Expert Witness: DVD Views and Review from Hither and Yon

Dave Kehr's weekly DVD column at The New York Times tackles the new VCI restoration of "The Prowler" ("Few films of this period show such a stark disdain for institutional authority; fewer still such sexual frankness…), Disney's Blu-ray of "Alice in Wonderland" and the oddball socio-political artifact "WUSA." (Click here to find my takes on "The Prowler" and "WUSA," and the debate over the new "Alice" Blu-ray.)

Glenn Erickson digs into "Santa Sangre" ("Santa Sangre invents an entire symbolic cosmos around its seeker of redemption.") and "The Prowler" ("The most significant film noir disc release in quite some time is this one-of-a-kind melodrama from 1951, when Hollywood blacklisting was terminating dozens of vital careers.") at DVD Savant on DVD Talk.

Gary Tooze takes on the new Criterion Blu-ray release of "The Double Life of Veronique" and "Fish Tank" (I'm still waiting for these to arrive for my own look) and (going from grace to the grotesque) compares the new Anchor Bay Blu-ray of the 1978 "I Spit on Your Grave" with the old Elite Millennium Edition DVD of the film at DVD Beaver.

Robert Harris on the Blu-ray release of "The Social Network": "Everything that you saw in the theater will appear on your home theater screen, albeit a bit smaller, and occasionally with better sound than one's local cinema." The restoration guru also comments on "An Affair to Remember" ("CinemaScope films of the era were not sharp, and AAtR is no exception.  It looks as good as it always did.") and "All About Eve" ("Fox's new Blu-ray disc is the best that I've seen it looking in decades") for the Home Theater Forum.

MSN critic Glenn Kenny celebrates Vincente Minnelli's "Two Weeks in Another Town," newly released on the Warner Archives series of DVD-R discs in a remastered edition, at his website Some Came Running. "The better you know the films that surround this one—The Bad and the Beautiful, Contempt, even 8 1/2 and La Ricotta—the better you'll get this. But it is still awfully striking even on its own, and the Warner Archive disc of it is handsome indeed." I couldn't agree more, and I hope to find the time to hammer out a few notes of my own on this mid-sixties melodrama of show-biz harlotry. And in this post, he tackles the climactic scene of "The Prowler" (not to be read until AFTER you see the film).