2007, Granada Television.
Total running time: 204 minutes.
Series created by Cath Staincliffe.Cast: Caroline Quentin, Ian Kelsey, Saskia Wickham, Paul Loughran, Nicholas Murchie.

Acorn's third "Blue Murder" set comprises the three hour-plus episodes of the fourth season of the British policier series. The shows aired in the U.K. in December 2007 but, like the previous nine episodes, have not aired stateside. Each episode is dense with plot, complex personae and speedy dialogue; all that and the heavy Manchester accents may have led U.S. TV programmers to conclude the series is too difficult for Americans. So DVD is the only way to see these intelligent, powerful mysteries.

"Blue Murder," centering on a middle-aged female police detective, is the working-class cousin of the London-set, Queen's English-speak...Read the entire review

1995, PG-13, 134 minutes plus extras
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Richard LaGravenese, based on Robert James Waller's novel
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Meryl Streep, Annie Corley, Victor Slezak, Jim Haynie, Phyllis Lyons, Michelle Benes

When it was announced that Clint Eastwood would star in the film version of Robert James Waller's mega-selling 1992 novel "The Bridges of Madison County," there was pause everywhere. Fans of the aggressively romantic book -- Janet Maslin of The New York Times called it "arguably the world's longest greeting card" -- couldn't see Dirty Harry as sensitive flower-picking traveling photojournalist Richard Kincaid, who has a four-day affair with unfulfilled Italian immigrant Iowa housewife Francesca Johnson; the Clint contingent just squinted skeptically. But in the end few could complain. Eastwood also took on directing chores and working fro...Read the entire review

1991, Anglia Television/ITV
6 parts, 310 minutes, not rated
Directed by John Davies
Written by Thomas Ellice, based on the novel by P.D. James
Cast: Roy Marsden, Susannah York, Gemma Jones, James Faulkner, Tony Haygarth, Tom Georgeson, Tom Chadbon, Harry Burton, Suzan Crowley, Nicola Cowper, Robert Hines, Helena Michell

The missing piece in the P.D. James DVD puzzle finally falls into place with the arrival of 1991's "Devices and Desires," which aired stateside that year on PBS' "Mystery!" In addition to this stand-alone two-disc set, the mystery tale is also included in Koch Vision's simultaneously released "P.D. James: The Essential Collection." That boxed set includes nine James tales starring Roy Marsden as Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard, but not Marsden's 10th and final (to date), "A Certain Justice," which is available from WGBH Boston. (Two more recent Dalgli...Read the entire review

2007, U.S., 102 minutes, unrated
Writer-director: Thomas Mignone
With: Brittany Snow, Josh Janowicz, Clayne Crawford, Eddie Jemison, Shanna Collins, Candice Accola, Chloe Domont, Angela Sarafyan, Marcus Giamatti, Theresa Russell, James Russo

Music video director Thomas Mignone's debut feature, "On the Doll," a multi-pronged suspense drama set in Los Angeles' porn and prostitution underworld, has big ambitions but gets awfully muddled. "Crash" meets "Pulp Fiction" as several unrelated plots are united, in the course of a jumbled time line, by one stray bullet fired by a cop. That bullet goes off near the start of the movie, moving in slow motion until it hits ... someone. Exactly who isn't revealed until the end of the film, which brings us back to the beginning.

Brittany Snow, the blonde sweetheart from TV's "American Dreams" and "John Tucker Must Die," is the marquee name i...Read the entire review

France, 2006, 69 minutes
Writer-director: Manoel de Oliveira
With: Michel Piccoli, Bulle Ogier, Ricardo Trepa, Leonor Baldaque, Julia Buisel

Director-intellectual Manoel de Oliveira made his first film in 1931 and only another 10 over the next 40 years, but since the mid-1970s he has been on, roughly, a film-a-year pace comparable to that of Woody Allen. He is currently in production on a feature in his native Portugal to be released in 2009 -- when he will be 100 years old.

