Pull a piece of history right out of the box

By Dennis Lim

Dec. 14, 2008 12 AM PT

Lim is a freelance writer.

After a few stagnant years, DVD sales have started to slip, and Blu-ray discs, despite the plummeting price of players, have yet to pick up the slack. But the crop of box sets is, if anything, more sumptuous than ever, in both content and presentation. With archivists at studios and indie distributors continuing to dig deeply and inventively, the year’s best collections afford ample opportunities for both nostalgia and discovery, for lovers of old Hollywood, art film and classic TV alike.

What follows is a roundup of some of the best sets on the market.

4 by Agnes Varda

Criterion, $99.95

Varda, who turned 80 this year, was a lonely female voice in the boys club of the French New Wave, and as the four wonderful features in this set confirm, she was also an inimitable one, mingling drama and documentary to uniquely poetic ends.

The Films of Budd Boetticher

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, $59.95

In Boetticher’s hands, the western’s mythic dimensions gave way to human qualities. The films he made with Randolph Scott in the late ‘50s -- five of which are collected here -- staked out a special place in the genre. Lean, tough, quietly intense, they remain paragons of no-frills action and clear-eyed empathy.

Georges Melies

First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913)

Flicker Alley, $89.95

A five-disc set devoted to cinema’s original magician and special-effects virtuoso. The 170 short films here are windows into an ancient, handmade universe as well as startling reminders that the Digital Age hunger for seamless illusion is as old as the movies themselves.

The Godfather

The Coppola Restoration

Paramount Home Entertainment, $69.99; Blu-ray $129.99

Parts I and II of Francis Ford Coppola’s crime-family saga are entrenched in the American movie canon, but several generations of viewers only have encountered them through battered prints and murky home-video editions. Thanks to a painstaking restoration process, the films finally glow as they once did. As for Part III, it hasn’t exactly matured like a Coppola reserve wine, but it’s not quite as bad as it once seemed.

Glitterbox: Derek Jarman x 4

Zeitgeist Video, $74.99

The Derek Jarman Collection

Kino International, $79,95

Zeitgeist’s four-disc tribute to queer cinema’s late, great godfather includes “Caravaggio” (1986) and “Wittgenstein” (1993) -- two examples of Jarman’s signature mode, the revisionist biopic. Kino’s four-disc collection begins with his censor-baiting debut, “Sebastiane” (1976), and is capped by a new documentary directed by one of his proteges, Isaac Julien, and narrated by his muse, Tilda Swinton.

The Jean-Luc Godard Collection

Lionsgate, $34.98

Godard’s glamorous 1960s period is well represented on DVD by the Criterion Collection, but this compact set, bringing together four of his lesser-known films from the ‘80s and ‘90s, showcases an underappreciated side of the auteur: at once elegiac and irascible, more perverse than ever but, for the patient viewer, still endlessly rewarding.

Murnau, Borzage and Fox

20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, $239.98

The cinephile’s must-have item of the season. F.W. Murnau, the master of German Expressionism, made only three movies at Fox, but the first of them, the transcendent “Sunrise,” included in two versions here, is often, with good reason, called the best American film of the silent era. Murnau’s influence was palpable on his American stablemates, not least his co-headliner here, Frank Borzage, who attested to the spiritual dimensions of love in such rhapsodic melodramas as “Seventh Heaven.” A popular hit-maker in his day, he’s now more than ripe for rediscovery as perhaps the medium’s most devoted romantic.

NewsRadio

The Complete Series

Sony Home Entertainment, $59.95

For TV-on-DVD completists, the year’s doorstop editions range from cult classics (“Mystery Science Theater 3000,” “Freaks and Geeks”) to critical darlings (“The Wire,” “The Sopranos”). But underdog sympathies lie with this NBC series that ran from 1995 to ‘99), a semi-forgotten forerunner to “The Office” and “30 Rock” and a workplace sitcom with the breathless precision of a Feydeau farce.

Satantango

Facets Video, $79.95

A four-disc set devoted to a single movie, Bela Tarr’s seven-hour contemplation of life on the muddy Hungarian flatlands. It might sound like an endurance test, but the lustrous black-and-white palette and fluid long takes exert a mesmerizing pull, even on the small screen. Susan Sontag once claimed to have seen this film 15 times, and Gus Van Sant has credited it as a major influence on his creative rejuvenation.

Honorable mentions

Abbott and Costello

The Complete Universal Pictures Collection

Universal, $83.99

Douglas Fairbanks

A Modern Musketeer

Flicker Alley, $89.99

Griffith Masterworks 2

Kino International, $89.95

The Little Rascals

The Complete Collection

Genius Entertainment, $89.95