The Ruth Rendell Mysteries, a treasure trove for mystery lovers, is out on DVD. This elegant box set of 17 tales based on stories and novels by the acclaimed mystery writer Ruth Rendell aims to please. Rendell was accomplished at police procedurals like her Detective Inspector Wexford series, but her short stories reflected more of a psychological nature than a who-done-it. These have been elegantly transformed into many dramas made for British TV. And what casts! Featuring the excellent George Baker as her irascible Inspector Wexford, not to mention stellar dramatic turns by Colin Firth (A Single Man), James D'Arcy (Mansfield Park), Susannah York (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?), and others. What's fascinating is the subtle twists and turns these stories take, not to mention the levels of emotional complexity. This is like a giant box of chocolates for me -- I have to pace myself not to watch them one after another. But fortunately you don't have to show such restraint with this marvelous set.

Out now on DVD is Mystery Science Theater 3000, Volume XVII (Shout Factory), another hilarious collection of episodes from the wildly popular cult TV show about a stranded astronaut (either played by Mike Nelson or Joel Hodgsen) and his robot friends forced to watch a bunch of bad movies in space. Their wisecracks are a dizzying bunch of cultural references, and repeated viewings only add more laughs. This volume includes their first episode The Crawling Eye -- actually a very decent sci-fi film starring Forrest Tucker fighting one-eyed monsters hiding in clouds in the Trollenberg mountains. The goofy asides are pretty uneven here. The Beatniks, about the rise of a pop singer named Eddie Crane who can't shake his juvenile delinquent friends, fares better. With bad ballads and priceless overacting this lends itself to jokes easily. The Blood Waters Of Dr. Z is a low budget Florida-made mess about a loony scientist who transforms himself into a fish monster. The rubber-suit alone is riotous enough but the wisecracks here soar. The best episode is The Final Sacrifice, a dreadful Canadian film about young Troy, the son of an archeologist, who is chased by muscle-bound hooded satanists because he has a secret map to a secret underground city. He falls in with a mullet-haired, mustached, hard-drinking, schlub named Zap Rowsdower in a beat-up truck and they both fight the devil-worshipers. This is fall-out-of-your-chair nonstop laughs.

Out now on DVD, via Criterion, is Lola Montes, Max Ophuls's 1955 masterpiece, fully restored in dazzling color and wide screen splendor. It's about the life of an adventuress and a cabaret dancer, Lola Montes (Martine Carol), whose notorious, purported affairs with composers like Franz Liszt were legendary. Her dalliance with the King of Bavaria caused a revolution and resulted in a handsome student (Oskar Werner) escorting her safely out of the country in the dead of night. The film takes place in a circus with the ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) showing his audience the highlights from Lola's scandalous life -- with Lola in the center ring. Filled with Ophuls's trademark amazing tracking shots (just watch the scene where the King asks for a needle and thread and you'll be dumbfounded at the camera movement). The restoration is exquisite and the extras (including a fascinating French TV episode in which Ophuls's collaborators lovingly discuss the director and his films).  

The Vengeance Trilogy Box Set (PalisadesTartan) is a thrilling collection of three brilliant films by South Korean master filmmaker Park Chan-Wook. Included are:
  
Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance: When the sister of a deaf factory worker named Ryu -- played by Ha-Kyan Shin (Thirst) -- falls ill and is in need of a kidney transplant, he foolhardily kidnaps the daughter of his former boss for a ransom (to pay for the operation). Everything ultimately spins out of control in this masterful tale of fatal retribution, the first in his Vengeance trilogy

Old Boy. Winner of the 2004 grand prize at the Cannes film festival, this brutal, wildly cinematic, Kafkaesque thriller stars Choi Ming-Shik as Oh Dae-su, a loudmouthed drunk, who gets abducted one night and finds himself imprisoned in a strange impregnable room for 15 years. When he just as mysteriously finds himself freed, he seeks spectacular revenge on the person responsible with the help of a lovely young sushi chef (Gang Hye-Jeong). It's like a Charles Bronson film filtered through Quentin Tarantino's sensibility. Whether he's chomping on live octopus or fending off a hallway of attackers with the claw end of a hammer, Choi Ming-Shik gives an astonishing, raw, mesmerizing, performance. 