"Belle Toujours," made in 2006 and released in the U.S. last year, is Oliveira's self-described homage to Luis Bunuel's 1967 hit, "Belle de Jour," in which Catherine Deneuve played a young, frigid, bourgeois housewife who unleashed her masochistic self by working in a brothel. The sex job had been playfully suggested to Severine by her husband's snobbish friend Husson (Michel Piccoli), who at the film's ...Read the entire review

1977, 73 minutes, rated R
Directed by I. Robert Levy
Written by Mike Callie, I. Robert Levy, Mike Price
With: Jeff Doucette, Roger Behr, Joey Camen, Moose Carlson, Tallie Cochrane, Vic Dunlop, Debra Klose, Robin Williams, Walter Olkewicz, Saba, others

A pre-"Mork & Mindy" Robin Williams appears unhilariously in two of the couple dozen brief skits that make up "Can I Do It ... 'Til I Need Glasses?," a followup to "If You Don't Stop It ... You'll Go Blind!" After the making these two movies, the creative team did indeed stop it, though it could be argued that, comedy-wise, they were blind before they started.

The 1970s brought a cottage industry of low-budget, R-rated anti-establishment skit comedies such as "The Groove Tube" (the best of the bunch), "Kentucky Fried Movie" and "Tunnel Vision." "Glasses" lies somewhere near the bottom of the barrel, its sexually and raci...Read the entire review

2006, 84 minutes.
Director: Brendan Maher
Screenplay: Stephen Greenhorn, from the novel by Jean Rhys
With: Rafe Spall, Rebecca Hall, Nina Sosanya, Victoria Hamilton, Lorraine Burroughs

English novelist Jean Rhys was raised on the Caribbean island nation of Dominica, the daughter of a Welsh father and a Creole mother, so Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre" must have struck a particular chord with her. The novel's insane Mrs. Rochester -- a presence creepily sensed but largely unseen until the novel's fiery climax -- turns out to be a Creole from the West Indies who years earlier was brought to England by her husband and locked in the upper reaches of his mansion. Bronte's madwoman in the attic became the template for a strain of Gothic literature (and B movies). But Rhys asked, How did she get there? -- and in 1966, after a 27-year hiatus from novel writing, published "Wide Sargasso ...Read the entire review

2008, U.K., 174 minutes
Directed by John Alexander
Written by Andrew Davies, based on Jane Austen's novel
With: Hattie Morahan, Charity Wakefield, David Morrissey, Dominic Cooper, Dan Stevens, Janet McTeer

Any doubts about the necessity of another production of Jane Austen's "Sense & Sensibility" just a dozen years after Ang Lee and Emma Thompson's four-star adaptation are quickly allayed in this new BBC/"Masterpiece Theatre" miniseries. Scripted by Andrew Davies (he's gold, with "To Serve Them All My Days," "House of Cards," the Colin Firth "Pride and Prejudice," "Bridget Jones's Diary" and "Bleak House" among his impressive credits), the richly shot three-hour film can stand next to Lee's in any tale-of-the-tape comparison.

In an interview on the first DVD in this two-disk set, Davies and producer Anne Pivcevic agree that with source material as good as Austen's book, it a...Read the entire review

The Voyeur (L'Uomo che guarda), 1994, Italy. 99 minutes
Directed by Tinto Brass
With: Francesco Casale, Katarina Vasilissa, Cristina Garavaglia, Raffaella Offidani, Franco Branciaroli

The Italian director Tinto Brass, like the American Russ Meyer, is proof that the auteur theory is an open tent. It would be tough to make the case for Brass as a great filmmaker -- he is essentially a silly titillator -- but he puts his unmistakable stamp on whatever he makes, asserting himself as the true author of his films no matter who provided the source material. With "The Voyeur," he takes a novel by a genuinely great artist, Alberto Moravia, and turns it into a Brassian bacchanal of female crotches, prosthetic erections and slo-mo bouncing breasts -- all while managing to slip in Moravian themes of betrayal, ennui and alienation. Certainly, that's something like genius.

What mak...Read the entire review

1978, 13 episodes, total running time 672 minutes

Directed by John Gorrie, Christopher Hodson, Tony Wharmby

Written by John Gorrie, David Butler, based on James Brough's book "The Prince and the Lily"

Cast: Francesca Annis, Dennis Lill, Anton Rodgers, Peter Egan, Joanna David, Jennie Linden, John Castle, and scores more

Miniseries in the 1970s had at least one thing in common with novels of a century earlier: length. The London Weekend Television production "Lillie" occupied three months of Sundays on "Masterpiece Theatre" in 1979, its 13 episodes emulating for PBS viewers what Victorian-era readers experienced with the eagerly awaited weekly or monthly magazine installments of the novels of Dickens and other productive giants of the age. The maxi-miniseries form thrived into the 1980s with such time-demanding hits as "Brideshead Revisited" and "The Jewel in the Crown," bu...Read the entire review

