Here Are (Seemingly) 32 Ways to Look at Super Bowl XXXII

Armchair quarterbacks will be happy to learn professional football has entered the DVD era. Polygram’s “The Best One Ever: Super Bowl XXXII” ($30) is the first DVD from a professional sports league.

Thanks to multiple camera angles, football fans can choose how they want to relive the 1998 championship game between the Denver Broncos and the Green Bay Packers. Viewers also have the option to watch the terrific highlights with either the Bronco or Packer play-by-play radio broadcasts.

Particularly fun are the replays of 26 of the game’s most critical plays, which can be viewed from as many as seven different perspectives. This disc definitely scores a touchdown.

Home Vision Cinema has just released the Criterion Collection’s DVD of former Monty Python Terry Gilliam’s acclaimed 1981 fantasy, “Time Bandits” ($40). This classy DVD offers the original--and very funny--theatrical trailer and a scrapbook of photos from the movie. The film is presented in its original wide-screen format. The consistently informative audio commentary not only features Gilliam, but also writer and star Michael Palin and stars John Cleese, David Warner and Craig Warnock, who played the boy who escapes gadget-obsessed parents to join a band of time-traveling dwarfs.

Gilliam, who also has directed “The Fisher King” and “Brazil,” is a marvelous guide through this family fantasy. Imagination, says Gilliam, is the theme of the film. And it’s the young, imaginative Kevin who proves to be far brighter than his consumer-oriented parents, who spend their time watching game shows on furniture wrapped in plastic. Gilliam’s commentary is terrific, as is that of other participants.

Seven decades before Gilliam began making his imaginative movies, French film pioneer Georges Melies created some of the most ingenious film shorts of the early silent era. Image Entertainment’s wonderful collection “Landmarks of Early Films #2: George Melies” ($25) is a wonderful chronicle of the screen’s first master illusionist, who used double exposure, makeup, editing and trickery to surprise audiences. The disc features the documentary “Georges Melies: Cinema Magician,” as well as 15 gorgeous restored films Melies made from 1904 to 1908. The high point of the DVD is the magical 1904 short “An Impossible Voyage,” which was struck from an original hand-colored negative and features Melies’ own narration.