Every so often a DVD comes along that makes you forget all the fluff found on most discs and reminds you just how cool this technology can be. This is the case with Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece "Seven Samurai," outstandingly packaged and presented by the Criterion Collection. The picture and sound are both cinema quality, but what makes this DVD such a treat is the superb audio commentary by Japanese film scholar Michael Jeck.

You already know the story: Beleaguered 16th century Japanese villagers seek to thwart local bandits by hiring the services of seven out-of-work samurai warriors. The samurai, led by Takashi Shimura but with Toshiro Mifune serving as their clown prince, meticulously plan out the village's defenses, stage a preemptive raid on the bandits' lair and then pull the villagers together for the climactic battle that leads to the film's bittersweet close. This is the movie that spawned numerous Hollywood knockoffs, from "The Magnificent Seven" to Roger Corman's "Battle Beyond the Stars," though none has come anywhere close to the original's epic grandeur and subtle undercurrents.

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Lost amid the bloated sprawl of "The Green Mile" is a halfway decent episode of "The Twilight Zone." But this death-row, supernatural, religious, triumph-of-the-spirit tale, based on Stephen King's serial novel, is so long and self-indulgent that its redeeming qualities -- not the least of which is another winning performance by Tom Hanks -- only barely prevent the whole enterprise from sinking.

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"Gone in 60 Seconds" is remarkably flaccid for a big-budget action pic. This is a movie about stealing 50 cars in a single night, and all but one are boosted virtually without incident. Nobody gets hurt. And although Angelina Jolie is the love interest, leading man Nicolas Cage can't get past first base.

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This is not a film that was crying out for a remake; the 1974 original directed by H.B. Halicki wasn't exactly a milestone in cinema history (although it did have the distinction of totaling about 90 vehicles). In the new version, Memphis Raines (Cage) comes out of car-theft retirement when a not-very-menacing gangster threatens to do in his inept younger brother (Giovanni Ribisi). To get Little Bro off the hook, Raines must deliver 50 stolen cars to the Long Beach port in a single night. With the help of a lovable crew of felons, he does.

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"In order to be funny, you got to push the envelope," declares Marlon Wayans on the DVD of "Scary Movie." Or, to be more specific, you got to toss in a lot of fart jokes. "Scary Movie" is primarily a send-up of "Scream," Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven's deconstruction of teenage horror movies, which makes it a spoof of a spoof. It also takes jabs at "I Know What You Did Last Summer," "Urban Legend," "The Sixth Sense" and "The Blair Witch Project," among other films. There are some pretty good chuckles, but, by and large, it's pretty lightweight fare.

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"The Abyss" is almost a great movie. Director James Cameron, with his typically maniacal attention to detail, pulls off what is described on the DVD as "the toughest shoot in film history" to tell the story of a disastrous deep-sea mining operation. With its tight, claustrophobic interiors and amazing underwater vistas, "The Abyss" is fast-paced, suspenseful and full of surprises. If only the story didn't veer off in the last reel into a completely different movie, this, and not "Titanic," would easily be Cameron's masterpiece.

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You want "Pitch Black" to be better than it is. Not because it sucks -- it doesn't -- but because it comes tantalizingly close to breaking free of the confines of its genre, only to scurry in the end back to the well-explored, monsters-in-the-dark territory that the "Alien" series does so much better.

The setup moves quickly enough. A commercial spacecraft runs into trouble when it crosses paths with a rogue comet, forcing it to crash-land on a three-sunned desert planet. The handful of survivors must cope with their inhospitable new surroundings as well as with the sudden disappearance of the fugitive murderer, played by Vin Diesel, as he is being transported back to interplanetary prison.

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It's taken Hollywood a while to figure out what to do with Hong Kong action star Jackie Chan. They've tried subtitling and dubbing him, recutting him and just keeping him quiet. Chan was largely wasted in his last U.S. outing, "Rush Hour," in which he played second banana to the massively annoying Chris Tucker. In "Shanghai Noon," though, Hollywood finally got it right.