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Out on DVD is The Pit & The Pendulum, the latest homoerotic oddness from director David DeCoteau, whose perverse films like The Brotherhood, Voodoo Academy and The Brotherhood II: Young Warlocks I really enjoy for their subversive nature and prolific shots of boys in their underwear. In this, part of a series DeCoteau did for the Here! network, seven hot college athletes answer an ad for hypnosis therapy and end up at a remote mansion run by the crazy daughter of a notorious doctor who enjoyed curing patients of their fear by killing them. In no time the boys and girls are in their skivvies and in grave danger. Great wrestling scenes with boys in boxers and briefs, and a stripped down weightlifting scene that ends badly. A young handsome blonde lad who chases "extreme weather" makes out with his male roommate and even two ladies find find themselves making out after too much wine. And yes there is a big fake giant pendulum at the end swinging dangerously over a hot boy. DeCoteau surely has an eye for cute kids in or out of their pants, and the weird tease of his films just cracks me up. 

Caught up with Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer over the weekend and it made me insane it was so good. Ewan McGregor plays an author hired to "ghost" the memoirs of a highly controversial former Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) and is whisked off to a remote American seaside compound only to find himself entangled in a web of secrets and lies. What's so deliciously devious about this is the way the film unfolds -- with such nerve-jangling paranoia and superb suspense. Polanski has such command over the storytelling that you sit spellbound for two hours watching it fiendishly play out. Rush out and catch this in a theater while you can.

Katherine Bigelow wins! I was absolutely thrilled last night about The Hurt Locker winning all those Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director... firstly, because the movie is truly great; but secondly, because Katherine Bigelow deserves it. She and Monty Montgomery shot Willem Dafoe in The Loveless in 1982 and has been in the family for a long time. Here is a picture of the time she took Jack Dafoe (who I babysat for many years) and me to the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles (mainly because I yearned to visit the set of Rebel Without a Cause). Being there that day was so much fun -- mostly for her company and her great kindness. And I've watched with immense joy her career as an artist and director through the years. Is there anything better than the vampire film Near Dark? Of course not. The Hurt Locker was a risky project, one which she approached with such passion and strength, it makes it that much sweeter. This is one of those rare times an award is rightly achieved. To a wonderful visionary, Katherine Bigelow, I salute you!

The first season of Nurse Jackie is now out on DVD! How great is this Showtime series starring the fabulous Edie Falco as a pill-popping nurse in a frantic New York hospital? Falco stars as Jackie Peyton -- a superb nurse with some serious problems. She has a handsome loving husband and kids at home but at work she pretends to be single and sleeps with the pharmacist (Paul Schulze) so she can get painkillers which she snorts up regularly during her hectic day. The show has a great ensemble cast -- from Eve Best as her tart-talking well-dressed best friend; Peter Facinelli as an arrogant doctor who cops a feel when he gets nervous; Anna Deavere Smith as the hospital administrator; a touching Merritt Wever  as her bumbling intern; and Haaz Sleiman, as the gay male nurse "Mo-Mo," who is sadly is not going to be on next season. People who only know Falco from The Sopranos now get to see her range as the troubled but terrific gal.  (Check out some her early indie movies like the wonderful Judy Berlin and Laws Of Gravity while you're at it). Several of this season's episodes were well directed by Steve Buscemi. Just the best show!

Usually I'm opposed to reboots, but in the case of The Crazies (which opens in theaters Friday), I was never that crazy about the original to begin with so anything might be an improvement. Director George Romero's 1973 follow-up to Night Of The Living Dead had a nifty premise. A biological weapon somehow gets into the water system of a small town and makes the populace go bonkers. But Romero's film never nailed how creepy it could possibly be. In this film, a military plane carrying the weapon crashes into the nearby lake and suddenly bizarre incidents start to happen. A man wanders on the field of a baseball game carrying a shotgun. Another sets fire to his house with his family locked inside. Suddenly the town is overrun with military troops rounding everyone up and herding them into trucks and the town becomes quarantined. In director's Breck Eisner's new film, the wonderful Timothy Olyphant plays the sheriff who breaks back into the quarantined town to rescue his pregnant wife (Radha Mitchell) and alongside his trusted deputy (Joe Anderson -- who's steals the picture) and a friend (Danielle Panabaker) they try to avoid loonies and the military to find an escape out of town. There's a creepy feel of isolation in the film -- the vast expanses and isolated farmhouses. Not to mention several action sequences that are chillingly memorable -- one attack in a car wash is my favorite. But for the most part it's pretty suspenseful and not half bad.

