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Oz - The Complete First Season

From the Oscar and Emmy winning team of Berry Levinson (Rain Man Diner) and Tom Fontana OZ is set deep inside the Oswald Maximum Security Prison in an experimental unit known as Emerald City. Em City focuses on prisoner rehabilitation over public retribution. There's one set of rules from the outside looking in and another once you're inside. Every group - Muslims Latinos Italians Aryans - stick close to their mutual friends and terrorizes their mutual enemies. OZ is a wake-up call.Running Time: 480 min.System Requirements:Running Time 451 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 026359920424 Manufacturer No: 99204

HBO's violent men-behind-bars drama is an addictive, testosterone-driven soap opera for guys. The eight episodes of the first season set the style for the show: a massive cast of a vivid characters on both sides of the bars, four or five stories unleashed at a breakneck pace and framed by angry, oddball introductions, and a soaring casualty rate. Created by Homicide producer Tom Fontana, this drama quickly earned its rightful reputation as the most brutal show on TV. It's simple chemistry: combine volatile ingredients in a confined space, shut tight, and shake.

The yellow brick road of the Oswald Correctional Facility (affectionately known as "Oz" among the inmates) leads to "Emerald City," an antiseptic cellblock of cement and glass overseen by prison-reform advocate Tim McManus (Terry Kinney). The first episode introduces its two most compelling inmates: meek lawyer Beecher (Lee Terguson), who transforms from a vulnerable lamb to a fearless, drug-addicted wildcat, and Muslim activist Kareem Said (Eamonn Walker), a fiercely non-violent leader whose campaign for reform explodes in a season-climaxing riot. The stunning first-season cast also features Ernie Hudson (the warden), Rita Moreno (a worldly drug-counseling nun), and Edie Falco (who jumped from her role as a single-mother prison guard to mob wife in The Sopranos). It carries no rating, but the drug use, nudity, and brutal violence make this highly inappropriate for young viewers and unsuited to the squeamish. Oz pulls no punches in its portrayal of prison violence and predatory abuse. --Sean Axmaker

When Trumpets Fade

First broadcast on HBO in June of 1998--shortly before the theatrical release of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan--this World War II drama offers an equally intimate and devastating study of combat and its tragic aftermath. Set in Germany during the closing days of the war, the film uses a little-known episode of U.S. military history--the bloody battle of the Hurtigen Forest--as the backdrop for the story of a battle-weary private (Ron Eldard) who is the only surviving member of his platoon. Despite his request for dismissal on the grounds of mental disability and shell-shock, he is considered a promising soldier by his superiors, promoted to sergeant, and assigned to command a fresh platoon of young, inexperienced soldiers. The cycle of war continues, and the film ends as it began--with one soldier carrying a mortally wounded comrade from a scene of devastating loss. A veteran of several war films, director John Irvin emphasizes the gritty, physically exhausting realities of combat with keen attention to detail on location in Hungary. This film is decidedly downbeat (don't look for any Spielbergian uplift here), but its depiction of warfare is undeniably powerful, earning praise for Irvin and HBO for tackling such an uncompromising project. --Jeff Shannon

Citizen X

Based on the true story of the hunt for the most savage and elusive serial killer on record. It started with eight bodies found murdered, raped and mutilated. A brilliant Soviet forensics expert (Stephen Rae) is put in charge of the case by his colonel (Donald Sutherland). But the investigation is buried under government red tape until a psychiatrist (Max von Sydow) is called in to create a psychological profile of the murder. With fifty-two victims to his name, the killer they call Citizen X finally takes shape before their eyes. But can they trap him before he kills again?

The Jack Bull

The Jack Bull was produced for and premiered on HBO, but it's easily the most respectable job that feature director John Badham (Saturday Night Fever, WarGames) has done in the past two decades. The title refers not to a piece of livestock but a metaphorical Jack Russell terrier that, once it's annoyed enough to close its jaws on something, will hang on to the point of death.

That would be Myrl Redding (John Cusack), a horse-breeder of limited means but a deeply entrenched sense of justice. His independence galls Henry Ballard (L.Q. Jones), the crusty land baron out to set his brand on most of the countryside. Ballard insults and cheats Redding several times over, and his men beat Redding's horse trainer and friend, an Indian (Rodney A. Grant). When Redding seeks redress from the law, its agents can't be bothered (the local magistrate is in Ballard's pocket). So Redding musters a vigilante army to enforce his own law.

