DVD Corner

“The Adventures of Superman: Complete Second Season”: Forget the ripped abs, the chiseled jaw, the flattering tights – this Superman was soft. The series, on the other hand, was not. With such episodes as “The Big Squeeze,” “The Machine that Could Plot Crimes” and “Semi-Private Eye,” the show, which ran during the 1953-54 television season, obviously was influenced by the noir movement of the day. Hardened criminals and hard-boiled reporting are the mainstay. With George Reeves as Superman and Noell Neil replacing Phyllis Coates as Lois Lane, the show might not appeal to fans of the current glossy series “Smallville,” but for those who appreciate the occasional airborne throwback, this landmark series won’t disappoint. Grade: B

“Alien Nation: Complete Series”: Fresh from the planet Tencton – but lasting only a season before it was sent packing to the black hole of canceled television shows – come the Newcomers, an alien detective and his family who arrive in Los Angeles, where they must tackle issues of prejudice and intolerance in a world filled with other inhuman crimes. This prescient series appeared in 1989, just two years before the Rodney King beating, which gives it weight. It isn’t as involving as Joss Whedon’s “Firefly,” but it holds up. Includes 22 episodes and commentary by director Kenneth Johnson. Grade: B

“The Constant Gardener”: Based on John Le Carre’s best-selling novel, this 2005, Golden Globe-winning standout features Ralph Fiennes as British diplomat Justin Quayle, whose wife, Tessa (Rachel Weisz), is brutally murdered in Africa. It’s an event that leads Quayle on a quest to learn why, with director Fernando Meirelles (“City of God”) mounting an admirably tense, expertly acted thriller in which Quayle’s English restraint is nixed when passion, rage and fear overcome him. A timely, daring movie that skillfully weaves the corruption of big government and drugs – the pharmaceutical sort – deep into its equation. Rated R. Grade: A-

“Flightplan”: Six-year-old Julia Pratt (Marlene Lawston) goes missing at 37,000 feet on a transatlantic flight from Berlin to New York. Was it the hasenpfeffer and the currywurst that did her in? Afraid not. Jodie Foster is her mother, Kyle, a propulsion engineer facing a sketchy flight crew with no record of Julia existing. All they have is Kyle’s word, which becomes increasingly shaky as Kyle’s fears escalate into instability, and particularly when the crew learns she recently lost her husband to suicide – he tossed himself off a rooftop and now is in a casket in the belly of the plane. Well-acted, well-assembled product for the masses, though it pales in the wake of Wes Craven’s “Red Eye,” which was taut and kinetic in ways that “Flightplan” isn’t. Rated: PG-13. Grade: B-

“The Fog”: A boggy remake of John Carpenter’s 1980 cult classic. The movie takes us back to Antonio Bay, where atrocious things happened a century ago upon a schooner filled with lepers, the lot of which now, as rotting ghosts hidden by banks of fog, are eager to seek revenge on the descendants of those who did them wrong so long ago. Those descendants include Tom Welling’s Nick Castle; Selma Blair in the Adrienne Barbeau role of radio host Stevie Wayne; and Maggie Grace as Nick’s girlfriend Elizabeth, who will remind no one of Jamie Lee Curtis’ energetic performance in the superior original. Unlike Carpenter’s film, this irritatingly dull version never embraces its B-movie vibe. Rated PG-13. Grade: D

“Hunter: Complete Third Season”: From Stephen J. Cannell, whose pen apparently couldn’t be stopped in the ’70s and ’80s. Fred Dyer is Det. Sgt. Rick Hunter, tall, tough, gruff – and gifted with the ladies and with a gun. Stephanie Kramer is Sgt. Dee Dee McCall, whose relationship with Hunter is strained during this third season, though their chemistry remains tight. Predictably, crime is everywhere, neatly solved in an hour, though some fine hooks do pull you through. Look for a young George Clooney and Chaka Khan, of all people, in the episodes “Double Exposure” and “Down and Under,” respectively. Grade: B-

“Lois & Clark – The New Adventures of Superman: Complete Second Season”: Teri Hatcher, before the desperation set in. Dean Cain, before the desperation really set in (witness, for example, his turn in the recent television movie, “10.5: Apocalypse” – awful). Together, however, for a time in the ’90s, these two were it, romantically squabbling onscreen while offscreen, the egos threatened to kill the show (which they eventually did). In the second season of this Superman takeoff, love is at the forefront, with a first kiss had and a marriage proposal leaving viewers in the balance. Grade: B+

“The Mob Box Set”: “Bugsy,” “Donnie Brasco” and “Snatch,” along with a fair bonus documentary, “The American Gangster.” The standout is the Academy Award-winning “Bugsy,” with Warren Beatty as Siegel and Annette Bening in a fiery, unforgettable turn as Virginia Hill. Watching them together, you know why they married. Watch Al Pacino and Johnny Depp together in “Brasco,” and you know why they signed on to make the movie; in this smart, cliche-skirting genre movie, their charisma is electric. Guy Ritchie’s “Snatch” might leave some wanting. It’s all dizzying technique, empty chatter, not a trace of substance, a showoff stunt. Grades: Bugsy: A; Donnie Brasco: B+; Snatch: C; Gangster: B-.

“The Magnificent Seven”: “The Seven Samurai” via the Old West, with director Akira Kurosawa’s vision successfully updated by director John Sturges. Re-released in a two-disc set, the film stars Yul Brynner, gun at the ready, cool as ever, with the who’s-who of Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Eli Wallach, Robert Vaughn, Horst Buchholz and Vladimir Sokoloff rounding out the young cast. Overly celebrated, but the gun fights are among the best ever in a Western. Grade: A-

“Oliver Twist”: From Roman Polanski, an often moving adaptation of Dickens’ tale, with the story stripped down to its essentials while remaining as faithful as possible to the book’s tone and sweep. It works. This hardscrabble movie about young, orphaned Oliver Twist (Barney Clark), who literally drew the short end of the stick in life and for whom pickpocketing promised a way out of poverty, understands what Polanski himself knew upon surviving the Holocaust – you take your kindness where you can find it, weighing its price along the way. Throughout, the performances eschew the romantic, particularly Clark’s Oliver, Jamie Foreman’s terrifying Bill Sykes, and Ben Kingsley’s Fagin, a beastly creep who offers his band of pickpockets a corrupt chance to survive, yes, but a chance nonetheless. Rated PG-13. Grade: B+.