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A slow week for library releases (Is there some kind of Oscar moratorium?) allows me to roll the clock back to late November, when AnimEigo released the first four of Yoji Yamada’s “Tora-San” films in a handsome, well-produced box set. Only 44 left to go!

Like all of that excellent company’s releases, the Tora-san films come with extensive cultural notes, this time in an accompanying booklet (with an affectionate Donald Richie essay), audio commentary by Stuart Galbraith IV, and subtitles that do their best to explain arcane references and the tortured puns that seem to be central to Tora-san’s comedy. I can’t say that these are films that mean much to me personally (I’ve sampled them sporadically over the years, without making a systematic survey), but clearly they constitute a genuine culture phenomenon, with meanings and associations that are not immediately evident to my western eyes. Perhaps some of the Asian film experts who post here can expand on their significance.

My New York Times review is here.

William Cameron Menzies is only credited as a co-writer (with a certain Joseph L. Mankiewicz) on Paramount’s unforgettably odd 1933 adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland,” but as contemporary press accounts confirm, his contributions to the film, directed by Norman McLoed, went far beyond the script: the expressionistic production design, ingenious in-camera special effects and the thematic focus on a child’s horrified perception of a dangerous, demented adult world all reflect the strong personality that Menzies brought to bear on the projects he touched, in all his different capacities. Finally released in a respectable DVD version by Universal (for years, “Alice” has been one of the most bootlegged titles on Ebay, right up there with the still mysteriously unavailable “Island of Lost Souls”), the film makes a perfect companion piece to Menzies’ body-snatching bedtime story of 1952, “Invaders from Mars.” My New York Times review, complete with an approving quote from Alice herself, is here.

It’s taken long enough, but one of the great American movies — hell, one of the great films from anywhere, anytime — has finally made it to home video in the US. Leo McCarey’s sublime “Make Way for Tomorrow” has been issued by Criterion in a transfer that strikes me as much superior to the recent French edition (and of, course, there are no hard subtitles) and the movie continues to play magnificently. My appreciation for McCarey’s work, with its subtleties of construction and minutely detailed performances (such as the moment, in the scene above, when Bondi self-consciously tugs up her lace collar when Moore tells her how young she still looks), grows every time I see this magnificent film — which I plan to do every day from now on (I wish). My New York Times review is here.

I’ve just discovered that Universal, in its infinite screwiness, has launched a burn-on-demand program through Amazon, where one of the dozen or titles available is McCarey’s brilliant Charles Laughton comedy “Ruggles of Red Gap.” It’s an odd group of films, ranging from Mitchell Leisen’s “Death Takes a Holiday” and Abe Polonski’s “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here” to Daniel Petrie’s “Resurrection” and Norman Jewison’s “40 Pounds of Trouble.” Has anyone had any experience with these? This is a separate operation from Universal’s “Vault Collection” at TCM, which is being produced in-house by the Turner Classic Movies staff and so far consists of Leisen’s great “Remember the Night,” a handful of minor horror films (including Joseph H. Lewis’s entertainingly lunatic “Mad Doctor of Market Street”) and a selection of three early Cary Grant Paramount titles due out in the next week or two. I’m glad to see that the Universal logjam is showing signs of breaking up, but it all seems fairly random and chaotic.

More strange bedfellows this week, as the gods of Blu-ray decree upgrades to Alexander Mackendrick’s black comedy of 1955, “The Ladykillers,” and William Friedkin’s hyper-stylized crime thriller of 1985, “To Live and Die in LA.” My New York Times review is here.

Studio Canal has done a major rehabilitation job on “The Ladykillers,” which is being released in the US by Lionsgate although the edition, as our friends at DVD Beaver have learned, is identical to the versions being released by Maple Films in Canada, Optimum in the UK and Studio Canal in France. On the other hand, Canal’s new Blu-ray of “Contempt” reveals flaws that were not apparent in the now discontinued standard def Criterion release. It’s all a trade-off, isn’t it?

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.