Scratch this handsome but rigorously unromanticized Western--fully an hour passes without a shot being fired--and you find the classic Heinrich von Kleist book Michael Kohlhaas transposed to Wyoming Territory on the eve of statehood. The script--by the star-producer's dad, Dick Cusack--is sturdy and uncompromising, willing to engage the knotty ambiguities of embracing vigilantism even in a just cause. Badham's decision to treat the authorities (Scott Wilson, Jay O. Sanders, John Goodman) as period caricatures is regrettable. But John Cusack is solid as a figure of utterly matter-of-fact integrity. --Richard T. Jameson

When wealthy landowner Henry Ballard sets up a toll gate and takes two of Myrl Redding?s horses in lieu of payment, Redding is enraged. But when those horses are starved and beaten almost to death, he demands justice. So begins a personal feud that becomes a war .. a war that becomes a manhunt ... and a trial that will lead to a bloody kind of Western justice.

The Tracker

Noble Adams, a legendary tracker, is coaxed out of retirement to hunt down crazed killer Red Jack Stilwell and his gang. Now it's kill or be killed in a West so wild you can never turn your back on a stranger.

A Bright Shining Lie

Based on Neil Sheehan's controversial book about the making of the Vietnam war, this HBO production is told from the perspective of Lt. Colonel John Paul Vann (Bill Paxton), one of the original military advisers sent in 1962 to prop up the fledgling South Vietnamese army against the Viet Cong. Battle-ready and enthusiastic upon his arrival, Vann quickly learns that political and social pressures are causing the South Vietnamese to doctor evidence of their victories and local military brass to take undeserved credit for overhyped battles. As the propaganda draws America ever deeper into a war most people clearly don't understand, Vann takes issue with the corruption and finds his career in tatters--only the beginning of a long journey that piles tragedies upon ironies. Written and directed by Terry George (Some Mother's Son), A Bright Shining Lie has a somewhat rushed and brittle quality to it, made all the more dry by passages from Sheehan's book read, documentary-style, by Donal Logue. But George also makes a case for Vann's more blatant personal contradictions--such as the casualness of his womanizing when he so clearly loves his wife (Amy Madigan)--that only grow as years pass and political myths supporting the war fold over onto themselves. (Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, more or less played in this film by Eric Bogosian, has taken issue with this depiction of Vann's character.) Sustaining the whole project is Paxton's focused, thoughtful performance, and an enduring public hunger to know just what it was that happened in Vietnam. On both counts, the film is well worth seeing. The DVD includes cast bios, English and Spanish audio tracks, and English, Spanish, and French subtitles. --Tom Keogh

Don King - Only in America

Made for HBO, this film biography of boxing promoter Don King is solid entertainment, thanks to a startlingly real performance at its core by Ving Rhames (who won a Golden Globe award for the role, then gave it away to Jack Lemmon on the TV broadcast). Rhames has the shuck-and-jive, but also the canny intelligence, as the film follows King from small-time numbers runner and concert promoter to ex-con to self-created fight mogul. The movie, based on a book by Jack Newfield, doesn't pull punches in outlining King's extralegal shenanigans and strong-arm tactics, bracketed by a device of having King address the audience from a boxing ring as he introduces episodes from his life. That could have gotten old, but not with the foxy, insinuating Rhames doing the talking. --Marshall Fine

First Time Felon

Faced with five years in prison or four months in boot camp, a young gangster takes what he thinks will be the easy road. Brutal Marine-style discipline teaches him lessons that change his life - but can he resist temptation when he's back on the streets? ' 'An experience not to be missed. ' ' (Hollywood Reporter)

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El Diablo

When a teenage schoolgirl is kidnapped by Mexican bandit El Diablo (Star Trek: Voyager's Robert Beltran), her clumsy, awkward schoolteacher Billy Ray Smith (Anthony Edwards) sets out to save her. The would-be hero in this offbeat Western teams up with crotchety veteran gunslinger Van Leek (Louis Gossett Jr.), who helps him form an unlikely posse to rescue Smith's damsel in distress. What sets this low-key, made-for-cable production apart from numerous other Westerns is its humorously skewed take on the myths and legends of the Old West, as it not only deconstructs Hollywood's romanticized view of the genre but Billy Ray's veneration of a mythical gunfighter named Kid Durango, whose literary adventures he regularly reads to his students. Gossett is wonderfully droll as unscrupulous six slinger Van Leek, whose motives are always suspect; Edwards is charming as the bumbling teacher; and the supporting cast--which includes Branscombe Richmond (Renegade), Miguel Sandoval (Get Shorty), and John Glover (Brimstone)--imbue life into their quirky gun-for-hire roles. Indeed the best aspect of El Diablo is the way in which many of its characters' façades are gradually revealed. The very tongue-in-cheek screenplay was coauthored by Halloween director John Carpenter. --Bryan Reeseman

Blind Justice

In this action-packed western, Assante is Canaan, a roving gunfighter, blinded in the Civil War. But justice isn't only blind, it's deadly. Canaan takes on the ruthless Alacran who is holding a small town hostage for a stash of government silver.