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Recent videocassette releases, reviewed by Times critics.

*** 1/2 “Repentance.”

Media. $ 7 9.95. 1987. PG.

Lit as it is with bursts of satiric humor, bits of opera and great flights of surreal imagery, this winner of the Cannes 1987 Special Jury Prize is coherent and powerful and unswerving in its persistence that the Stalinist evils it explores not remain below ground. Director Tengiz Abuladze controls the vicious fury inherent in this story (of a stylized minor dictator and the lives warped by his rule) most of the time, only occasionally lapsing into melodrama--and interesting melodrama at that. Mercifully subtitled, not dubbed.