DVDs, 2/2.

Don't take a pass on Eclipse's set of Lubitsch Musicals, advises Glenn Kenny: "How often do you see light quasi-operettas rife with sexual innuendo these days, right? Among other things, the set is an education in a particular form - I mean, you knew that the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup was an anarchic political satire, but did you also know that it was a pointed parody of the very type of popular film presented here?"

"In an era of sagas like The Sopranos, The Wire and Six Feet Under, told over weeks and years, Berlin Alexanderplatz would seem easier to swallow," writes Andy Beta in Stop Smiling. "Yet what makes watching Berlin Alexanderplatz such an exacting endeavor is how it gets honed down to a single tale, dictated steadfastly, gathering speed like a glacier. Not once does it stray or divert from its path."

"Vanishing Point is above all else a film about impetuousness," writes Rumsey Taylor at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. Also, Two-Lane Blacktop.

"Produced by Aaron Spelling, The Mod Squad desperately wanted to prove that it wasn't the work of the network TV establishment, even though it very obviously was," writes David Browne in the New York Times. "It was happy to exploit the 60s underground much the way Hair did on Broadway during the same era." At the same time, the show semaphored signs of "the demise of the 60s dream, a slow death that The Mod Squad came to embody."

Robert Cashill offers a list of 2007's noteworthy DVDs.

Posted by dwhudson at February 2, 2008 9:12 AM