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**** “Isadora.”

MCA. $29.95. 1968.

Karel Reisz’s swirling memory-biography, in which Vanessa Redgrave is the embodiment of the iconoclastic dancer Isadora Duncan, is an incandescent portrait of a period and a woman. Her life was dance, her private moments teetered between lust and maternal impulses, her crushing tragedy was the drowning of both of her little children. Reisz captures it all in full romantic flood: Paris Singer arriving in an open Rolls with hampers of strawberries; artist Edward Gordon Craig, taking her tempestuously by moonlight; Sergei Essenin, her mad Russian poet. It’s important to note that at 2 hours and 33 minutes, this is Reisz’s own re-edited version made for a Z Channel showing, in which he went back to his 1968 original and shaped it to exactly the length he wished.