Director Tom Dey says on the DVD that by placing Chan in the Old West, he was able to play to the star's strengths, allowing Chan to mug and double-take in a classic fish-out-of-water scenario. "It's like a bad suit," Dey says. "It touches him everywhere and fits him nowhere."

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"Dr. No" is the best of all the Bond films. It was the first in the longest-running series in movie history and remains the freshest installment of the lot. There may be girls and gadgets galore in "Dr. No," but there is no formula. This is the movie that defined James Bond as a screen presence and that established the tone and look for all the films that would follow, some wonderful and some pretty darn awful. It is also the movie that made Sean Connery an international star and Ursula Andress a pinup queen. All of this is explored in exquisite detail in the special-edition DVD version.

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"The Lost World: Jurassic Park" is an unpleasant, mean-spirited movie utterly lacking the wide-eyed grandeur that made its predecessor such a crowd-pleasing spectacle. Having already demonstrated his ability to show humans and dinosaurs interacting, director Steven Spielberg could do little in the sequel but lapse into traditional "monsters on the loose" conventions, and "The Lost World" features plenty of people running in fright from voracious predators. It's a film we've seen plenty of times before.

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"All the modern movies of any merit have their roots in 'Surf Nazis Must Die,'" proclaims Lloyd Kaufman, president of low-budget movie factory Troma Films. If for some strange reason you dispute that conclusion, then this and other Troma movies are not for you. If, however, you can appreciate the cheerful goofiness in Kaufman's not-very-serious cinematic outlook, then you will find much to enjoy in the DVD "director's cut" of this classic study of surfing, Nazis and a pistol-packing mama's revenge.

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"I wanted this to have a tremendous sense of authenticity," says writer-director Jonathan Mostow of his big-budget submarine yarn "U-571." And, indeed, the movie displays a fine eye for detail in everything from the creation of actual-size World War II-vintage subs and costumes to the scary effects of depth charges on those beneath the waves. (The digital sound on the DVD is especially helpful in this regard.) Were it not for Mostow's decision to devote himself to the Oliver Stone school of historical filmmaking, "U-571" would be a fitting tribute to the young sailors who risked their lives in the last decent war.

As it stands, this is a troublesome movie in that audiences might come away thinking the Americans performed deeds that were in fact done by others. But more on that in a moment.

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"Final Destination" is a teen horror pic that didn't get much attention in theaters from most people over age 15. The DVD, however, merits scrutiny for an unusual reason: It is one of the first discs to emerge that not only explains in detail how the movie was originally screwed up by its makers but also how the film was ultimately salvaged through that most craven of studio processes, the test screening.

"Let's give the audience what they want," declares Robert Shaye, chairman of New Line Cinema, in an accompanying documentary, unashamedly titled "The Perfect Souffli" (the connotation being that movies can rise to the top if they just contain exact amounts of the right ingredients). In the case of "Final Destination," the test screenings revealed that the filmmakers had misstepped in several key areas: They had included a love story, they had killed off the hero and they had devised a deliberately ambiguous ending. Uh-oh. Sounds a bit too much like a serious film.

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The "Citizen Kane" of bad movies, "Plan 9 From Outer Space" routinely tops most people's lists of the worst films ever made. And for good reason. Writer, director, producer and editor Edward D. Wood Jr., generally regarded as one of the least competent auteurs in cinema history, botched just about every element of this, his masterpiece. From the goofy dialogue and terrible acting to the ridiculous story and cheesy effects, this is the film for which the phrase "So bad it's good" was invented. As TV psychic Criswell warns at the outset, "Future events such as these will affect you in the future."