2007, 85 minutes
Directed by Andy Wolk
With: Samantha Mathis, Peter Dobson, Gina Hecht, Thomas Kopache, June Squibb, Kevin Kilner, Mary Matilyn Mouser

It s shooting fish in a barrel to knock a well-intentioned Hallmark Channel movie, but the bland and obvious melodrama A Stranger s Heart can turn even the most open-minded viewer into Simon Cowell with a hangover. As the American Idol judge might say, I don t mean to be cruel, but, aside from the game lead actors and the pretty look of the film, this is cinematic karaoke.

Lonely thirtysomething magazine reporter Callie Morgan (Samantha Mathis), whose mother was run down by a car when Callie was little, has grown up with a withdrawn father (Thomas Kopache) and has become withdrawn herself. Much of her misery stems from worrying about her diseased heart, and blonde beauty Mathis ( Jack & Sarah, Super Mari...Read the entire review

2007, 101 minutes
Directed by Robert Benton
With: Morgan Freeman, Greg Kinnear, Radha Mitchell, Alexa Davalos, Selma Blair, Toby Hemingway, Jane Alexander, Billy Burke, Fred Ward, Missi Pyle, Stana Katic, Erika Marozsan, Shannon Lucio.

All you need is love, perhaps, but literature and movies require a bit more. "Feast of Love," which came and went in a heartbeat last fall, loads up on characters meant to illustrate the undeniable power of love, particularly the at-first-sight variety. "Love Actually" is the gold standard of this shameless genre; "Feast of Love," based on Charles Baxter's novel "The Feast of Love" and directed by Robert Benton ("The Human Stain," "Kramer vs. Kramer"), is not as ambitious at that British hit, nor does it have its humor, wit or warmth. Love has rarely seemed such a grim thing.

Coffee shop owner Bradley (Greg Kinnear), who just may be the nicest, most ...Read the entire review

2006, Granada Television.
Total running time: 275 minutes.
Series created by Cath Staincliffe.
Written by John Fay, Cath Staincliffe, Colin MacDonald, Jeff Povey, Roy Mitchell.
Directed by Suri Krishnamma, Menhaj Huda.
Cast: Caroline Quentin, Ian Kelsey, Saskia Wickham, Paul Loughran, Nicholas Murchie.

DVD continues to be the only place American viewers can see "Blue Murder," a British police detective series that no U.S. TV programmer has seen fit to import. Could be they fear the characters' thick Manchester accents would prove too daunting, but that doesn't hold water given the success here of that earlier hit series with a star who speaks in a strong regional brogue, "The Osbournes." Fortunately, Acorn Media has included optional closed-captioning on this new double-disc set to aid uninitiated ears.

Part "CSI," part "Inspector Morse" and part "Saving Grace" (the...Read the entire review

2006, written and directed by Tsai Ming-liang. 115 minutes.
Cast: Lee Kang-sheng, Chen Shiang-chyi, Norman Atun, Pearlly Chua.

Watching Tsai Ming-liang's "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" you feel like a visitor in a strange city who's been separated from his tour group and become lost in a part of town that's not on the itinerary. It's not just that you don't know the language, you don't recognize the behavior -- or the filmmaking approach.

Viewers who know only standard film language will find Tsai's technique foreign indeed. Establishing shots leading to medium shots and an alternating of close-ups between protagonists? Not in Tsai's world. Artfully revealing dialogue and nuanced line deliveries? Nope. A linear plot. Hardly. Background music to spur emotional responses in the audience? Come on. Tsai is a charter member of the so-called Sixth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, tho...Read the entire review

2007, 104 minutes, plus extras.
Directed by Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman.
Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Laura Linney, Paul Giamatti, Alicia Keys, Chris Evans, Donna Murphy, Nicholas Art.

The clich -ridden "Nanny Diaries," the first feature by writer-directors Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman since their acclaimed "American Splendor" four years ago, is all about Manhattan splendor: chiefly the real estate porn of the Upper East Side, with its adulterous investment bankers, Bergdorf-lunching wives and bratty kids. It will take a working-class girl from New Jersey to conquer the place and turn its soulless population into feeling people.

