The+kid+brother+(1927)

With his third feature film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, Alfred Hitchcock took a major step toward greatness and made what he would come to consider his true directorial debut. This haunting silent thriller tells the tale of a mysterious young man (matinee idol Ivor Novello) who takes up residence at a London boardinghouse just as a killer known as the Avenger descends upon the city, preying on blonde women. The film is animated by the palpable energy of a young stylist at play, decisively establishing the director’s formal and thematic obsessions. In this release, The Lodger is accompanied by Downhill, another silent from 1927 that explores Hitchcock’s “wrong man” trope, also headlined by Novello—making for a double feature that reveals the master of the macabre as he was just coming into his own.

The supplemental disc include a host of new features mixed in with older ones that were previously created for the 2001 release. As if the restored films alone would be reason enough to own this set, the extra features are plentiful and mostly informative.

A group of teenage friends and their Great Dane (Scooby-Doo) travel in a bright green van solving strange and hilarious mysteries, while returning from or going to a regular teenage function.

The Beatles agree to accompany Captain Fred in his yellow submarine and go to Pepperland to free it from the music-hating Blue Meanies.

The Girl with the Hat Box established Barnet's reputation. The charming Anna (Anna Sten) works in a hat shop, sharing her small apartment with a penniless student. A supposedly worthless lottery ticket from her employer turns into a gold mine, leading to a madcap chase for the ticket - and her love.

A film epic about the 1917 Revolution in Petrograd. The Revolution’s headquarters at the Smolny Palace, where the plan for seizing power in Russia was masterminded; the historic salvo from the Aurora battle cruiser, a signal to revolutionary soldier and sailor detachments to begin storming the last stronghold of the Provisional Government, the Winter Palace; Lenin’s historic speech at the Congress of Soviets, proclaiming the dawn of a new era in Russia – these are some of the sequences that go before the viewer.

The clowns of the American silent screen bring laughter to a new generation in this wonderful box set, featuring 53 short films from the era's funniest comic talents: Laurel and Hardy, Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, Will Rogers, Ben Turpin and more. Meticulously prepared for DVD with fresh new musical scores, "Slapstick Encyclopedia" is a unique collection of silent comedy gems.

A massive six-hour biopic of Napoleon, tracing his career from his schooldays (where a snowball fight is staged like a military campaign), his flight from Corsica, through the French Revolution (where a real storm is intercut with a political storm) and the Terror, culminating in his triumphant invasion of Italy in 1797 (the film stops there because it was intended to be part one of six, but director Abel Gance never raised the money to make the other five). The film's legendary reputation is due to the astonishing range of techniques that Gance uses to tell his story, culminating in the final twenty-minute triptych sequence, which alternates widescreen panoramas with complex multiple- image montages projected simultaneously on three screens.

The greatest variety acts of the past – humorists, bands, vaudevillians, dramatists, dancers and more – return for a second collection of the earliest of the venerable Vitaphone sound shorts. Entertainers from coast to coast, from stage and screen, from the heights of Brooklyn to the valleys of Hollywood, all shared the spotlight as cinema learned to play with sound. Nestled in among 35 Jazz Age gems to be found on this 2-Disc collection are appearances by Edgar Bergen, Fred Allen, Fred Waring, Blanche Sweet, Bert Lahr, Pat O’Brien, Joe E. Brown and a (very) young Natalie Schafer – the future Mrs. Thurston Howell III on Gilligan’s Island.

This is one of the very few surviving silents - all the negatives were lost when his archives were destroyed in an air raid in World War II - by Weimar cinema's greatest action hero, Harry Piel. Much influenced by the serials of Feuillade, Piel engaged and surprised his audience with pulpy and suspenseful plots, spectacular stunts which he almost all did himself, dangerous animals, and so on, but always retaining a cool stylishness when solving crimes and fighting the bad guys.