"WIRE IN THE BLOOD: PRAYER OF THE BONE." (2008. NOT RATED. KOCH VISION. $24.98.)It's kind of an unwritten rule of TV that when writers think a series is getting stale, they send the cast somewhere. Like "The Brady Bunch" in Hawaii, for example. That rule seems to be operative in the most recent installment of the brilliantly edgy BBC America series "Wire in the Blood," starring Robson Green as a consulting psychiatrist who may or may not be a few scones short of afternoon tea himself.In "Prayer of the Bone," now out on DVD, the writers send Dr. Tony Hill to Texas as an expert witness in the trial of an Iraq war veteran who is accused of brutally killing his former-prom-queen wife and their two young children. Back in Britain, Hill had assessed the accused killer's sanity in a rape case.Although the evidence against the former soldier seems rock-solid, something isn't right. Why wouldn't he use the gun he had that day instead of inflicting so many minor knife wounds on his wife and children before doing them in? And who is the other man who may have been in the wife's life while the accused was overseas?Hill has a hard time adjusting to the heat and good-ol'-boy sensibility of rural Texas, but eventually, he unravels the case in ways that are both surprising and, in retrospect, completely believable. Green's performance makes it all work.-- David Wiegand"HIGH AND LOW." (1963. NOT RATED. CRITERION COLLECTION. $39.95. TWO DISCS.)Akira Kurosawa was always influenced by American movies and Western literature -- he was an unabashed fan of Hollywood director John Ford, among others, and adapted Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and Gorky. But little in his oeuvre would hint at "High and Low," basically Kurosawa's attempt at film noir based on Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novel "King's Ransom."Toshiro Mifune stars as Gondo, a high-ranking executive of a shoe company who is about to invest all his money in a risky stock-option takeover of his firm. But his son is kidnapped, and the ransom demand will wipe him out. Then comes the ingenious twist: Turns out the kidnapped boy is the son of Gondo's chauffeur -- the kidnappers snatched the wrong boy. And so begins a deep moral dilemma: Rule the shoe company or save the life of someone else's son at the expense of personal wealth.It is possibly Kurosawa's most underrated masterpiece, rich in characterization and structure, yet lost in the shuffle among such classics as "Rashomon" and "Seven Samurai." Criterion's two-disc set has a wealth of extras, though one might have hoped for the inclusion of the first "King's Ransom" adaptation, an episode of NBC's 1961-62 series "87th Precinct" that starred Charles McGraw and Nancy Davis (Reagan).-- G. Allen Johnson"ALFRESCO." (1983-84. NOT RATED. ACORN MEDIA. $39.99. TWO DISCS.)There's nothing wrong with the 1980s British sketch-comedy series "Alfresco" that a translator and a British historian couldn't fix. Just kidding. Sort of.Britain's answer to "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" is often very funny, but there are a number of patches when the accents are too thick to understand, and there are more than a few cultural and political references that may not translate for the average colonial viewer. No matter. You'll want to watch it anyway for two reasons.First, there's a whole lot of humor you will be able to get. And second, the cast includes Emma Thompson, Robbie Coltrane, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, as well as equally talented if less well-known actors Ben Elton, Siobhan Redmond and Paul Shearer.The humor is British, of course, and that means lots of wonderfully terrible puns. Example: In a Robin Hood sketch, when an intruder thought to be King Richard is revealed to be Maid Marian, someone says they thought she'd gotten married. Nope. Turns out she's "not the Marian kind."The second season of the show isn't as good as the first. Set in a "pretend pub," it doesn't quite have the out-on-a-limb zaniness of the first season. Even if the dialogue is sometimes unintelligible, it's a delight to watch these now-familiar talents when they were just pups.-- David Wiegand"BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY." (1988. RATED R. MGM. $14.98.)This cautionary tale of youth and excess in '80s New York, re-released in a 20th-anniversary edition with new extras, features the first real bad-boy role in Michael J. Fox's career of squeaky-clean comedies.When the film opens with the title "It's 6 a.m. Do you know where you are?," we meet Jamie (Fox), coked up and drinking at closing time in an after-hours club. Once a straight-arrow kid working in Kansas, he has lost his sobriety and his wife, and he is being threatened with losing his job as a magazine fact-checker after showing up to work late and otherwise screwing up.He looks a little too good in the morning for the type of partying Jamie's doing, and he can't escape the boyish charm that won over "Family Ties" and "Back to the Future" fans, but Fox pulls off this portrait of a once-ambitious young man spiraling toward rock bottom.Directed by James Bridges, the film co-stars Kiefer Sutherland as Jamie's well-dressed sleaze of a friend, Phoebe Cates as his wife, Swoosie Kurtz as a sympathetic co-worker and Jason Robards as a three-martini-lunch editor who discourages Jamie's dream: to be a fiction writer. (Tracy Pollan, who married Fox the year this film came out, is also in the cast.)For those who were hitting the club scene or listening to the radio in the '80s, the soundtrack will be nostalgic (Bryan Ferry, Prince, New Order), and it's also nice to revisit Fox at his best, before his health began failing. Extras include commentaries with screenwriter Jay McInerney and cinematographer Gordon Willis and two new featurettes.-- Sue Adolphson(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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