DVD Deals

Tips for the movie geek on your holiday list.

by Sam Adams

MCBADASS: Ian McShane plays the foul-mouthed, de facto town dictator Al Swearengen in David Milch's Deadwood. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION

The staggering economy has not been kind to the DVD biz. All of a sudden, $20 for a movie you might watch once or twice isn't such a bargain. But even when money is tight, there are boxed sets that offer plenty of bang for the buck. Add up all the hours you'll spend watching the complete five-season run of The Wire and that C-note-plus doesn't seem so steep. Watching The Wire in its entirety, which ought to keep you busy until Obama takes office, one is awed by its calculated sweep, the curve of an epic story line allowed to play out to its conclusion. The complete Deadwood, by contrast, is a study in promises only partly fulfilled. Where the Wire box simply collects the five previously released seasons, the Deadwood set adds a bonus disc whose salient feature is creator David Milch's tour through the abruptly canceled show's abandoned sets. It's a bizarre and somewhat excruciating experience, one Milch aptly labels "infinitely depressing." Milch offers a few tidbits as to what would have happened in the richly textured Western's fourth season, but mostly he winces his way through an obviously painful and largely fruitless process. More philosophically, Milch likens the messy process of TV-making to the struggle for civilization at the heart of the show, a contingent but noble struggle against the forces of entropy.

The bold palette of Budd Boetticher's Westerns couldn't be farther from Deadwood's gloomy hues, but the five films in Sony's long-awaited set are just as bleak and bracing. Including The Tall T, Decision at Sundown, Buchanan Rides Alone, Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station, The Films of Budd Boetticher brings the bulk of the movies he made with Randolph Scott into the digital age for the first time. The widescreen movies at the set's latter end are particularly magnificent, full of stark compositions that highlight the characters' microscopic presence in a vast and uncharted terrain. The five-disc set includes a feature-length documentary by the critic Dave Kehr and appreciations from Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood.

The 12-disc Murnau , Borzage and Fox is pricey, but the five discs I've seen hold almost immeasurable riches. Borazge, a silent master who has fallen into undeserved obscurity, gets the bulk of the box: 10 features, including Seventh Heaven, a triple winner at the first Academy Awards in 1929, plus a reconstruction of the lost The River. But the two Murnau films more than even the scales. Sunrise is a flat-out masterpiece, a zenith of silent film art enhanced by expressionist sets and in-camera effects. Murnau was reined in for City Girl, but he still managed to create some of the most beautiful images in the medium's history. Silent film aficionados will also warm to Kino's D.W. Griffith Masterworks 2 , a five-disc collection that includes Lillian Gish's ice-floe ride in Way Down East, as well as historian Kevin Brownlow's excellent biography.

Kino's Derek Jarman Collection is a fairly random assortment by the late queer cinema pioneer, but the combination of Sebastiane with his take on Shakespeare's The Tempest and his elegiac adaptation of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem with Isaac Julien's feature-length portrait makes for a fine introduction to an overlooked giant. Zeitgeist's four-disc Glitterbox draws three more features from the latter part of Jarman's career, as well as the posthumous Glitterbug.

Every Criterion DVD is like a miniature boxed set. For fans of outlaw cinema, try the first-ever release of Sam Fuller's White Dog, a parable about a dog trained to attack black people on sight. Buried by a studio expecting "Jaws on paws," the movie was condemned sight unseen, but Fuller's scathing (if, as always, occasionally nutsoid) attack on the prejudice embedded in American life is a horror movie of a disturbing kind.

Collecting works by a delightfully idiosyncratic and formally innovative filmmaker, 4 Films by Agnès Varda is full of magical moments and short-film surprises. Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Doulos and Le Deuxième Souffle combine elegance and brutality in equal measure. Criterion's long-awaited foray in the world of high-def arrives later this month with their first wave of Blu-ray releases, including Wong Kar-Wai's dizzying Chungking Express and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor. All things considered, they're better investments than the stock market.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)