Scarlett Johansson, her blonde hair darkened to indicate "down-to-earth person," stars as Annie Braddock, a new college graduate who wants to pursue anthropology; she imagines New York's various social cliques as dioramas at the...Read the entire review

12 episodes; 10 hours, 26 minutes.
Cast: Jennifer Beals, Bruce Davison, Steven Eckholdt, Janina Gavinkar, Pam Grier, Leisha Hailey, Laurel Holloman, Sandrine Holt, Aidan Jarrar, Mia Kirshner, Kristanna Loken, Jane Lynch, Marlee Matlin, Heather Matarazzo, Katherine Moennig, Dallas Roberts, Eric Roberts, Rose Rollins, Annabella Sciorra, Daniela Sea, Rachel Shelley, Cybill Shepherd.

In its fourth season, Showtime's lesbian dramedy "The L Word" moves along with ease and confidence. Perhaps no longer feeling the need to "explain" lesbian love, the filmmakers, led by creator Ilene Chaiken, just show it, and they let their characters' story lines breathe and expand. The core set of lead characters retain their essential qualities but also change in slight but significant ways, while new characters are smoothly integrated into the framework. You need not be a longtime viewer to pick up ...Read the entire review

His latest film, the acclaimed "The Wind That Shakes the Barley," is atypical for director Ken Loach: a commercial success with a name cast (led by Cillian Murphy). But its concern with the ordinary man struggling to get by and do the right thing is, as the Brits say, right up his street.

Loach went from studying law at Oxford to creating documentaries, then fiction features, about the plight of those falling through society's cracks. His narrative films are highwater marks in social(ist) realism. They could pass for documentaries themselves, as they utilize nonprofessional actors and a v rit directing style that eschews melodramatic closeups in favor of wide shots and eliminates dramatic editing flourishes and nondiegetic music (i.e., music that the characters don't hear). Background performers occasionally look at the camera, as civilians would at a documentary camera in their midst. In suc...Read the entire review

1982, 73 minutes.
Directed by Alan W. Cools (Mario Bianchi).
Cast: Jaqueline Dupre, Mariangela Giordano, Marina Hedman, Aldo Sanbrell, Joe Davers, Giancarlo Del Duca, Alfonso Gaita.

In a new interview on Severin's DVD of "Satan's Baby Doll," director Mario Bianchi praises one of his stars, Mariangela Giordano, but says, "The other actors were just fine, nothing special." That faint praise is on the mark and could go for the entire movie. The 25-year-old horror quickie manages to make ghostly possession, nude corpses and nun sex about as edgy as an installment of "Regis and Kelly."

Pretty but lifeless blonde teen Miria (Jaqueline Dupre, in understandably her first and last screen performance) hears the voice of her beautiful, recently deceased mother, Maria (Marina Hedman), commanding her to do bad things. Like killing the rest of the family and staff who made her life in their h...Read the entire review

Six mysteries (eight episodes) from 1995-1997, 466 minutes total running time

Many critics rank Ruth Rendell alongside P.D. James as Britain's leading modern female mystery writers, their works usually praised as transcending the mystery genre to attain true literary status. But "modern" suits Rendell more, even when she's writing period tales. While James hews to an almost 19th-century classicism in her building of plot, Rendell takes a more jagged, disorienting path; while James' characters, even the killers, act in rationally explainable ways, Rendell's are weirder, less easily pinned down, more deeply unsettling; James accepts the standard parameters of civilized society; Rendell questions everything.

Both women have been made baronesses and both sit in the House of Lords, though, not surprisingly, Rendell is with Labour and James is with the Conservatives. And both writers ha...Read the entire review

Short films by Francois Ozon, 1993-2006

Francois Ozon has been grouped with the leading art-film directors of Europe since his feature debut in 1997, "See the Sea," but that accomplished movie didn't come out of nowhere. Ozon made his bones with 15 narrative and documentary shorts between 1988, when he was 21, and 1996, seven of which are collected in this important disc from Kimstim and Kino.

Four of the films here are pickups from a 2003 DVD released by Image Entertainment, "X2000: The Collected Shorts of Francois Ozon," but this set reaches back for two more early shorts and adds the 2006 title piece; the shorts play in chronological order.

