The cosmos keeps growing larger, extending beyond anything the human eye can see and confounding the limits of reason. First came other galaxies, a starry sea in which our Milky Way is a mere island; then the Big Bang, in which the universe came into being as if from nothing. Now our universe itself cannot contain the cosmos, which may include many universes�a �multiverse.� The History Ch...

When Melbourne police detective James Jewel is called away to a murder scene in the middle of the night, his wife admonishes, �If it gets crazy, don�t be a hero this time, OK?� Apparently, shrinking from responsibility is not OK in his book. Detective Jewel responds to his wife with silence. Fans of �The Shield� would probably love The Line, an Australian crime film out now on DVD. Youn...

Reginald Perrin is married and middle-aged, a corporate manager and bored out of his mind, literally out of his mind. Like an airplane on autopilot, he is losing altitude and heading for a crash. The 1970s British TV comedy, �The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin,� is a remarkably funny look at one man�s mid-life crisis. The four-disc DVD will be out on May 12. As played by Leonard Ross...

When he was part of New York’s “downtown scene” in the ‘70s, Philip Glass was the target of vituperative put-downs by critics and the older generation of modernist composers, who scripted their music according to the dictates of intellectual theories. Fortunately, the spirit of those composers has migrated to academic cultural studies programs, where they can do little harm. Glass won the ar...

A Russian film set in a time of living memory, Cargo 200 takes place in 1984, when the entire USSR resembled the shabby squalor of the worst districts of Detroit. Director Alexy Balabanov titled his film from the Soviet code name for the coffins of dead solders shipped home from Afghanistan, a war the Soviet Union could never win. Cargo 200 will be released April 28 on DVD. If Cargo 200 h...

Veteran British actor Albert Finney is magnificent in �A Rather English Marriage� (1999). For the award-winning UK television drama (out now on DVD), Finney plays Squadron Leader Reggie Conyngham-Jervis, an upper-class Englishman of ponderous and slightly ridiculous dignity. While his wife is dying in hospital, he meets another World War II veteran about to become a widower, the plebeian Roy Sou...

Nostalgia for 1950s family sitcoms centers on �Leave It to Beaver,� presided over by an all-knowing dad, and the moral of the genre is summed up by the name of a series called �Father Knows Best.� But �50s sitcoms weren�t monolithic in their view, and in the popular program starring Danny Thomas, father seldom knew best. Episodes of the show from fall of 1958 are collected on a new DVD, �Make Ro...

Everyone knows Walt Disney. His chief rivals in animation, however, are better known nowadays to historians and aficionados than the general public. But mention Popeye and Betty Boop and eyes widen with recognition. The cartoons of brothers Max and Dave Fleischer were usually more streetwise than Uncle Walt, less reliant on cute animals and serving a high adrenaline vision of modernity in motion...

An innocent man runs for his life, hunted by police convinced he�s guilty of a great crime and by shadowy forces who will kill him if he falls into their hands. It�s the core of many Alfred Hitchcock films and of Tell NoOne (2006) by French director Guillaume Canet. It�s out now on DVD. Hitchcock has long been honored in France, whose filmmakers continue to work out his ideas in contempor...

Hugues de Montalembert was returning home one evening to his Manhattan apartment near Washington Square when he was attacked by robbers. In the fight that followed he was sprayed in the eyes with paint remover and lost his sight. The Frenchman had been a painter and filmmaker until that evening in 1978. �My life was based on seeing,� he says. And, he adds, that he never considered ending it. ...