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Video Reviews : ****Excellent***Good**Fair*Poor : <i> Recent releases, reviewed by Times critics.</i> : Movies

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<i> Compiled by Terry Atkinson</i>

**** “The Milky Way.” Media/Cinematheque Collection. $59.95.

Luis Bunuel’s public image as a savage iconoclast, obsessed with mankind’s foibles and womankind’s feet, is contradicted by this gentle little film. It’s a satire on religious heresies, done by Bunuel and co-scenarist Jean-Claude Carriere in the loose, jokey, elliptical style they continued into “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeosie” and “The Phantom of Liberty.” In “Milky Way,” two bewildered travelers on a pilgrimage run into a succession of surreal-seeming episodes--all inspired by actual heresies or historical events. Occasionally, the humor seems not only heretic but hermetic. But Bunuel’s targets here go beyond the Church. He skewers all fanaticisms: religious, political or aesthetic.

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