Out on DVD is Make Way For Tomorrow, a forgotten gem of a film. Director Leo McCarey's (The Awful Truth, An Affair To Remember) heartbreaking 1937 tale is about an older married couple (Beulah Bondi, Victor Moore) who lose their house to the bank and are separated and shuttled around to live with their children who don't really want them. Obviously an inspiration for Ozu's Tokyo Story, this was a commercial failure when it came out but was remembered well by critics and directors. In a lovely extra on this Criterion DVD, Peter Bogdanovich recalls asking Orson Welles about Make Way For Tomorrow only to have him roar back: "Oh my God, that's the saddest movie ever made. It would make a stone cry!" It just is a truly exquisite film. A long sequence where the elderly couple wander through New York for probably their last hours together and return to the hotel where their spent their honeymoon is sheer perfection. It will rip your heart out, but boy is it great.

Out on DVD is Dead Snow. Horror fans are in for a real treat with this ghoulish Scandinavian shocker about a bunch of medical students who vacation in a cabin in the Norwegian Alps only to be attacked by Nazi zombies (who have been hiding out in mountain tunnels). Director Tommy Wirkola's grisly but fun flick really goes all out with intestine chomping and chainsaw mayhem. This two-disc special edition includes behind the scenes footage, outtakes and make-up effects.

Out on DVD is a show Johnny Depp is said to be a big fan of: Midsomer Murders, Set 14. This collection features another marvelous quartet of incredibly enjoyable British mysteries based on the characters created in the detective novels of Caroline Graham. John Nettles is wonderfully droll as Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby as he investigates murders in the bucolic English villages filled with eccentrics and kooks. Death And Dust is about the impending marriage between a doctor and a well-to-to-widow which causes a killer to rise up and strike like a cobra. Picture Of Innocence is about camera club that rejects digital, and when members of the club show up strangled, the clues all point to Barnaby as the killer. It's up to Sergeant Ben Jones (Jason Hughes) to prove his innocence. They Seek Him Here is centered around The Scarlet Pimpernel film set and the mysterious killings utilizing the guillotine in the movie. Death In A Chocolate Box is about a halfway house for prisoners and a long-buried secret that threatens someone to commit murder. 

Out on DVD is the gross-out horror comedy Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, a sort-of follow-up to Eli Roth's inventive chiller about a bunch of kids camping in the woods who come in contact with a virulent flesh-eating disease. Some of the first cast returns, including lead Rider Strong and the bizarrely funny Officer Winston (Guiseppe Andrews). A bunch of kids are en route to their prom when a sexual encounter and a delivery of infected water from a nearby bottling plant sets into motion a puss-popping, face-melting nightmare that makes Carrie look like a "lovely dance." Noah Segan, Alexi Wasser and Rusty Kelley are some of the unlucky teens. Marc Senter (who played the homicidal lead in The Lost) costars as a loathsome jock and is memorably nasty. Director Ti West (The House Of The Devil) plays fast and loose with the rules and the result is rudely funny.

Law Abiding Citizen, (Anchor Bay) an enjoyably trashy revenge saga starring Gerald Butler as Clyde Shelton, who watched his wife and child hideously killed in front of him during a home invasion, is out on DVD. Through a fluke of justice, one of the perps gets a light sentence from the Philadelphia prosecutor (Jamie Foxx), and ten years later everyone associated with this miscarriage of justice begins to meet a violent end. Even when Clyde is arrested for suspicion of the crimes and is in solitary confinement, the reign of terror continues. Directed by F. Gary Gray, this is junky pulp fiction but very watchable and entertaining. And make sure you watch the Unrated Director's Cut because there's a nice piece of nastiness involving Gerard Butler using a buzz saw on a loathsome criminal that was cut from the theatrical print.

Out on DVD this week is Hunger, British artist Steve McQueen's debut feature set in the notorious Northern Ireland Maze prison and during Republican Army member Bobby Sands' (Michael Fassbender) fatal hunger strike of 1981. As brutal and harrowing as much of the film is (the guards beating the inmates, the prisoners drawing on the walls of their cells with feces), the movie has astonishing lyrical beauty as well. Michael Fassbender's (Inglourious Basterds, Fish Tank) physical and emotional transformations are extraordinary. A strangely beautiful, equally horrifying film.

