Quentin Tarantino, arguably, is the first director of the DVD generation. His dense collages of cool tunes, movie allusions, pop-culture riffing and gory-showy “good parts” practically scan and reshuffle themselves in his tricky time-bending structures; in Pulp Fiction, he goes so far as to provide his own chapter headings. Which makes it odd that collectors have had to wait several years for deluxe DVD editions of his three features. Now Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and QT’s last film to date, 1997’s Jackie Brown, have just come out in delectable two-disc sets that amount to an on-the-spot reassessment of his career to date.

That’s easy, of course, when the dude’s directorial career consists of three movies, an anthology segment and an episode of ER. Then again, after his meteoric mid-’90s ascendancy and a knee-jerk backlash fueled by his gabby ubiquity, it’s a pleasure to be reassured that he didn’t just turn heads with hype. Ten years (is that all?) after its release, 1992’s Reservoir Dogs remains a nastily amusing bout of lowlife brinkmanship, a dry run for his mix-tape masterpiece Pulp Fiction two years later. But the revelation for most will be his wistful, resonant Elmore Leonard adaptation Jackie Brown. Pegged unfairly upon its release as a disappointment, it’s at once a delectable character study and a lament for the impermanence of cool, even as it delivers a career-topping mash-note to Tarantino faves Pam Grier and Robert Forster.

Extras on all three discs are plentiful, from the Sundance workshop rehearsals that shaped Reservoir Dogs to a deleted Pulp Fiction camcorder inquiry. Best of all are Jackie Brown’s gallery of essential Grier-Forster trailers and a wonderful alternate opening of the righteous Grier surfing down an airport walkway to “Misirlou.” The extras rock so hard, you’d think Tarantino had planned the discs before the movies—a suspicion that his upcoming lollapalooza Kill Bill may confirm.

—Jim Ridley

The loss of drive-in theaters as a vital movie distribution outlet hasn’t really meant a loss of drive-in-quality product. Starting in the late ’70s, the low-rent genre staples—knife-wielding maniacs, car crashes, topless women—became mainstream summer movie standards, with bigger budgets and a thin veneer of respectability. Which is too bad in a way, because recent B-movie-style smashes like The Fast and the Furious and American Pie might’ve been improved by a kernel of disreputability.

So thank God (yet again) for DVD, which has been reviving the tawdriest old drive-in features in packages that have lost none of their funky smell, “special edition” or no. The past couple of months have seen the release of two primo late-’70s junk-car comedies by young directors who would go on to win Academy Awards. Ron Howard’s 1977 directorial debut Grand Theft Auto joins other recent Roger Corman productions on DVD, and like many of its “Corman Collection” cohorts, the disc features interviews with the drive-in impresario and with the director, both of whom also take part in an entertaining scene-specific commentary. Grand Theft Auto is dopey but somewhat ingenious wrecker porn, with Howard and Nancy Morgan as lovers on the run in her father’s Rolls-Royce. It’s simple and just a little tedious, but the stars are genuinely engaging, and the slightly rougher (albeit PG-rated) atmosphere of a low-budget Corman energizes Howard, encouraging him to pander to the baseness of his audience (rather than pandering to their supposed classiness, as he does now).

Even gamier is Robert Zemeckis’ 1980 comedy Used Cars, the only R-rated movie in the Forrest Gump director’s filmography. Produced by Steven Spielberg and written by Bob Gale—the team with whom Zemeckis would later make Back to the Future—Used Cars marks a transition point as the ramshackle raunch of the ’70s made its way from midnight screenings to matinees. But if only all mean-spirited, cynical, anything-for-a-laugh comedies were as funny and pointed as Used Cars, which comments crudely and effectively on the debasement of the American dream. Star Kurt Russell—who shows up on a riotous DVD commentary track with Zemeckis and Gale—plays a used car salesman willing to do anything to make a buck, including running for state senate, where he figures he can scam people legitimately.

—Noel Murray

Welcome to Lumberton. Red roses against a white picket fence, a fire engine passing down a peaceful neighborhood street, a middle-aged man watering his lawn—iconic images from Norman Rockwell or Our Town, but the colors are too vivid, the good cheer too plastic. Then the man collapses, a spray of water issuing pointedly from his groin area as a dog frisks playfully in the mist.

Back in ’86 as a wizened undergrad, I was smugly dismissive of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. The dark, rotting underside of suburbia—been there, done that. Turns out that patronizing bit of reductionism characterizes about a quarter of the director’s expansive vision. Lynch believes equally in the severed ear that initiates the mystery and the mother-and-child reunion that brings it to an unironic conclusion. In his cosmos, good and evil dance forever on razor’s edge, their uneasy coexistence providing everyday life’s richness, meaning and texture. As such, it’s Laura Dern’s innocent yet resilient Sandy (not Kyle MacLachlan’s director/viewer surrogate Jeffrey) who best embodies the film’s “mystery of love.” Even as her world collapses around her, she clings to her vision of robins and light.

The recent “Special Edition” release boasts the usual assemblage of extras: an entertaining, intermittently informative “making of” doc, a rough sketch of the four-hour pre-edit, even Roger Ebert’s early, moralistic dismissal. But what’s truly “special” about this package is the stunning digital transfer. After too many years of muddy pan-and-scan video versions (and an early DVD rush job), we can once again immerse ourselves in Lynch’s richly evocative nightmare dreamscape, basking in all its perverse, surreal splendor.

—Scott Manzler

Filled with a doomed romanticism, Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi’s A Year of the Quiet Sun chronicles the yearlong relationship in 1946 Poland between an American soldier (Scott Wilson) and a baker (Maja Komorowska) whose husband died in World War II, only a few months into their marriage. The couple don’t speak the same language—in an amusing scene, a fellow soldier translates Wilson’s lengthy profession about the difficulties of love in two sentences—but they still find common ground. As in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, the devastation caused by World War II practically becomes a character in itself. The DVD looks murky and grungy throughout, but I suspect this effect is the product of deliberately ugly cinematography. Zanussi and director of photography Slawomir Idziak make occasional use of bright primary colors, especially in a beautifully lit scene where the couple make out in a bombed-out building.

A Polish/German/American production from 1984, A Year of the Quiet Sun suffers from some of the problems that often plague Europudding: bit parts for actors cast only to fill production requirements, stiff dialogue in the screenwriter’s second or third language. (Zanussi both wrote and directed the film.) Still, it’s a pretty affecting depiction of difficult times, exemplifying what Wilson says in an interview included on the DVD: that in the early ’80s, Poland still felt “as if the war had happened yesterday.”

—Steve Erickson