While the length, subject matter and tone of these works varies, you can detect in all of them Ozon's attention to the psychology and mystery of sexuality, a theme explored at greater length in the recent masterworks "Under the Sand" and "Swimmin...Read the entire review

Some light bondage and some heavy nudity, shot in warm soft focus, mark the German-produced, Hong Kong-shot, dubbed-in-English "Vanessa" as a typical product of the '70s softcore industry. In the wake of 1974's "Emmanuelle," European producers couldn't churn out "exotic" erotica fast enough for export to American second-run or grindhouse theaters; the films would go on in a few years to have an unplanned-for second life as late-night adult programming in the early days of pay cable.

And "fast" certainly applies to "Vanessa," which, we learn in the supplementary material on Severin's well-produced DVD, was shot in a matter of weeks and with an incomplete and largely ignored screenplay. Veteran skin purveyor Hubert Frank admits in a new interview that back in the day, he and others in the same field worked in quantity, not quality. So he had no problem signing on for a movie that had a script "that eve...Read the entire review

The French erotic drama "Emmanuelle" was a mainstream U.S. hit in 1974, helped no doubt by Columbia Pictures' clever ad line: "X was never like this" (what -- boring?). The film's soft-focus softcore style and exotic locations became all the rage for a few years, and among the productions cashing in on the "Emmanuelle" name was "Laure" (1976), aka "Forever Emmanuelle."

No one named Emmanuelle appears in "Laure," but the connection is via actress and putative "Emmanuelle" author Emmanuelle Arsan, who appears here and is credited as the screenwriter. The film's on-screen directorial credit is "Anonimo" (Anonymous), though industry wisdom over the years has pinned the helming credit (blame?) on Arsan and/or producer Ovidio Assonitis.

But in the new interview with Assonitis included on this DVD, the filmmaker reveals the truth: The original "Emmanuelle" novel was written, not by Arsan, bu...Read the entire review

2003-2004, Granada Television.
Total running time: 414 minutes.
Series created by Cath Staincliffe.
Written by John Fay, Matthew Hall, Jeff Povey, Cath Staincliffe.
Directed by Pip Broughton, Alex Pillai, Paul Wroblewski.

The success of Helen Mirren's "Prime Suspect" mysteries has led to other female detectives popping up on British TV, one of the latest being DCI Janine Lewis of "Blue Murder." But where Mirren's Jane Tennison is grim, alcoholic and generally miserable, Lewis, playing the maternal, fortysomething Caroline Quentin, is a warmer, earthier sleuth.

Quentin, a veteran of such British series as "Men Behaving Badly" and "Jonathan Creek," may not have the figure of "CSI's" Marg Helgenberger or Emily Procter, but she doesn't have their attitude either. Her Lewis is a real woman -- a single mother living in a modest house but dedicated to her work. Quentin, the w...Read the entire review

Directed by Robert Knights, 1987, U.K., 200 minutes.

Tom Sharpe is one of the funniest and finest writers around, but while keenly appreciated by other novelists and critics, he's criminally unknown to the wider public, at least in America. The British satirist writes finely structured stories about outrageous but recognizable character types caught up in snowballing disasters. Puncturing British (or, in his early work, South African) pomposity is a favorite theme, be it among Members of Parliament in "Blott on the Landscape," the publishing world ("The Great Pursuit"), the military ("Riotous Assembly") or the landed gentry ("The Throwback"). In "Porterhouse Blue," his third novel, published in 1974, Sharpe takes on academe, and if you've read the book, or see this 1987 miniseries adaptation, new to DVD, you'll never again look at university ceremonies with all those old dons...Read the entire review

1984, 90 minutes. Directed by Bud Townsend. With Tiffany Bolling, Franc Luz, Julie Newmar, Jack Carter, Britt Ekland. Private Screening Collection.

THE MOVIE

I know it's a stretch to even draw this comparison, but: the justly forgotten "Love Scenes" reminds me of the 1973 Oscar winner "Day for Night." Francois Truffaut's classic was about the comedies and tragedies involving a movie crew, and part of the joke was that the movie the crew was so dedicated to making was obviously a melodramatic piece of junk; it was, rather, the real-life story of the director (played by Truffaut himself) and his cast and staff that engaged us. In Bud Townsend's 1984 "Love Scenes," a director and his actress-wife are making an erotic piece of junk and it's hard to tell the difference between the film-within-the-film and the melodramatic film Townsend is making.

