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Both “bad girl” and “film noir” are terms to be understood loosely in this two-volume, eight-film collection from Sony, but I’m more than willing to put up with a little hype if it means bringing some fresh material to market. To say the least, this isn’t a director-oriented collection; the strongest personality here is the redoubtable Hugo Haas, represented by “One Girl’s Confession,” one of his least pathological productions (this time, Cleo Moore is the masochist).

There are two anonymous efforts by Lewis Seiler (“Women’s Prison,” 1955; “Over-Exposed,” 1956); two somewhat more flavorful films from Henry Levin (“Night Editor,” 1946; “Two of a Kind,” 1951) that suggest Levin had a little more kink in him than his bland Fox comedies would suggest; and a half-hearted medical melodrama from Irving Rapper (“Bad for Each Other,” 1953) which manages to make Charlton Heston look like a much worse actor than he actually was. More intriguing are the two on-location thrillers, “The Killer That Stalked New York” by Earl McAvoy and “The Glass Wall” by Maxwell Shane, both of which show the very strong influence that neorealism was bringing to bear on Hollywood practices, even on this marginal level of production. The latter film goes so far as to import Vittorio Gassman, in his first English language role, to play a Hungarian displaced person on the run in New York City; his attempts to find refuge in Times Square were filmed, according to the trailer, with “hidden cameras” — probably 16-millimeter rigs loaded with high speed newsreel stock.

The performers, of course, are the center of attraction here, and if the set offers a little too much of the fleshy Cleo Moore (in three films, including the all-star “Women’s Prison”), it does showcase Lizabeth Scott (in two films), Ida Lupino, Jan Sterling, Audrey Totter, Gertrude Michael, Juanita Moore and Mae Clarke (all in “Women’s Prison”), Evelyn Keyes (“The Killer That Stalked New York”) and the underrated Janis Carter — whose enthusiastic interpretation of a decadent socialite who gets turned on by the prospect of examining a battered corpse in “Night Editor” makes her the baddest girl of this bunch. That’s her above, with William Gargan. My New York Times review is here.

This week, the luck of the release schedule yields what is very likely the world’s first pairing of Chantal Akerman and Morton Da Costa in the same column space as I review the fine new Akerman set from Criterion’s Eclipse label and Warner Home Video’s handsome Blu-ray edition of Da Costa’s minimally altered Broadway transplant “The Music Man” (1962). It’s Robert Preston’s brash, braying performance that makes that one memorable, though Shirley Jones is no slouch. The link is here.

Criterion’s new edition of these crucially important films — “Rome Open City” (1945), “Paisan” (1946) and “Germany Year Zero” (1948) — has been in the works for a long time, but the wait was more than worth it. These films probably haven’t looked this good since they were first released, and “Paisan” in particular appears to have been brought back from the dead, thanks to the miracle of digital dust-busting. “Germany Year Zero” has lost its distracting Italian soundtrack and now speaks its native German for, apparently, the first time in North America. The set contains a generous serving of scholarly material as well, including “visual essays” by Tag Gallagher and Mark Shiel, Carlo Lizzani’s 2001 television documentary “Roberto Rossellini,” a booklet with essays by James Quandt, Colin McCabe and Jonathan Rosenbaum, and a lot more. Congratulations to producer Johanna Schiller for a daunting task triumphantly accomplished. My New York Times review is here.

Still brooding about “Avatar” and the possibility of a paradigm shift coming up, I took a look at nine early musicals recently released in the Warner Archive Collection, searching for clues to how Hollywood managed that major transition. Results are here in the New York Times.

A great artist and a great critic. My New York Times obituary is here.

Two — count ‘em — two stories in the New York Times’ special Oscar section this week: one on the top three Oscar-winning directors and their films on DVD, another on the past, present and future of 3-D (all in 1200 breathless words). Above is a poster for William Wyler’s too-often overlooked “College Capers,” one of his finest works and a milestone in stereographic cinema.

My best wishes and deepest thanks to all the brilliant contributors and patient readers who make this place whatever it is!

If anyone has ten best lists to post — for the year, the decade, or any other arbitrary division of time — this would be an excellent moment to do so.

This week in the New York Times, a glance at two fine films by directors whose work knew some wide variations in quality and commitment. From VCI comes at last a watchable copy of Milestone’s superb “A Walk in the Sun,” a film about men in combat made during the last months of World War II and governed by a reflective, mature sensibility quite at odds with the propaganda films to which wartime audiences had become accustomed; it looks forward to the postwar masterworks of Wyler (“The Best Years of Our Lives,” to which “A Walk in the Sun” could almost function as a prequel) and Ford (“They Were Expendable”). And Lionsgate has made good on its corporate promise to issue a do-over of their flawed release of John Huston’s “The Dead” last November. The missing reel has been restored (and the running time on the box has been accordingly updated from 72 to 82 minutes, so check the back before you buy). Those who purchased the abridged version can get a replacement copy by sending a scan of your receipt (you saved it, of course!) to lionsgatecs@orderassistance.com.

It’s the year in review issue of the New York Times today, which means no DVD column — just as well, because the passing of Robin Wood overshadows anything I would have to say this week. He was one of the finest minds our field has produced, one of the very few writers who negotiated the critical climate change from the warmly humanist breezes of auteurist introspection to the chilly winds of ideological prescriptiveness without compromising his clarity of thought or moral seriousness. I’m sure everyone who stops by here has been affected by Robin’s work in one way or another. As John T. Chance might say, he was good, real good.