Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's visually stunning, adult fairy tale comes to startling life on DVD. The bold vision of the French duo is just as warped as it was in the cinema. The surreal, colorful imagery is served well on DVD. Much of the film is enshrouded in shadows or lit by candles, so a quality transfer was vital. Luckily, the digital transfer does not distill cinematographer Darius Khondji's magical craftsmanship. Jean-Paul Gaultier's costumes have never looked better on a TV screen. The sound is always crisp and clear. Barking dogs, talking brains, cackling schoolteachers, and whispering children are all perfectly mixed for maximum effect. Angelo Badalamenti's haunting score sounds superb. The DVD is packed with special features. Director Jeunet and actor Ron Perlman's running commentary provides for a touching, light-hearted look at the filmmaking process. Viewers will snicker when they hear about a dog who wouldn't take orders and why he needed a urine wrangler. The costume design gallery consists of about twenty Gaultier sketches, some of them simply detailed close-ups of the same picture. An extensive production-stills gallery presents the films' sets as realized in black-and-white sketches, and "Talent Files" provides brief biographies/filmographies of Jeunet and Caro, Perlman, Badalamenti, and Gaultier. The theatrical trailer could teach Hollywood a great deal about film promotion; it is entirely free of dialogue and more than a tiny bit spooky. A stunning film, The City of Lost Children is beautifully presented on this DVD. It's an absolutely joyful experience.

Childhood chums Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney) and Jerry Connelly (Pat O'Brien) grow up on opposite sides of the fence: Rocky matures into a prominent gangster, while Jerry becomes a priest, tending to the needs of his old tenement neighborhood. Rocky becomes a hero to a gang of teenaged boys (played by Dead End Kids Billy Halop, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Gabriel Dell, Bobby Jordan and Bernard Punsly). Father Jerry despairs at this, asking Rocky to lay off so he can keep the kids on the straight and narrow. Then Rocky's crooked business associates George Bancroft and Humphrey Bogart attempt to end Father Jerry's radio campaign against the rackets by killing the priest. Rocky (whose cynical outlook on life has been softened by his romance with true-blue Anne Sheridan) shoots them down and takes it on the lam. Arrested and convicted of murder, Rocky sits smugly on death row, fully intending to go to the chair with a smile on his face. A few moments before the execution, Father Jerry pleads with Rocky to "turn yellow" so that the tenement kids will despise his memory.

Dancer in the Dark, shot in large part on digital video, works perhaps even better on DVD than it did in the cinema. The 2.40:1 widescreen picture is sharp and bold. Sound quality is superb, with Bjork's emotionally charged songs and the movie's dialogue and sound effects coming across dynamically on both the 5.1 and DTS audio tracks. Director Lars von Trier's artistic vision is not compromised in the slightest. The supplemental material is better than average, though judging by the press coverage of the rocky relationship between von Trier and Bjork, more behind-the-scenes footage would have been welcome. Two audio commentaries are available. The one shared by von Trier, producer Vibeke Windelov, artist Per Kirkeby, and technical supervisor Peter Hjorth is certainly interesting, though von Trier displays little of his usual hyperkinetic self-analysis. Choreography Vincent Paterson, who almost labels himself a co-director, provides insightful thoughts on the other commentary track. Paterson also dominates the two mini-documentaries. "100 Cameras: Capturing Lars von Trier's Vision" is perhaps too technical, but it's still worth a look for behind-the-scenes tidbits about pre-production of the train-based musical number. "Choreography: Creating Vincent Paterson's Dance Sequences" is overlong, but it entertains via its wealth of production footage. "Alternate Scenes" concentrates solely on the musical numbers, and there's not really enough variation from the final cut to provide much substance, but "I've Seen It All Version 3" entertains in its rapid-edit glory. The theatrical trailer is blurb-heavy and gives away far too many important plot points. "Selma's Music" provides much-needed instant access to the movie's nine musical numbers via song titles, while "Scene Selections" gives instant access to the DVD's 30 chapters via still frames and chapter titles. The interactive menus are stylish and appropriate to the movie's tone and bleak subject matter.