"Love Scenes" was made for the young ...Read the entire review

THE PROGRAM

The arts-and-literature homevideo label Kultur is issuing eight individual DVDs under the umbrella title "Great Russian Writers." There are no copyright dates on the discs' packaging or on the programs themselves, but the 25-minute films appear to date from the 1970s. They were originally produced in Russia and reworked with English narration by Britain's Channel 4, and seem best suited to elementary-school students.

The disk devoted to Dostoevsky adds nothing for anyone who has actually read anything by or about the author, and provides very little to pique the interest of the uninitiated. You immediately lower your expectations when the first line of narration is, "This is the story of one of the greatest writers of all time." What follows is hardly "the story," but simply a book report that ticks off major life events and mentions the novels that made the writer famous. The na...Read the entire review

2002, 125 minutes
Written and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

THE MOVIE

A middle-aged woman and a young woman take a young man to the doctor to have his skin rash examined. The young man and woman then head to the jungle for a picnic and love-making, while the older woman also winds up making love in the same jungle. The two women reconvene to help float the young guy in a river to help ease his skin pain. That's essentially the plot of the Thai film but like a Hemingway story or a John Cage composition, there's meaning in what's not shown, not said, not heard, not there.

Writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul has been a favorite of alternative critics and a handful of moviegoers since his weird debut feature, "Mysterious Object at Noon" (2000); "Blissfully Yours," his second film, since followed by "The Adventures of Iron Pussy," "Tropical ...Read the entire review

1971, directed by Carlos Tobalina.
With: Liz Renay, Devon Mayer, Anita De Moulin, Edwig Sands Ph.D., Jim Mayer, Ron Darby, Geoffrey W. Patterson, Susan Bergdahl, James Fuller, Santiago Burwell, Bill St. Pierre, Paul Herbert, Micky Hanes, Vera Angel, Danny Sanders, Roland Peters, Kathy Phidel, Judy Lane.

Virtually presenting itself as Exhibit A in the censorship debate that was heating up as the "porno chic" movement arrived in the early '70s, "Refinements in Love" is both a porn film and documentary about porn. Liz Renay, the late B-movie bombshell and John Waters leading lady, is the "hostess" for this 1971 goof, in which seemingly serious interviews about censorship, sexuality and mental health are intercut with illustrative sex scenes. The movie is inept by mainstream standards then or now, but it does deliver quite a bit of the "redeeming social value" that director Read the entire review

THE MINISERIES

In a headline-making interview given in March to Britain's Radio Times magazine, Stephen Fry, the British actor-writer best known in the U.S. for playing Jeeves to Hugh Laurie's Wooster in the "Jeeves and Wooster" comedies, exposed what he sees as a dirty little secret in the Anglo-American special relationship in film, TV and theater. "I shouldn't be saying this - high treason really -- but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren't fooled by our accent into detecting a brilliance that may not really be there," Fry said, no doubt in his plummiest Oxbridge tones. "I mean, would they notice if Jeremy Irons or Judi Dench gave a bad performance?"

It's a valid question, and one that comes to mind big-time, albeit for a different reason, when watching "Sleepers." In this 1991 BBC miniseries about lingering intrigue at the end of the Cold War, some fine British actors portray Ru...Read the entire review

Babette: 1968, 65 minutes, directed by Peter Woodcock. With Linda Boyce, Uta Erickson, Claudia Cheer, Jo Sweet, Maxine, Sue Akers, Dick White, Carla Costa.

Monique, My Love: 1969, 65 minutes, directed by Peter Woodcock. With Linda Boyce, Gerri Miller, Claudia Cheer, Jo Sweet, Maxine, Sue Akers, Dick White, Carla Costa.

Total running time with extras: approximately 3:30.

THE MOVIES

Two exploitation disposables from the late '60s (and probably not seen since then) are paired up on this single disc from archivists of sleaze Something Weird Video. Falling in the adult cinema continuum somewhere between silent loops and fully fleshed out narrative features, the black-and-white "Babette" and "Monique, My Love," seen today, leave much to be desired as films, but they served their purpose of providing female nudity for male audiences at urban grindhouses in the so...Read the entire review

12 episodes, total running time 10:44, plus extras.
Cast: Jennifer Beals, Erin Daniels, Pam Grier, Leisha Hailey, Laurel Holloman, Mia Kershner, Eric Lively, Katherine Moennig, Dallas Roberts, Daniela Sea, Sarah Shahi, Rachel Shelley.

