The corrupt, midwestern Prohibition-era town where Miller’s Crossing takes place is never identified, but it may as well be called Coenville, since it’s more specifically a creation of directors Joel and Ethan Coen than any real place at any actual time.

This story of a gang war barely managed and manipulated by wise guy Gabriel Byrne is probably the most restrained Coen film that still seems to attempt some emotional connection with it’s audience; from this point on, the Coens would flirt with excess, stylistic or otherwise, and make films more often that not like Barton Fink, also finally released on DVD, films they seem to be making for each other more than anyone else.

At times, it’s possible to imagine that you’re watching just any decent period film about speakeasies and tommy guns, until you hit a sequence like the justifiably famous “Danny Boy” botched hit scene, where Albert Finney foils two assassins sent to rub him out in a jaw-dropping spectacle of flames and automatic gunfire. It’s outlandish and audacious, and the product of no other mind than Joel and Ethan Coen.

Byrne’s character is familiar enough - we’ve seen Humphrey Bogart play it often enough, and Kurosawa’s Yojimbo is probably the template for this kind of story, practically a template for the whole genre. Of course, when Bogart or Toshiro Mifune play the crafty gunman, he’s rarely beaten up as regularly or as viciously as Byrne is in this film.

Includes a really nice featurette, an interview with cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld, who would leave the Coens after Miller’s Crossing for an only occasionally interesting career as a director.

Since we’re told, from practically the first scene, that this story of a young CIA recruit is one where no one is to be trusted, nothing is to be believed, we’re prepared for any number of double-crosses or false trails. It’s a sign of how venerable this kind of film has become, and how it’s come to systematically shortchange the suspense it’s supposed to be retailing.

It’s directed by Roger Donaldson, whose fondness for the coolly paranoid world of Washington intrigue and espionage was essayed before in No Way Out and Thirteen Days. He gets the details right, inviting us along with MIT grad Colin Farrell into the chilly world of the CIA, a place full of lethal high tech gadgets and low-tech physical trials that might be totally invented, but seems plausible enough, unlike Al Pacino’s Mephistophelean recruiter, or Colin Farrell’s cocky, father-fixated recruit, who would have washed out of real CIA training in an hour. Includes a fascinating but wholly unlikely featurette on the agency training program.

This collection of animated shorts is meant to flesh out the Matrix universe created by the Wachowski Brothers, and if you’re looking for a sampling of the latest, state-of-the-art digital animation, this is the place to go. If you’re looking for something more than standard-issue apocalyptic paranoia filled with buxom, sword-wielding babes and cool robots, you’re better off with the latest Pixar children’s film.

It’s unlikely that anyone has seen Michael Caine’s debut as a star in it’s proper widescreen form since the film was released almost forty years ago, so this clean but bare-bones reissue is something of a revelation. Zulu is an accurate re-creation of the desperate defense of a remote outpost by a few dozen British soldiers, against a few thousand crack Zulu warriors, and Cy Endfield’s austere direction will be a revelation for anyone used to the clumsy pan-and-scan version shown on television for decades.

Spencer Tracy could have played the beleaguered dad coping with his only daughter’s wedding spectacle in his sleep; it’s hardly the most compelling exhibit in his gallery of gruff, put-upon middle-aged men, but it’s hard not to enjoy. Elizabeth Taylor plays the spoiled daddy’s girl, and Joan Bennett Tracy’s charming and purposeful wife, and Vincent Minnelli’s film does a nice job of contradicting the myth that the 1950s were a man’s decade, so totally do women rule the domestic sphere.

Errol Flynn plays the heroic leader of a group of crack paratroops fighting behind enemy lines in this skillful piece of wartime Hollywood propaganda. If you like war films, you’ve seen this film before - it’s a “lost patrol” movie, where a group of disparate, mostly stock-character Ordinary Joes forge bonds in combat while being picked off and while wiping out numberless enemy soldiers. It’s hard to remember that this is something of an original, the first, and most accomplished, of a kind of war film subgenre. Includes two priceless Warner Bros. wartime shorts, one starring Ronald Reagan, who spent the war making this sort of clumsy, earnest propaganda.