Dvd reviews

3) My purpose here, as I see it, is to provide some suggestions that might help you push your personal reset button, right in the middle of one of the coldest, dreariest winter in North American memory and — let’s face facts — a pretty darn dismal season for moviegoing. I mean, if you’re still red hot with “Green Hornet” fever, then more power to you and you don’t need my help. Otherwise, onward.

Hollywood Heavyweight Box Sets: Elia Kazan and Rita Hayworth

Nearly six decades after Elia Kazan’s fateful testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and seven years after his death, Hollywood has finally made peace with one of its greatest filmmakers. I don’t have the time or space to rehearse the Kazan controversy one more time, nor the inclination to argue that he should be damned or beatified. But the monumental “Elia Kazan Collection,” curated by Martin Scorsese for 20th Century Fox, makes a powerful argument for Kazan’s artistic and social importance. This exhaustive survey includes 15 of Kazan’s films, from acknowledged masterpieces like “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “On the Waterfront,” “East of Eden” and “A Face in the Crowd” to more obscure and arguably lesser pictures like “Boomerang,” “Pinky,” “Viva Zapata!” and “Wild River.” Also here is Scorsese’s moving 2010 documentary “A Letter to Elia,” in which Scorsese credits Kazan as his first filmmaking inspiration and principal avatar.

I won’t claim that Columbia’s five-disc set “The Films of Rita Hayworth” carries quite the same heft, but if you’re not familiar with the Latina sex bomb (née Margarita Cansino) who ruled the screen in the 1940s, this is a great opportunity to get up close and personal with one of old Hollywood’s hottest starlets. The best of these films is probably Charles Vidor’s 1946 noir “Gilda,” with Hayworth opposite a seething, demented Glenn Ford. There’s also the Technicolor musical “Cover Girl” (with Gene Kelly and songs by Ira Gershwin and Jerome Kern), William Dieterle’s bizarre 1953 production of “Salome” (with Stewart Granger and Charles Laughton) and the South Pacific erotic drama “Miss Sadie Thompson,” in which Hayworth’s ample talents were originally presented in 3-D.

Silent Masterpieces: Chaplin’s “Modern Times” and Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”

I can offer no better endorsement of Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 “Modern Times” — the great filmmaker and comedian’s last screen appearance as the Little Tramp — than to tell you I recently showed it to a couple of 6-year-olds, who loved every minute. Of course Chaplin’s thrilling stunt work and technological gags made them giggle uncontrollably, but they were also totally caught up by the film’s heart-rending vision of poverty, violence and resilience in Depression America. (I didn’t really try to explain the role that Communism and cocaine play in the plot — and yes, this was very much the film that got Chaplin branded as a seditious Red sympathizer.) Even if you think “City Lights” or “The Circus” or something else is a purer distillation of Chaplin’s art, “Modern Times” is an irreplaceable work of genius that speaks clearly across 75 years. That’s more true than ever in Criterion’s beautiful new digital transfer, which comes packaged with loads of extras, including deleted scenes and a hilarious 1916 Chaplin two-reeler called “The Rink.” (DVD and Blu-ray.)

From a film-history point of view, nothing released in 2010 could possibly be as important as the recent restoration of “Metropolis,” the sci-fi masterpiece by Fritz Lang that paved the way for dozens of dystopian-future movies to come. Incorporating 25 minutes of footage discovered in a Buenos Aires archive and a new recording of Gottfried Huppertz’s original score, this “Complete Metropolis” has superior pacing and improved dramatic tension, and presumably comes very close to the original 1927 release. An absolute must for genre fans, this new DVD/Blu-ray from Kino should bring Lang’s hypnotic and nightmarish vision, and his groundbreaking use of special effects, to a new generation of fans.