With about a dozen main characters and as many more recurring guests, and enough fast-changing, overlapping story lines to rival Balzac, "The L Word" plays out as Showtime's answer to HBO's "The Sopranos." Creator Ilene Chaiken's comedy-drama centering on a group of lesbian Los Angeles friends (and to some extent lovers) is the SoCal answer to David Chase's New Jersey wiseguys and goomars. The volatile relationship between life partners Bette Porter and Tina Kennard (Jennifer Beals and Laurel Holloman) is every bit as compelling and dynamic as that of Tony and Carmela. And these L.A. ladies, from rich alpha female Helena Peabody (Rachel Shelley) to ...Read the entire review

Cast: Rupert Graves, Judy Davis, Helena Bonham Carter, Helen Mirren, Barbara Jefford, Giovanni Guidelli.
Director: Charles Sturridge
1992, 112 minutes, PG

Like Henry James, E.M. Forster took the clash of cultures as an abiding theme, be it Brits wreaking havoc on the Continent or the Subcontinent, or upper-class English lording it over their less privileged countrymen. If James' chief concern was psychological, Forster's was social; he came on the scene a few decades after the Master at a time of thunderous industrial and economic change, and trained his gently searing eye on the essential insidiousness of the class system and the British sense of entitlement.

Forster's elegant novels, written in the first quarter of the 20th century, went largely unfilmed until the 1980s, when he suddenly became a source as hot as Stephen King (albeit for a different audience). David Lean's "A Pas...Read the entire review

2001, U.K.
A TalkBack Production for Channel 4
Running time: 193 minutes
Cast: Daniel Craig, Megan Dodds, Richard Coyle, Leslie Phillips, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Katrin Cartlidge, Robert Daws, Guy Henry

Now that Daniel Craig is flying high as the new James Bond, DVD companies are snooping around their vaults for any of his past performances that they can capitalize on. While Craig created a solid body of pre-"Casino Royale" work in such diverse and well-regarded movies as "Enduring Love," "Sylvia," "Layer Cake," "The Mother" and "Road to Perdition," he paid his dues like everyone else in product that fell below the A level. Such as "Sword of Honour," a perfectly fine but unremarkable British miniseries from 2001, now brought to DVD by Brit-TV specialists Acorn Media. The World War II romantic drama -- based on Evelyn Waugh's trilogy of novels comprising "Men at Arms," "Officers ...Read the entire review

Adaptations of five tales by William Sydney Porter -- the bookkeeper, pharmacist, journalist, convicted embezzler and short story master known to the world as O. Henry -- make up this 1952 production, an instructive example of the classical studio system at work.

Stars inside and outside the 20th Century Fox stable were put to work in what are essentially short films, each with its own screenwriters and directed by a top-rank craftsman. Fox could count on lovers of the hugely popular turn-of-the-century writer famed for his twist endings as well as fans of such names as Charles Laughton, Jeanne Crain, Anne Baxter and the up-and-comer Marilyn Monroe to turn out, even if the individual actors' screen time was limited. Fox's DVD marks the film's homevideo debut.

The stories, in order:

1. "The Cop and the Anthem," directed by Henry Koster. Charles Laughton is Soapy, a fastidious,...Read the entire review

NoShame Films, the Criterion of Italian genre cinema, has unearthed a minor treat with "Ubalda, All Naked and Warm," a bawdy 1972 comedy showcasing the earthy charms of actresses Edwige Fenech and Karin Schubert. The movie, never theatrically released in the U.S., is standard Italian B erotica of the period, which means that it is handsomely photographed but with pun-based humor that doesn't translate and a Benny Hill level of silliness. (A sample of the dialogue: "Do you serve chickens here?" "We serve anyone.")

The movie is most blatantly a takeoff on Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Decameron" but it also nods to "The Seventh Seal." Pippo Franco stars as Olimpio, a goofy medieval knight returning home from "the war." He encounters various pastoral archetypes, such as an unholy monk, before stumbling home to an impossibly hot wife (Schubert) who, despite being locked in a chastity belt for months, has a team...Read the entire review