The Ticket starts its Christmas countdown with Michael Dwyer's guide to movie DVD box sets
Of the mass of material now available in DVD sets, here are a handful well worth noting. Most should be easily available from the main music and DVD stores, and prices will vary. However, for the best value and the widest possible choice, I recommend purchasing on-line. Two UK-based sites I would particularly recommend, not least because they provide free postage for Irish customers, are www.play.com and www.sendit.com
ALFRED HITCHOCK: THE SIGNATURE COLLECTION
Packed with extras, this six-film collection features movies made by the master in the 1950s. The best is his immensely entertaining 1958 thriller, North By Northwest, starring Cary Grant, which is accompanied by a 38-minute documentary hosted by Grant's co-star in the film, Eva Marie Saint, an audio commentary by screenwriter Ernest Lehman, and other features. Hitchcock's gripping 1951 thriller, Strangers On a Train is available on two discs in different versions, along with a documentary and a commentary by Peter Bogdanovich. Completing the set are Stage Fright (1950) with Marlene Dietrich and Jane Wyman; I Confess (1953) with Montgomery Clift and Karl Malden; Dial M For Murder (1954), featuring Ray Milland and Grace Kelly; and The Wrong Man (1956), starring Henry Fonda.
ALMODOVAR
Pedro Almodovar's increasing depth and maturity, and the flair and imagination that has marked him out as one of world cinema's supreme visual stylists, is evident on this five-film set. It includes his four most recent movies - the politically charged Live Flesh; the richly emotional All About My Mother, for which he was named best director at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival; the touching and disturbing Talk to Her, which earned him the best screenplay Oscar last year; and his latest film, Bad Education. The set also includes the kinky Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990), starring Victoria Abril and Antonio Banderas. Save your gift vouchers for the release of this set on December 27th.
ANGELS IN AMERICA
Arguably the TV event of the year, this HBO production swept the board at the Emmy awards in the US, and is now available in a two-DVD set. Based on Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning two-part stage epic, this marvellous six-hour adult drama thoughtfully explores the morality, politics and search for hope in the story of six inter-connected characters in late 1980s New York. Brilliantly directed by Mike Nichols, it features a superb cast includingAl Pacino, Meryl Streep (unrecognisable as a rabbi in one of her four roles), Emma Thompson , Mary-Louise Parker and Jeffrey Wright.
DIRECTED BY FRANK CAPRA
Forget Bad Santa. The definitive Christmas movie remains Frank Capra's magical, joyous and intensely emotional It's a Wonderful Life (1946), starring James Stewart. It's one of four Capra pictures in this box set that features his delightful It Happened One Night, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, which swept all the major Oscars in 1934, along with the populist entertainments, You Can't Take It With You (1938) and Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), both of which also feature Stewart.
JEAN RENOIR DVD COLLECTION
This set is worth buying just for Renoir's 1937 masterpiece, La Grande Illusion, an immensely accomplished and powerful anti-war drama that stands the test of time. It features Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay and Marcel Dalio as French soldiers who are from different social backgrounds and are held prisoner in a fortress run by a German commandant (the great Erich Von Stroheim). This fine set also includes Renoir's stirring socialist drama, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1935), and his updated Zola adaptation, La Bête Humaine (1938).
JEAN-LUC GODARD DVD COLLECTION
This welcome set features three Godard movies from the 1960s, made after his international breakthrough with Breathless, and all three feature Anna Karina, whom he married in 1961. Godard's second feature film, Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier, 1960) is set at the time of the Algerian war as a French secret agent (Michel Subor) finds he is being used as a pawn by both sides, and the film was banned for two years by the French ministry of information. Une Femme est une Femme (1961), Godard's first film in colour, is a shrine to Karina, who plays a young woman in a ménage a trois. Completing the set is the haunting, futuristic Alphaville (1965), in which Eddie Constantine plays a private detective investigating a city where individuality and love have been suppressed.
LUIS BUÑUEL DVD COLLECTION
Three Buñuel classics feature in this set, including his sublime Belle de Jour (1967), a surreal and erotic picture of a newly-wed Parisian (an hypnotic Catherine Deneuve), who secretly spends her days exploring her sexual tastes and boundaries at an upmarket brothel. Buñuel's favourite target, the bourgeoisie, come in for more ridicule in The Diary of a Chambermaid (1964). The Catholic Church, another of avowed atheist Buñuel's prime targets, comes under attack in The Milky Way (1964), in which two tramps embark on a pilgrimage with bizarre consequences.
MARTIN SCORSESE COLLECTION
Few, if any, directors provide more fascinating and insightful DVD commentaries than the wonderfully loquacious Martin Scorsese, who's in full flight on this four-film DVD box set. It includes his rarely seen Little Italy drama, Who's That Knocking At My Door (1968), starring the young Harvey Keitel, and the underestimated Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, which earned Ellen Burstyn the best actress Oscar in 1974. There's also the frenetic 1985 nocturnal New York comedy, After Hours, and the terrific 1990 gangster movie, GoodFellas, which is accompanied by a separate DVD containing three documentaries - on its production, its legacy and its genre.
THE STAR WARS TRILOGY
Nostalgia probably explains why George Lucas's original Star Wars (1977) figures so prominently, and often in first place, in polls of the all-time best movies. Such reverence wildly overstates the case for the movie and its successors, although they remain thoroughly entertaining. This set features the original along with the best movie in the series, The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and The Return of the Jedi (1983), along with a 150-minute documentary and other features, and they serve as a reminder of just how superior they are to the more recent Episodes I and II.