Unknown Masters of World Cinema: Helma Sanders-Brahms and Masahiro Kobayashi

If you’re undaunted by relative obscurity and emotional intensity — indeed if you crave them — here are a couple of unjustly neglected directors to pursue. While such New German Cinema figures of the ’70s as Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog and R.W. Fassbinder went on to worldwide fame, Helma Sanders-Brahms remains a sort of historical asterisk, stereotyped as the movement’s angry feminist. (Her Wikipedia page is a stub, at least in English.) Yet the best films in Facets Video’s new Sanders-Brahms box set, including “Under the Pavement Lies the Strand” from 1974, “Germany, Pale Mother” from 1980 and “The Future of Emily” from 1985, are ferocious dramas that crackle with electricity, and seem both classic and well ahead of their time. In finding explosive truths beneath the surface of women’s lives and ordinary domestic relationships, Sanders-Brahms blends Ibsen and feminist theory, and prefigures much of the independent cinema of decades to come.

If Sanders-Brahms could almost be called an emotional maximalist, Japanese director Masahiro Kobayashi goes in the other direction, setting his stringent, low-dialogue stories against the semi-rural chill of northern Japan. He got some international recognition for “Bashing” in 2005, with its memorable performance by Fusako Urabe as an aid worker held hostage in Iraq who is shunned in Japanese society after returning home. But the other films in Facets’ set “Kobayashi Four” are nearly as compelling, beginning with his 1999 debut “Bootleg Film,” a black-comic black-and-white encounter between a cop and a yakuza that announces Kobayashi as an heir to Ozu, by way of Jim Jarmusch. Also included are “Man Walking on Snow,” with a gorgeous central performance from Ken Ogata, and “The Rebirth” from 2007, with Kobayashi himself playing a grieving father who strikes up a strained acquaintance with the mother of his daughter’s killer.

The Most Cronenberg You Can Get: “Videodrome”

I’m an unrepentant fan of nearly all David Cronenberg’s work, and in fact I suspect that his post-auteur adaptations, from the unjustly maligned “M. Butterfly” to “Eastern Promises,” will only get better with repeat viewings. That said, his grotesque and visionary science-fiction films from the ’70s and ’80s are in a class by themselves, and one can definitely make a case that the prophetic and exceptionally disturbing 1983 “Videodrome,” with its conception of a consciousness-altering underground of torture media, right-wing conspiracy and bodily transformation, reaches paranoid heights unmatched in movie history. Criterion’s new high-def restoration features all manner of Cronenbergundian delights, including commentary tracks by the director, cinematographer Mark Irwin and stars James Woods and Deborah Harry, two documentaries on the film’s transformative special effects, a 2000 short film by Cronenberg and the complete footage of “Samurai Dreams,” one of the pirate broadcasts seen in “Videodrome.” (DVD and Blu-ray.)

Latin Visionaries: Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “Santa Sangre” and Guillermo del Toro’s “Cronos”

OK, arguably I’m conflating two continents and stretching a point here, but not entirely without reason. Chilean-born madman Alejandro Jodorowsky, an avant-garde cult figure whose work goes from cinema to spirituality to drugs to comic books, spent much of the ’60s and ’70s in Mexico, and it’s a pretty safe bet that his untethered hallucinatory aesthetic had an impact on the young Guillermo del Toro. With Severin Films’ new DVD/Blu-ray release of his surrealist horror film “Santa Sangre” — which tells the story, more or less, of a boy who becomes a serial killer after watching his circus-performer mother mutilated — Jodorowsky’s three major films are all on high-quality home video for the first time. (“El Topo” and “The Holy Mountain” were released on DVD in 2009, after decades of copyright problems were unwound.) It’s too bad, I think, that Jodorowsky never got to make a proposed late-’70s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” which would have starred Salvador Dalí and Orson Welles. What can you say, really?

