This superbly acted, mordantly funny romp through 70 years or so of Roman history is one of the best-loved miniseries ever made, and deservedly so. Derek Jacobi plays Roman Emperor Claudius, who reflects in old age on his life and his remarkable family, giving us a history lesson that's unlike anything you learned in school. The story begins in 24 B.C. during the reign of Augustus Caesar, ...

Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox
Starring: Derek Jacobi, John Hurt, Siân Phillips, Brian Blessed, George Baker

Like Tolstoy's novel, this epic-length War and Peace is rough going, but worth the effort. Winner of the 1969 Academy Award® for Best Foreign Language Film and widely considered the most faithful adaptation of Tolstoy's classic, Sergei Bondarchuk's massive Soviet-Italian coproduction was seven years in the making, at a record-setting cost of $100 million. Bondarchuk himself plays the ...

Manufacturer: Kultur Video
Starring: Lyudmila Savelyeva, Vyacheslav Tikhonov, Gennadi Ivanov, Irina Gubanova, Antonina Shuranova
Directed By: Sergei Bondarchuk

Like Tolstoy's novel, this epic-length War and Peace is rough going, but worth the effort. Winner of the 1969 Academy Award® for Best Foreign Language Film and widely considered the most faithful adaptation of Tolstoy's classic, Sergei Bondarchuk's massive Soviet-Italian coproduction was seven years in the making, at a record-setting cost of $100 million. Bondarchuk himself plays the ...

Manufacturer: Kultur Video

Manufacturer: Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment
Starring: Kanu Bannerjee, Karuna Bannerjee, Subir Bannerjee, Uma Das Gupta, Chunibala Devi
Directed By: Satyajit Ray

Superlatives abound when describing Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Decalogue, a series of 10 one-hour dramas originally made for Polish TV between 1988 and 1989 and seen throughout the world in film festivals and cinematheque and museum programs. Though each episode is inspired by one of the Ten Commandments of the Bible, these are not Sunday school fables illustrating some simplistic moral ...

Manufacturer: Facets Video
Starring: Maria Pakulnis, Anna Polony

The Killer John Woo's 1989 Hong Kong action classic, a stylish, bullet-riddled elegy to friendship under fire, firmly established him as the maestro of mayhem. Superstar Chow Yun-fat, Asia's king of cool, plays the most charming hit man ever (and yes, he only takes contracts on those who deserve it), but when one of his killings leaves an innocent nightclub singer (Sally Yeh) ...

Manufacturer: Fox Lorber
Starring: Bobbie Au-Yeung, Philip Chan, Yun-Fat Chow, Michael Dingo, Jun Kunimura

Was George Lucas's Star Wars Trilogy, the most anticipated DVD release ever, worth the wait? You bet. It's a must-have for any home theater, looking great, sounding great, and supplemented by generous bonus features. The Movies

Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox
Starring: Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill

Memories of past adaptations of the Alexandre Dumas novel inevitably hover over this four-part French miniseries, originally broadcast on American cable television in 1999. It's hard, for instance, to top the 1934 feature starring Robert Donat as Edmond Dantès, the sea captain who is framed and unjustifiably imprisoned in 1815 for nearly two decades. Similarly, anyone who saw Richard ...

Manufacturer: Fox Lorber
Starring: Gérard Depardieu, Ornella Muti, Jean Rochefort, Pierre Arditi, Florence Darel
Directed By: Josée Dayan

This legendary seven-hour silent French serial, one of the earliest and most original gangster films, combines realism and fantasy. Written and directed by Louis Feuillade, Les Vampires concerns an intrepid reporter's pursuit of a strange gang of jewel thieves terrorizing Paris. The gang ambitiously seeks political, psychological, and sexual domination of the city's social elite, with the ...

Manufacturer: Water Bearer Films
Starring: Musidora, Édouard Mathé, Marcel Lévesque, Jean Aymé, Fernand Herrmann
Directed By: Louis Feuillade

In his last film legendary writer, painter and filmmaker Jean Cocteau ( Beauty and the Beast) attempts to reconcile the world he lives in by portraying an 18th-century poet traveling through time on a quest for divine wisdom. He meets a scientist who can open doorways into new dimensions. The scientist's method only works by murdering his subject. Cocteau then rises from his symbolic ...

Manufacturer: Homevision