The Errant Æsthete

For the holiday procrastinator, a valuable list of gift ideas out of The New Yorker. The greats and near greats beautifully assembled for the discriminating film buff”s viewing pleasure. Among the many choices, a sampling:

“Berlin Alexanderplatz” (Criterion)—The DVD event of the year where Rainer Wernet Fassbinder reached the zenith of his inspiration. “His 1980 adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel about the German underworld offers a visual daring and a ruminative tone to match the vast scope and the inwardness of the literary masterwork.”

“Ford at Fox” (20th Century Fox)—Among the delights in this twenty-four-feature, twenty-one-disk set are the long-awaited “My Darling Clementine,” starring Henry Fonda, as Wyatt Earp, and Victor Mature, implausibly but superbly, as the Shakespeare-spouting gunman Doc Holliday; “The Prisoner of Shark Island,” a fierce historical drama and several rare silent films, including the 1924 railroad epic, “The Iron Horse.”

“Stanley Kubrick” (Warner Home Video)—Eight years after the director’s death, a reconsideration is due: a master of the marmoreal, Kubrick had a greater gift for the agonies of intimacy, as seen in such films as “The Shining” and “Eyes Wide Shut,” featured here along with “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Full Metal Jacket,” “A Clockwork Orange,” and a host of fascinating extras.