It's Saturday and Savant gets a day off, which naturally means more reviews - laundry and groceries can wait.

It doesn't come out until February 18, but Savant has a preview review up of Kino's magnificent disc of the Restored Authorized Edition of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The film looks so good, and so much has been restored to it (much more than the 1983 Giorgio Moroder version) that I'll bet Lang himself would like it again - at UCLA in 1974 he told us he believed it to be a failure. It certainly doesn't play like a failure here.

First Run Features has released an important DVD in The Eye of Vichy. It's a 1993 compilation of French newsreels made during the Nazi occupation, an amazing history lesson that puts faces and voices to many of the names of the time, heroes and collaborators alike. It also stands as a document of the use of propaganda in the hands of a totalitarian state that wants to control the minds of its people as well as their actions.

Not much else to relate, at least that I can remember at the moment. Hope you are as excited by the Metropolis release as I am. Thanks to Aitam-Bar Sagi for his technical assistance with the review. Anyone notice my new animated logo? Glenn Erickson