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At first glance, it would appear that Norman Jewison was looking for a big change of pace after directing the screen versions of "Fiddler on the Roof" and "Jesus Christ Superstar." But "Rollerball," his gloomy sci-fi assessment of a world run by corporations, actually isn't that far thematically from its two immediate predecessors. In all three cases the story revolves around the upheaval that results when a strong individual clashes with a powerful establishment. In the case of "Rollerball," however, the central figure -- modern gladiator Jonathan E. (James Caan) -- is not a victim of circumstance. Rather, he's a hero in the truest sense: indomitable, unbreakable. Even against an adversary as chilling as |ber-executive Mr. Bartholomew (John Houseman), Jonathan's fate is never really in doubt.

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"Rambo: First Blood Part II" is such an unashamedly lunkheaded movie, it almost makes you nostalgic for the Reagan years. This time capsule of mid-'80s U.S. arrogance showcases Sylvester Stallone as monosyllabic Vietnam vet John Rambo, who is asked by his former commander (Richard Crenna) to go back into the Southeast Asian jungle to photograph a suspected American POW camp. He is subsequently betrayed by his country and takes matters into his own hands. He frees some POWs and kills lots of Vietnamese and their Soviet benefactors. In short, we win.

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"Our city lived peacefully for 800 years," Dulnik told me. "Then Hitler came and made our city suffer. It was not our choice. We did not invite the Nazis to build the camp."

The camp in question, which sits on the outskirts of town, is Auschwitz. What to do when your single most important attraction is a death camp where more than 1 million were murdered during the Holocaust is a vexing problem. Indeed, Oswiecim's civic leaders have been wrestling with it for decades. For the most part, they have been resigned to living quietly in the camp's long, dark shadow. When I paid a visit to the area on a magazine assignment, it was clear that such sentiments were beginning to shift.

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Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of chop-socky, and "Enter the Dragon" represents his finest work. Released just weeks after Lee's untimely death in 1973 (the result of a cerebral edema, not, as some have insisted, foul play), "Enter the Dragon" is part martial-arts extravaganza, part James Bond-style caper and part shrine to the man who introduced high-speed Hong Kong action techniques to the West, virtually reinventing the way Hollywood would subsequently treat its own such offerings (albeit with far less of a sense of fun). Cheated of the starring role in TV's "Kung Fu," Lee keenly wanted "Enter the Dragon" to make him a movie star of the first order. It did. Fans can only speculate on what might have followed.

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Director John Boorman can be a tad preachy for some tastes. But his penchant for moralizing is perfectly suited to "Excalibur," a lush retelling of the King Arthur legend that sets a high-water mark among sword-and-sorcery movies. Actually, we're talking more swords than sorcery here, as Boorman sets the tale at an imagined historical juncture: the twilight of the days of magic and the emergence of mankind and rationalism. While Arthur (Nigel Terry) ostensibly stands at the heart of the story, the true central figure is Merlin (Nicol Williamson, shamelessly chewing up the scenery), who serves as both witness and puppet master for the events that transpire. In the end, it is Merlin's demise, and not Arthur's, that marks the tragic climax of Boorman's version of the legend.

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"Apollo 13" is one of those movies that gets better each time you see it. Bristling with techno-speak and microscopic attention to detail, this true tale of the spacecraft that almost got away is like a graduate course in rocket science and the people who put their pressure-suited behinds on the line to get us to the moon. The fact that viewers know in advance how the story ends (the guys make it back) does nothing to take away from the film's genuine chills and suspense. The respect and admiration with which director Ron Howard and star Tom Hanks approach the material shine through in every frame, and especially after countless go-nowhere space-shuttle missions over the years, "Apollo 13" reminds us of the singular commitment and courage that once propelled mankind into the proverbial final frontier.

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Every so often an otherwise routine genre film nails the target so squarely it creates a subgenre all its own. "Die Hard" is one such film. This cops-and-robbers, cat-and-mouse thrill ride not only made a multimillion-dollar action star of Bruce Willis but also gave birth to a dizzying variety of knockoffs that run the gamut from "Die Hard" on a bus ("Speed") to "Die Hard" with the president ("Air Force One"). Two sequels followed, and a third is said to be in the works. But there's still no beating the original.

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