PICKS & PANS

This week's reviews: 'Lady and Duke,' Weezer album, 'Courage'

(PEOPLE) -- This week, PEOPLE.COM looks at film "The Lady and the Duke," Weezer's new album "Maladroit," and PBS World War II documentary "Uncommon Courage."

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Movie review: 'The Lady and the Duke'

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With this true story of an Englishwoman in Paris and her friendship with the doomed Duke of Orleans, director Eric Rohmer has made a quietly revolutionary film about the French Revolution. Rather than build acres of sets, he commissioned delicate background illustrations of 18th-century Paris, then digitally inserted the actors. The effect is handsomely surreal. It's as if one were to look down at a plate of painted antique china and see it crawling with ants that, on closer inspection, were revealed to be teeny aristocrats chased by teeny rebels with bayonets.

And yet the two-dimensional stillness only heightens the couple's passionate sparring. The lady (Lucy Russell, looking like Alicia Silverstone with leonine hair) is resolutely royalist, while the Duke (Jean-Claude Dreyfus, as boomingly sonorous as a cannon muffled in velvet) plays along with the bloody Jacobins. History has never looked less authentic-or felt more alive. (PG-13)

Bottom Line: A classic

Music review: 'Maladroit'

Weezer (Geffen)

"Cheese smells so good/ On a burnt piece of lamb/ Fact of the year/ Who could beat up your man?" Given Weezer front man Rivers Cuomo's immense capacity for quirkiness, it's no surprise that the roaring "Dope Nose," the first single off this follow-up to last year's platinum self-titled disc, makes little sense. As with the band's 1994 hit "Undone (The Sweater Song)," that's what makes it wacky fun.

With their grinding guitars set against charmingly retro choruses, it's easy to dismiss the L.A. quartet as simply eccentric novelty rockers. But some tracks are actually deeper than they seem: When Cuomo is not making references to overdone meat, his lyrics, at times anguished, can add a poignancy to the punkiest moments. It's not all thrash and burn. On the '50s-inspired "December," the plaintive notes struck by Cuomo's usually deadpan voice turn a would-be bauble into a gem.

Bottom Line: A Weezer pleaser

TV review: 'Uncommon Courage'

PBS (check local listings)

Though this documentary sometimes has an overly didactic tone, it tells an important, moving and deeply ironic story of World War II.

While their families were confined in internment camps by order of the U.S. government, thousands of second-generation Americans of Japanese ancestry joined the Army's Military Intelligence Service and operated in the Pacific as translators, interrogators and infiltrators. They used the Japanese language as an American weapon. The vets interviewed here speak proudly and candidly about the constant battle to prove their loyalty as they did their duty. This worthy film is a decoration they deserve.

Bottom Line: Serves honorably