Out on DVD is one of my top 10 films of last year: Bronson, a savagely smart, hilariously alarming portrait of Britain's most notorious violent prisoner, Michael Peterson (Tom Hardy) who changed his name to Charles Bronson (coerced by a seedy fight club promoter) during one of his rare stints out of jail. Bronson is like a walking fist, always ready to attack, but with his bald, handsome, muscular face and handlebar mustache you might first mistake him for a member of a barbershop quartet. That is until you sense the psychotic tension constantly seething beneath his skin. It's an outrageous, humorous, scary performance -- you find yourself catching yourself between a gasp and a laugh as he greases his nude body into fighting off another phalanx of prison guards. Directed by the wildly talented Danish director of the brilliant Pusher Trilogy -- Nicolas Winding Refn, who keeps the tone cartoonishly operatic -- it's like Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange but far more perversely barbaric. The DVD has commentary by the director and a funny interview with the scarily handsome Tom Hardy relating his meetings with the real Charles Bronson in jail.

Out now on DVD is the complete sixth season of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Truly one the best shows on television, this season was amazing, and featured the Emmy-winning "Chuckles Bites The Dust" episode that is brilliant and hilarious. The season also includes one of my favorites, "Edie Gets Married" in which Lou Grant (Ed Asner) gives a touching performance as he deals with the fact that his wife's remarrying. There's the riotous, impromptu "Ted's Wedding," which takes place at Mary's new apartment with a young John Ritter as the minister. Mary's Aunt Flo (the wonderful Eileen Heckhart) bucks heads with Lou Grant in two wonderful episodes. And the lascivious Happy Homemaker, Sue Ann Nivens (Betty White), finally beds Lou one drunken evening in another peerless show. The writing, direction, and cast really rise to the occasion in this fabulously funny season. As they say in the "Chuckles" episode: "A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants..."

Out on DVD are volumes one and two of the glorious series, Bad Girls Of Film Noir. For years, I've dreamed of seeing a film by the Czech auteur Hugo Haas (who wrote, produced, and directed scores of juicy melodramas in the 1950s) on DVD. Well in these two volumes saluting the dangerous dames of crime drams there are two of his gems now in pristine condition starring one of his B muses Cleo Moore: Over-Exposed (1956), about a blackmailing photographer, and One Girl's Confession (1953), wherein a young woman steals from her boss and then merrily goes to prison for the crime without revealing where she buried the money. There are four movies to each volume, and you need both of them. In The Killer That Stalked New York (1953), Evelyn Keyes plays a woman who smuggles diamonds into Manhattan for her shady boyfriend. But she is also carrying small pox and quickly becomes Typhoid Mary infecting the population. The wonderful temptress Lizabeth Scott appears in Two Of A Kind (1951), which finds her dragging Edmond O'Brien into an inheritance scheme, and Bad For Each Other (1953), in which she plays a boozy socialite who tempts good doctor (Charlton Heston) to go against his conscience. The Glass Wall (1953) introduces America to handsome Vittorio Gassman, on the run after stowing away on a boat to America. He falls in with a down-on-her luck gal (Gloria Grahame) in this tense thriller. Night Editor (1946) is the tale of a cop whose extramarital affair keeps him from being an eyewitness to a murder. And the fabulous Women's Prison (1955) stars Ida Lupino as a bitch warden in a female penitentiary filled with B-movie greats like Audrey Totter, Cleo Moore and others. Don't pass these up!

Terribly Happy, which opened last Friday, is a grungy, deliciously demonic Danish film-noir about a Copenhagen cop named Robert Hanson (Jakob Cedergren) who is transferred to a shit hole of a small town where he becomes entangled with a wily, battered wife. Director Henrik Ruben Genz sets all the sleazy machinery into motion as Robert gets nightmarishly sucked down the rabbit hole into murder and mayhem. There's a nice, lurid and bleak Jim Thompson sensibility to the film and the lead has a scruffy, anti-hero handsomeness.
  

Out on DVD is the bizarre Goodbye Gemini (Scorpion Releasing). Set in swinging London in the '70s, precocious twins Jacki (Judy Geeson) and Julien (Martin Potter) arrive at their father's flat and get rid of the meddling housekeeper by craftily placing their toy teddy bear on the stair landing. She takes a header and is carted off in an ambulance. They are then left to their own demented devices and head to a pub full of decadent swingers and a drag queen disrobing on the bar. There they meet a dissolute couple who unwisely attach themselves to the troubled twosome. The twins are weirdly incestuous and afterJulien is tricked into having a threesome with drag queens in a seedy hotel room the plot unravels into madness and murder. Jacki wanders aimlessly on the streets with a bloody sheet only to be rescued by a slumming politician (Michael Redgrave). Directed by Alan Gibson (The Satanic Rites Of Dracula) and with gorgeous cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth (2001: A Space Odyssey/Cabaret) this was also known as Twinsanity on VHS. The DVD unleashes its true beauty and enjoyably nutty oddness.