BC Magazine presents a collection of writers offering their opinion on the best DVD releases of the year. The choices range from Hollywood blockbusters to foreign language imports, original stories to remakes, a directorial debut to one of a a master director's final films, a classic finally appearing on DVD to a triple-dip Extended Edition and even a Saturday morning show — the only common thread being the enjoyment of the experience.

Mat Brewster
Lady Vengeance

Park Chan-wook's conclusion to his vengeance trilogy is filled with ultra-violence, buckets of blood, and stunning beauty. Like the rest of the trilogy, Lady Vengeance focuses not only on extreme, violent revenge but the ultimate cause and repercussions of that violence.

Lee Young-ae is breathtaking as Lee Geum-ja, the story’s protagonist - a gorgeous young woman who has spent 13 years in prison for a crime she didn't commit and has set out to take her revenge on the person who did.

The cinematography is stunning, the violence a ballet, and the story is heartbreaking. It is the perfect conclusion to a marvelous trilogy that takes epic film violence to philosophical levels by delving deep into the consequence of being wronged and how finding vengeance reaps more than it sows.

It may not be as gut-wrenchingly satisfying an ending as we get in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance or Oldboy, but it is one that rings the finality to the trilogy, one that serves as an answer to the questions brought up by all three films.

The DVD package is as marvelous as the film, coming with multiple commentaries, a documentary on the making of the film, and an interview with the director.

Randall A Byrn
Ryan's Daughter

Made from restored 70mm materials, Lean's much-maligned masterpiece looks more beautiful than just about any other disc I have seen. It is the full roadshow-length print, 196 minutes, not including the four — count-'em — four musical interludes: overture, intermission, entr'acte, and exit music. The post-roadshow general release cut was 165 minutes. (This is what I must have seen in Clarksville, Tennessee in 1971, the only previous time I've seen the film.)

The vicious reviews in 1970 focused on the slight, simple plot and the antiquated quality of the melodrama, and complained they were a mismatch with the gigantic scale of the production. These criticisms are not completely undeserved, but they downplay the visual majesty of this movie, which goes far beyond merely pretty photography. No one else put images and sound together in quite the way David Lean did; he was maligned by auteurists long before this film, but I think in his case they were just blind. Ryan's Daughter is so exciting to experience visually that the shortcomings in the script are more like background noise, like a stupid libretto in a great opera.