As for “Cronos,” a low-budget Mexican vampire movie that blends the Hammer Films Poe adaptations of the ’60s with some seriously weird mechanical effects, it might seem tame after “Santa Sangre.” But this intriguing 1993 debut launched del Toro on a rich and strange career trajectory that keeps getting better, and its combination of old-fashioned storytelling with newfangled gizmology is immediately distinctive. Federico Luppi plays Jesús, a courtly, aging antiques dealer who happens upon a mysterious golden scarab, a device built in colonial times for which a nefarious American (the ever-enjoyable Ron Perlman) has been hunting. This Criterion restoration features new English subtitles, numerous commentaries and interviews, and “Geometria,” an unreleased del Toro short from 1987.

The French Hitchcock Bids Farewell: “Inspector Bellamy”

If you’ve got to go, go out on top, and French mystery master Claude Chabrol, who left us in September at age 80, did just that. “Inspector Bellamy,” the last of Chabrol’s 55 or so feature films (!), barely got a look in United States theaters, but it’s got all the wit, style and cold-blooded subterfuge that runs through the “French Hitchcock’s” best work, along with a fine performance from Gérard Depardieu as its eponymous protagonist, a pudgy, cynical, homebody detective whose country vacation keeps being disturbed by unwelcome late-night visitors. Now, does “Inspector Bellamy” belong on the list with, say, “La Ceremonie” or “Violette” or “The Unfaithful Wife,” among the Chabrol thrillers that transcend their genre? Probably not, but it’s a lean, economical and deceptively casual film, self-consciously modeled after the great crime novelist Georges Simenon, with a sting in its tail (as is customary with Chabrol) that you almost certainly won’t see coming.

Dark Travelers: Bergman’s “The Magician” and Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter”

Little appreciated except by completists, Ingmar Bergman’s 1958 “The Magician” deftly delivers all the Swedish master’s central concerns — life and art, men and women, language and silence, God and the supernatural — in a drily entertaining little black-comic package. It’s beautifully photographed by the underrated Gunnar Fischer (Bergman’s pre-Sven Nykvist cinematographer) and features many Bergman regulars, including Max von Sydow as Vogler, the mysterious traveling magician, and Gunnar Björnstrand as the pompous Dr. Vergérus, who hosts Vogler’s troupe in a passive-aggressive attempt to expose them as charlatans. (Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson and Erland Josephson also appear.) You can explain the film’s obscurity in various ways — its droll tone, ambiguous verdict and deus-ex-machina conclusion apparently convinced ’50s critics that it didn’t measure up in philosophical heft to “Wild Strawberries” and “The Seventh Seal,” both made a year earlier. Personally, I think it holds a key to Bergman’s worldview, and belongs on any list of his best films. This Criterion DVD/Blu-ray release features archival interviews with Bergman, a visual essay by scholar Peter Cowie, and a tribute to “The Magician” from French director Olivier Assayas.

I probably don’t need to introduce “The Night of the Hunter” to film buffs, except to explain that the great English actor Charles Laughton’s only film as a director, made three years before “The Magician,” is also a fable about a seductive drifter who claims contact with supernatural authorities, but whose soul is poisoned by cynical darkness. There’s no Scandinavian angst to preacher Harry Powell, the signature role of Robert Mitchum’s career — he’s got plenty of can-do American spirit, along with “HATE” and “LOVE” tattooed on his knuckles and a version of religion “the Lord and me have worked out betwixt ourselves,” as he explains to cellmate Peter Graves. It’s a creepy, spectacular fable of innocence and experience, murder and misogyny, a classic horror film with a thread of Grand Guignol comedy that Bergman must have appreciated. The real tragedy, of course, is that “Night of the Hunter” was too much for Hollywood, and for 1950s America, although in retrospect it looks as if Laughton, Mitchum, screenwriter James Agee and cinematographer Stanley Cortez made one of that decade’s greatest American films.

Bonus British Isles TV selections: “Blue Murder” in Manchester; “Single-Handed” in the west of Ireland

Two quick hits for fans of small-screen Britcrime: Caroline Quentin is tremendous as Manchester detective Janine Lewis — a single mum solving her battered city’s most gruesome crimes — in the 2003-9 ITV series “Blue Murder,” now available in a complete box set from Acorn Media. Also just out on Acorn, from the Irish national broadcaster RTÉ, is the satisfyingly pulpy “Single-Handed: Set One,” starring Owen McDonnell as a young cop who comes home from Dublin to the windswept, treeless west coast, where he discovers that small-town law enforcement involves uncovering secrets (some of them his own family’s) that most people are happy to leave buried.

