DVDs, 5/5.

By David Hudson on 05/05/2009

In 1966, the BBC broadcast a version of "Alice in Wonderland" directed by Jonathan Miller, available on DVD from Home Vision Entertainment. John Coulthart admires the "extraordinary cast of acting and comedy talent, all of whom portray [Lewis] Carroll's characters without masks or any kind of animal impersonation: Wilfred Bramble is a rather camp White Rabbit, Finlay Currie plays the Dodo, Michael Redgrave is the Caterpillar, Leo McKern drags up as the ugly Duchess and John Gielgud is the Mock Turtle. Alan Bennett and Peter Cook appear as the Mouse and Mad Hatter respectively which always makes me wonder why Dudley Moore is missing. The most surprising cast member is Peter Sellers as the King of Hearts, Sellers being an international film star by this point and about to appear in a string of Hollywood-goes-psych films with the sprawling 'Casino Royale,' 'I Love You, Alice B Toklas!' and 'The Magic Christian.' In this respect Miller's 'Alice' acts as a precursor to the burgeoning excesses of the decade, just as [John Lennon's] 'Tomorrow Never Knows' and Donovan's Sunshine Superman' album (both made the same year as Miller's film) stand as signposts for the music of the next two years."

"Having made his feature debut with 'Gumshoe' in 1971, [Stephen] Frears had been working primarily in television, directing plays and films written by the likes of Alan Bennett, Tom Stoppard and Christopher Hampton, and characterized by adroit storytelling and visual economy." Graham Fuller for Criterion's Current: "Though commissioned for TV, 'My Beautiful Laundrette' was released theatrically, and it reestablished Frears as a man of the cinema. The year before, however, he had directed another audacious film, 'The Hit,' which surprisingly bombed. It was a strange hybrid - a London crime drama cum Spanish road movie - possibly doomed by its dislocatedness and disregard for genre rules. Few reviewers of the time cottoned to the film's blend of the cool and the lofty. Contemporary critics, in comparison, would appreciate such offspring of 'The Hit' as 'Gangster No. 1,' 'Sexy Beast' and 'In Bruges,' and the stateside equivalents made by the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino."

"Over the decades, certain famous titles by director William 'Wild Bill' Wellman have thrown a veil over another part of his work," writes Bertrand Tavernier for LA Weekly. "Above all, there is the extraordinary body of films Wellman made for Warner Bros between 1931 and 1934, which are, for the most part, narcotics of energy, vitality and dynamism. Those were qualities specific to that studio but which Wellman, who feared nothing, carried to the point of incandescence. In these films, six of which are newly released on DVD, he seems truly inspired, carried by the audacity of certain subjects."

The "cynically efficient Ben Hecht." The way that sentence begins, you just don't expect Dave Kehr to swoop in from the side and score. Did he aim? Did he even shoot? Such verbal dexterity is one mark of his weekly DVD column in the New York Times; another is the curatorial finesse. Which, of all the releases in any given week, will matter most, or at least be most remarkable to cinephiles with a penchant for relishing the turning points in the history of their pet art? This week he's selected "The Goldwyn Follies" (1938), "a fascinating mash-up whose ill-sorted elements are a major part of its odd appeal."

David N Meyer, film editor at the Brooklyn Rail and author of "Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music" and "A Girl and a Gun: The Complete Guide to Film Noir on Video," has the Noir of the Week: Arthur Penn's "Night Moves."

The project Martin Scorsese will most likely turn to once "Shuttle Island" is wrapped and ready is an adaptation of Shushaku Endo's novel "Chinmoku" ("Silence"). "Two years after his classic 'Double Suicide,' Masahiro Shinoda made a beautiful film out of the novel in 1971," and Glenn Kenny reviews it in The Auteurs' Notebook.

Matt Singer here at IFC on Nagisa Oshima's "In the Realm of the Senses": "[W]hat continues to be disquieting about the film when viewed today is not the intensity of its eroticism, but rather the intensity of its emotions. Though it's not as often thought of in these terms, 'In the Realm of the Senses' is as much a film about sexuality as it is about addiction." Earlier: "Criterion's Oshimas."

"Loosely based on Frank Wedekind's two plays 'Erdgeist' (1985) and 'Die Büchse der Pandora' (1904), 'Pandora's Box,' directed by Austrian GW Pabst, is perhaps one of the greatest films of the Weimar Republic," writes Douglas Messerli for nthposition. "Watching the movie the other day, I could easily see why composer Alban Berg was attracted to the same Wedekind plays as the source to his opera, 'Lulu.' For Pabst's film, despite its silence, is basically a visual opera, as it counts down the numerous acts in Lulu's fall." Also reviewed: Pabst's "Threepenny Opera."

"Kelly Reichardt's 'Wendy & Lucy' may be - in competition only with Lance Hammer's 'Ballast' - the best film of 2008," writes Michael Atkinson here at IFC. "'Ballast' is the more visually stealthy of the two, but Reichardt's film is almost a structuralist triumph: how to make the most emotionally wrenching indie of the new era with as little narrative as possible." Also: "Wisdom, respect and generosity are hard to come by these days, which is why the DVD-ing of Chris Marker's 'A Grin without a Cat' (1977) could be a balm for the filmgoing soul - particularly as it chronicles the rising-falling-rocket trajectory of the 1960s, seen in the prismatic, idiosyncratic and dialectical way that is Marker's own." More on that one from Cullen Gallagher' in the L Magazine and Eric Henderson in Slant.

"Had there ever been a film that so succinctly enacted its high concept than 'Speed'?" asks Dan North.

"Zen gives us the parable of the master who points to the moon, and the student who looks at the master's finger," James Rocchi reminds us. "'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' isn't about a man who lives backwards or a woman who lives forwards; that's just looking at the finger. Get past the plot, the pitch, and the technique, and you can see it as a reminder that all we can do is live now."

"Agnès Varda's third feature, 'Le bonheur,' is a cheerful, sunny, colorful film, a vibrant and ambiguous fable about love, fidelity and the search for happiness, all of it scored with the richly emotional music of Mozart," writes Ed Howard. "It is a stunningly provocative film, offering up few answers to the thorny questions it raises about its protagonists and their attempts to create happy lives for themselves."

"[W]hen the reviewer's only pre-screening option is a DVD, he is being coaxed and coerced to adopt the standards of the very people he likes to be sniffy about, those who choose to wait for the DVD," argues Duncan Shepherd in the San Diego Reader.

"I need a way to keep track of DVDs." So Chris Stangl is trying out various systems, beginning with Delicious Library 2.

Online viewing tip. The NYT's AO Scott on Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole," which "walks a fine and crooked line between sharp satire and pitch-black film noir."

DVD roundups: Sean Axmaker (Parallax View), DVD Talk, Guru, Ambrose Heron, Mark Kermode (Observer), PopMatters, Slant, Gordon Thomas (Bright Lights) and Michael Tully (Hammer to Nail).

[Photo: "Alice in Wonderland," BBC / Home Vision Entertainment, 1966]

Tags: Agnès Varda, Arthur Penn, Chris Marker, GW Pabst, Jonathan Miller, Kelly Reichardt, Masahiro Shinoda, Nagisa Oshima, Samuel Goldwyn, Stephen Frears, William Wellman