War Photographer (Wed., April 23, 8 p.m., $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542, www.ihousephilly.org/) "In a war, so-called normal behavior doesn't apply," says legendary combat photographer James Nachtwey, the subject of Christian Frei's riveting documentary, which kicks off International House's five-day redaction of the Human Rights Watch film festival. He's not talking about the atrocities committed in times of conflict, but the fact that grieving families will allow a stranger who doesn't speak their language to walk right up to them and take pictures of their grieving faces, immortalizing their most painful moments. Of course, the one doesn't exist without the other; if it weren't for the social breakdown that accompanies bloodshed, it would be impossible for Nachtwey to do the job that seems to occupy most of his life -- a contradiction that clearly eats at both Nachtwey and Frei's film.

Whether it's a strategy or just a product of its subject's taciturn demeanor (or likely both), War Photographer perfectly sets the scene with an opening movement entirely devoid of dialogue: just Nachtwey, roaming the Kosovo landscape, his movements captured both by a standard camera and a digital minicam fastened to the top of his camera, so we see what he shoots. It's 15 minutes before we hear Nachtwey speak a complete sentence, perhaps half an hour before we actually get to see him talk on camera, but watching him move wordlessly among the wreckage, slipping into and out of situations, you begin to sense that his silence is a tool -- and, to people who've lived with the din of war, almost a gift. (Nachtwey can't really describe how he builds a sense of trust with his subjects when they rarely speak the same language, but moving slowly and quietly seems to play a central role.)

Though a friend tells us Nachtwey's been wounded five times, the shooter seems like anything but the adrenaline junkie you might expect; with his button-down shirts and carefully combed silver hair, he might be taken at the outside for a soft-spoken art teacher. The pictures tell a different story. Though Frei's film focuses on Nachtwey's relationship with several German magazines, his work will be familiar to anyone who recalls his haunting pictures, published in Time, of Manhattan on and immediately after Sept. 11, 2001. War Photographer's settings are less familiar, from Kosovo to Jakarta, but Nachtwey's images bring the devastation home. Hardly prone to hyperbole -- his comment that covering Rwanda in the 1990s was "like taking the express elevator to hell" is a rare moment of color -- Nachtwey becomes most sorrowfully eloquent when exploring the contradictions and compulsions inherent in his job, the fact that war only becomes less comprehensible the more you cover it. Nachtwey isn't inclined to reach for conclusions beyond the fact that once you've experienced it in the flesh -- as opposed to, say, on Fox News Channel -- war no longer seems like a viable solution to anything, but that simple statement is itself worth a thousand words.

The Truth About Charlie ($26.98 DVD) On his commentary track, the word director Jonathan Demme keeps using to describe The Truth About Charlie is "fun" -- which, unfortunately, is exactly what his Nouvelle Vague-inspired remake of Charade isn't. Even if movies like Breathless and Shoot the Piano Player paid homage to their shoot-'em-up source material, they weren't so consumed with it (not to mention the fact that paying tribute to déclassé B movies is a lot more interesting than worshiping at the oft-visited New Wave altar). Charlie, which features cameos by Charles Aznavour, Agnès Varda, Anna Karina and Magali Noël, as well as references to François Truffaut, Jacques Démy and Cinématheque Français head Henri Langlois, seems almost desperate to revisit the hopped-up, hand-held style of the French films of Demme's youth, but the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers turned to hand-held camerawork as a matter of necessity -- they either couldn't afford tripods or didn't have time to set them up -- not as a fashion accessory. Charlie reeks of an attempt by Demme to recapture the manic style of his pre-Married to the Mob work, but every gesture seems forced, not "fun." It doesn't help that Thandie Newton is as stiff as she is beautiful (and that's a lotta pretty), or that neither Mark Wahlberg nor Tim Robbins has the face of the government operatives they're meant to be. (Even in a policier as abstracted as Alphaville, Godard still used Eddie Constantine, who could've given Bogart a run for his money in the craggy, stoic department.) Demme's commentary certainly gives you a feel for the affection behind the picture, but it doesn't make it any more fun to watch. (Note: Universal's DVD includes Charade in its entirety -- a neat extra, though it's too bad this bare-bones version had to replace Criterion's out-of-print disc.)

Migrating Forms/Back Against the Wall ($29.95 each DVD) It's hard to know how much of James Fotopoulos' reputation as a "rising star" among underground filmmakers has to do with the fact that his films are so aggressively hard to watch; shot on ultra-grainy black-and-white stock, Migrating Forms (1999) looks like it was made for whatever spare change Fotopoulos could find in his couch, and its lengthy single shots, often with no dialogue and little movement, present a challenge to all but the most focused attention spans. But a sympathetic viewing, or even a merely interested one, reveals a challenging but worthwhile aesthetic at work. Though Forms' Cronenbergian tale of sexual obsession works familiar territory -- how is it that supposedly avant-garde filmmakers continue to convince themselves that this ground hasn't been covered? -- Fotopoulos' dead-eyed gaze proves more affecting than the film's more literal-minded aspects (the monstrous cyst that grows first on a woman and then on her love, to take one particularly oogy example). Forms' naught-but-poison view of sex -- the empty apartment, the sparse, joyless conversations, the blunt requests for sexual favors -- still seems awfully sophomoric, but there's no denying Fotopoulos puts it across powerfully. Now he just needs to get laid.

Back Against the Wall, another Fotopoulos effort, had the distinction of receiving the lowest audience rating of any movie in last year's Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema. For people who are going to be Fotopoulos fans, that's recommendation enough.