Dubious as I remain about the Blu-ray format — sure, it looks awesome if you’ve got the right equipment, but talk about planned obsolescence! — I too have relented. We’ve tried to catch every instance where a film is available on both formats, but I’m simply not thorough enough to pay attention to the different extras often available on Blu-ray. The complaint desk is open alternate Thursdays from 12:01 to 12:45, in every month without a “u,” “r” or “y.”

Please chime in with your own suggestions, since I’ve definitely left out a lot of great stuff.

“Gamera the Giant Monster” and “Gamera vs. Barugon”

What mad, nerdy, completist spirit has led the folks at Shout! Factory to release the original Japanese-language versions of two second-string mid-’60s monster movies (never previously available on DVD)? Well, the same spirit led me to watch both of them with tremendous relish. If you’ve worn out your Godzilla library, you’ll find much the same blend of Cold War dread and high-camp cuteness in these sagas about the reheated giant turtle from the Lost Continent of Atlantis, accidentally thawed when a Soviet bomber is shot down in the Arctic. Created by Daiei Studios as a rival to Toho’s “King of the Monsters,” Gamera and his spinning-saucer flight technique held his own in the Japanese market for several years, and became a staple of Stateside kids’ TV in badly dubbed versions. Shout! will reissue all six of the Daiei films, but the low-tech, black-and-white claustrophobia of the 1965 original has the most force. “Gamera vs. Barugon” is the first color entry, featuring an evil lizard that threatens to launch a new Ice Age, along with Japanese actors playing New Guinea natives. Awkward! But really fun!

Columbia Film Noir Classics, Vol. II

Columbia Pictures arrived late to the vault-scouring game of releasing big packages of ’50s genre films on DVD, but by partnering with Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation on these loving restorations and remasterings, they’ve absolutely done it the right way. This second set of Columbia noirs features five little-known films, but all are worth seeing and at least two qualify as major discoveries. I’d never seen Fritz Lang’s “Human Desire,” a 1954 Emile Zola adaptation (!) with Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame and Broderick Crawford as the parties in a tangled love triangle, but it’s a doozy. Jacques Tourneur’s “Nightfall” lacks star power and isn’t as good, but features classic noir cinematography by Burnett Guffey. Scorsese himself introduces “The Brothers Rico,” an obscure but ruthless and absorbing late-’50s Mafia flick. In Richard Quine’s terrific 1954 “Pushover,” cop Fred MacMurray falls for gangster’s moll Kim Novak (in one of her earliest starring roles) with predictably disastrous results. And what would a noir collection be without nuclear paranoia? In Irving Lerner’s 1958 “City of Fear,” Vince Edwards breaks out of prison with a canister of white powder he thinks is pure heroin. Whoops!

“Shinjuku Incident”

Amid all the Hollywood dreck he’s been churning out since the ’90s, it’s tough to remember what a massive and irresistible superstar Jackie Chan was, and is, in Asia — a Cantonese-speaking combination of Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable and Tom Cruise. Chan never totally quit working in Hong Kong, and over the course of the last decade he’s returned to Chinese movies almost full time. Writer-director Derek Yee’s crime drama about a Chinese immigrant laborer named Steelhead, who rises to become a Tokyo mob boss, is a fairly routine H.K. action vehicle, delivered with grit and intensity. (I’ve heard good reports on Chan’s “New Police Story” from 2004, but haven’t seen it). But it’s great to see Chan quit playing the cutie-pie, lovable-mutt characters he’s always assigned in American movies and kick some yakuza ass. Even at his relatively advanced age, Jackie pulls off the fight scenes with brio, and “Shinjuku Incident” overall ranks among his meatiest and most satisfying flicks.

