5 Smart DVDs to Watch Now

If you’re not already suffering from DVD overload, you probably should be. This month alone, close to 1,000 DVDs and films are coming out, according to MovieWeb.com, a site that tracks releases. How does the home-viewer sift through them all? To help make sense of the onslaught, we pulled together a selection of movies and television shows to rent or buy, all of which are available this month. They offer an escape from daily pressures but still say something about our modern lives, from a journalist’s wanderings around America to a 19th-century look at greed and society.

Set 1; various directors

We are ever curious about how people make a living. From the long-running 1950s and 1960s game show What’s My Line to the humorous stories of This American Life on radio and cable TV, Americans are interested in what makes each other tick. On the Road with Charles Kuralt was a benign precursor to NPR’s decidedly more ironic This American Life. The late Mr. Kuralt captured the byways of American working and playing life in all 50 states over the years, profiling everyone from sharecroppers to horse traders, mailmen to bicycle repairmen. The series began as a segment on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and became a cultural icon in its own right. What makes it highly watchable even today, in this newly released set of 18 episodes, is Kuralt’s genuine interest in people for themselves, not merely as artifacts of homegrown eccentricity.

By Charles Dickens, adapted by Andrew Davies; various directors

Bilking investors is nothing new. In fact, some 75 years before Charles Ponzi unleashed his scheme, another Charles – Dickens – wrote in Little Dorrit about how people could easily be duped into bogus investments. This adaptation of Dickens’ sweeping novel about social-climbing, family secrets, government bureaucracy and financial greed won several Emmy awards last month, and it makes for compelling viewing a year after the start of our current financial crisis. It’s about the tangled lives of a young seamstress, Little Dorrit, who was born into a debtor’s prison; the woman she works for, Mrs. Clennam; her son Arthur Clennam who tries to uncover the truth behind Little Dorrit’s and his own family history, and the interconnectedness of society high and low, rich and poor, honest and thieving.

Directed by Max Ophüls

Sex scandals come and go, from late-night talk-show hosts to the latest indiscretions of sanctimonious senators. In this riveting drama, adapted from a novel by Louise Levêque de Vilmorin, a woman (Danielle Darrieux) married to a general (Charles Boyer), has an affair with an Italian baron (Vittorio de Sica). She sells the unwanted earrings her husband has presented to her, but later comes to cherish them when, by chance, she is given them again by her lover the baron, who has bought them for her. The movie is not only a look at the sentimental attachment we place on possessions, but also the nature of possessiveness in our personal relations.

Various directors

There are few better ways to unwind after making a killing at the office than by watching English people murder each other. This long-running British mystery series, inspired by the novels of Caroline Graham, is, like many a mystery from across the pond, set in a small English village. The feature-length mysteries in this new set have not aired in the U.S., and appear here on DVD for the first time. The mysteries are well-plotted, and the movies feature excellent British character actors, evocative settings and, luckily for the squeamish, not too much violence.

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

This 1966 movie about crime and American-style consumerism has just been made available in the U.S., thanks to the folks at the Criterion Collection. It was unavailable for a long time because it was based partly on The Jugger, a novel by Richard Stark (a pseudonym for the late crime author Donald E. Westlake, who died last December) and rights to the novel were never properly secured. All that’s been worked out now, so Americans can see this pop-color mash-up of Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep and French New Wave cinema. The story follows Paula Nelson (Anna Karina), who investigates the death of her lover in Atlantic City, uncovering misdirection, corruption and a slew of colorful gangsters.