a masterpiece. I don’t want to spoil the party–I  do think, just as a thriller, it’s technically above critique–but there’s something about the Coens’ need to turn genre into a joke that, for me, undermines the desperate nihilism of the material. I sometimes wonder if I have something of a Coen Brothers block; I’m compiling my findings to that end and will issue a report before the film hits wide release.
• Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead: Sidney Lumet’s totally serviceable late career comeback has been performing astonishingly well in limited release; this weekend it expands to a slightly-wider 122 screens. Check out our NYFF review here.
• Steal a Pencil For Me: Michele Ohayon’s Holocaust docu-romance opens in New York today and expands in the coming weeks; read our review here.
• Lions For Lambs: With this review and this podcast, we’ve already given Robert Redford’s long-awaited follow-up to The Legend of Bagger Vance more airtime than it deserves.

Michele Ohayon’s Steal a Pencil For Me, like her previous documentary, Cowboy Del Amor, is a bittersweet paen to love born from startling circumstances. Whereas Cowboy delved into the surprisingly successful relationships arranged for a fee between American men and Mexican women, Pencil tells the story of two Dutch Jews from different social classes whose love blossomed in the most unlikely of places: a concentration camp

The poor, married Jaap meets young diamond heiress Ina at a dinner party; the two chat all night with the assumption that, due to Ina’s elevated social class and Jaap’s ball and chain, they’ll never meet again. Soon after, Jaap and badly matched wife Manja are deported to Westerbork, a detainment camp where Jews lived in relative comfort before being shipped off to the labor/death camps. Ina is sent to the same camp several months later. With his wife living in the same barracks, Jaap begins a tentative relationship with Ina, based on late night walks and furtive “necking.” When Manja finds out about the affair, she forbids it, and Ina and Jaap carry on by writing letters. Ina and Jaap are eventually sent to Bergen Belsen, the concentration camp where Anne Frank died, but are separated before the liberation. When they reunite in June of 1945, Jaap immediately moves to get a divorce so that they can marry. They’ve been together ever since.

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