“Mystery Train” (Criterion Collection Special Edition, on DVD and Blu-ray)

Welcome to Memphis, circa 1989, both as a real place and the dream home of the American unconscious, as perceived through the cracked, off-kilter genius of Jim Jarmusch. Japanese tourists, Joe Strummer, a mysterious Italian widow (Nicoletta Braschi) and her overly talkative roommate (Lorraine Bracco); Screamin’ Jay Hawkins as a desk clerk and Cinqué Lee as an unhelpful bellboy. A tremendous, and tremendously odd supporting cast of musicians and street characters and presiding over it all, of course, the ghost (both seen and unseen) of Elvis Aron Presley. Jarmusch is the director who puts the loose in “allusive” and the lipstick in “elliptical”; I fully recognize his movies aren’t to everybody’s taste. But this charming, radical, deceptive meditation on rock ‘n’ roll, race, Memphis and America might be his most enjoyable, most thoughtful and most profound film, all at once. Watching it now — for me , at least — involves multiple layers of personal nostalgia piled atop cultural nostalgia, so I won’t even pretend objectivity. So I kind of think it’s a great movie, but even if you don’t agree, it’s plenty of fun and not like anything else.

“The White Ribbon” (DVD and Blu-ray)

Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or-winning black-and-white fable, set in a Protestant village in rural northern Germany just before the outbreak of World War I, looks amazing in its hi-def DVD/Blu-ray release — and like all the Austrian director’s meticulous tales of shaggy-dog evil, it gains tremendous resonance from repeat viewings. From my original review: “Shot in spectacular black-and-white by cinematographer Christian Berger, and marvelously acted by a first-rate German ensemble, ‘The White Ribbon’ captures a mood of thickening tension and mounting violence as a series of brutal but apparently unrelated events — vandalism, fires, accidents and abductions — turn the people of the village against each other and shatter what remains of a fragile social consensus. If Haneke’s most obvious point is that the hierarchical, aristocratic society of peasant Germany was replaced by something much worse — by the ‘New Order’ created by its mistreated children, a generation later — it definitely can’t be reduced to a fable about the roots of fascism. ‘The White Ribbon’ is a dense account of childhood, courtship, family and class relations in a painfully repressed and repressive society, which seems to channel both early Ingmar Bergman and the ‘Bad Seed’/'Children of the Corn’ evil-tot tradition.” For more discussion of what may or may not be “going on” in the movie, here’s my interview with Haneke.

“Death Race 2000″ (Roger Corman’s Cult Classics, on DVD and Blu-ray)

Let’s see — it’s the year 2000, and pretty much all sports, politics and pop culture have been replaced by a coast-to-coast auto race where the point is to kill as many pedestrians as possible. David Carradine, Sylvester Stallone and Warhol pal Mary Woronov are among the leading racers — but wait, a bunch of Commie anti-race activists are looking to kill them! Well, OK, there’s no mention of that rigged presidential election, but otherwise that’s a pretty accurate description, wouldn’t you say? This 1975 Corman production (actually directed by Paul Bartel) captures the moment when B movies finally crossed the boundary into postmodern art. Shout! Factory’s new wide-screen, hi-def transfer comes with loads of featurettes and extras, including interviews with Corman and Carradine, two commentary tracks and a documentary on the film’s groundbreaking design team. Other titles in Shout!’s Corman series include “Forbidden World,” “Galaxy of Terror, “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” and “Suburbia,” with plenty more to come.

