Video Reviews and News : <i> Recent videocassette releases, reviewed by Times critics.</i>

**** Excellent *** Good ** Ordinary * Poor

*** “War and Peace.”

Kultur. $99.95. Four cassettes. Given the recent popularity of film novels “Brideshead Revisited” and “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” it’s surprising that the 1966-67 Soviet adaptation of Tolstoy’s epic has taken so long to make it into video. The book is a tour-de-force of idealism, historical imagination and psychological drama as three upper-class protagonists--good-hearted Pierre, heroic prince Andrey and impetuous Natasha--move through an astonishing re-creation of Napoleon’s invasions of Russia. The film, directed and co-written by Sergei Bondarchuk, who also plays Pierre, also has its astonishing moments. The most elaborate Russian production to date, it took the 1968 Foreign Film Oscar. Unfortunately, this video version, from the original American release, is cut and diminished. Its 507 minutes are slashed to 373, the wide-screen frames are cropped and the actors dubbed. Be that as it may, when we get to Part III and to Bondarchuk’s furiously exciting, logistically staggering re-creations of the Battle of Borodino and the march into Moscow, the video redeems itself. Psychology, philosophy and peace may be somewhat muffled in these cropped cassettes, but war itself is thunderingly present.