“Black Narcissus” (Criterion Collection Special Edition, on DVD and Blu-ray)

I haven’t yet seen Criterion’s new release of “The Red Shoes,” Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s acknowledged masterpiece, but in some ways the British sensualist duo’s lesser-known 1947 “Black Narcissus” is more worth noticing. To say that this tale of a group of nuns trapped high in the Himalayas is strange, gorgeous and intoxicating is just to say that it’s a Powell-Pressburger film, but even by their standards this gorgeous yarn about cultural isolation, sexual repression and terrible weather, set against a harsh but beautiful mountain landscape, is something special. The all-female cast headed by Deborah Kerr is outstanding, and Criterion’s disc is predictably loaded with extras, including a commentary track by Powell and leading admirer Martin Scorsese, an introduction by Bertrand Tavernier, and two interesting making-of documentaries. Both directors are deceased, but the hi-def transfer was supervised by cinematographer Jack Cardiff and editor Thelma Schoonmaker (who is also Powell’s widow).

“Mystery Science Theater 3000″ Vol. XVIII

With 18 DVD sets, not all from the same distributor and not all simultaneously available, the digital-media history of meta-movie-mockery cult series MST3K is becoming as convoluted as the show’s original history. Nonetheless, if you’re a fan, put all that aside and just buy this — and if you’re simply curious, this collection makes a fine place to start. Once again we get four episodes never previously available (at least legally), including two cackle-inducing classics, “The Beast of Yucca Flats” (which features a true MST3K high point, the Puerto Rico short “Progress Island, USA”) and the immortally strange Soviet folktale “Jack Frost.” Also here: “Lost Continent” from the early, Joel Hodgson days, along with a Season 4 sci-fi mess that’s totally new to me, called “Crash of the Moons.” Wait, there’s more (as usual). Extras this time include introductions by MSTers Frank Conniff and Kevin Murphy, original trailers, four exclusive mini-posters and a new documentary about the unbelievably bad “Beast of Yucca Flats.”

“Night Train to Munich” (Criterion Collection)

Not only had I never seen this 1940 British espionage caper from “Third Man” director Carol Reed — made during the earliest and most dangerous stiff-upper-lip days of World War II — I’m pretty sure I’d never heard of it either. It turns out to be a handsome and thoroughly enjoyable adventure in a light, early-Hitchcock mode, starring Rex Harrison as a suave British superspy who must conduct a Czech scientist and his attractive daughter (Margaret Lockwood) across the heart of Nazi Germany. Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat’s screenplay has some nice switchbacks, and Reed keeps the pace bubbling, especially by period standards. Of course the middle-European “locations” are all the Shepherd’s Bush studios in London, but such high artifice has its charms too.

“The Maid” (“La Nana”)

Friends and acquaintances kept telling me I was a dope for missing Catalina Saavedra’s award-winning performance as the blank, hostile, passive-aggressive “nana” to an upper-crust Chilean family. Now I get it: Whether you call Sebastián Silva’s film a dark comedy or a class-war drama is up to you — Latin American movies about social class are virtually a genre unto themselves — as is the question of whether Saavedra’s Raquel is a mistreated heroine or a manipulative villain. What I can be sure about is that this is a subtle, disturbing and funny film, suggestive of Hitchcock or Chabrol and open to various interpretations — and that Saavedra marvelously evokes a damaged and dangerous character who never asks you to understand or pity her.

Special months-old personal bonus selection: “Rocky Road to Dublin”

This witty, despairing 1967 documentary about the dire social and cultural condition of Ireland, 40-odd years after independence from Britain, is an absolute must if you (like me) have roots in that place and time. (Director Peter Lennon shares my great-grandfather’s name, for the love of God.) But it’s also interesting on other levels, as a fine early example of the ethnographic personal essay, shot by great French cinematographer Raoul Coutard, that includes interviews with such Irish leading lights as writer Sean O’Faolain, academic and diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien and Yank expat filmmaker John Huston. Bizarrely, Lennon’s documentary was the last film shown at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival before protests led by François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard shut the place down. While that’s in no way relevant to its subject matter, it has helped cement the film’s legendary status. For any Irish person, With its depiction of a priest-ridden, repressed and mildewed version of nationalism, “Rocky Road to Dublin” may serve to remind Irish folks that, bleak as things on that dubious green island may be at the moment — and they’re fairly bleak — nobody wants to go back to that.