Day of Wrath, Alexander Nevsky, Love in the Time of Hysteria, Quartet for the End of Time, & Wedding Night

Day of Wrath was made by Carl Theodor Dreyer during the Nazi occupation of Denmark. And as such, it's a not-all-that-subtle attack on the Nazi occupation. A young wife falls for her older husband's young son (something that Bergman also dealt with, in much funnier fashion, in Smiles of a Summer Night), and when he dies, she's accused of witchcraft. But basically, it's using 17th century witchcraft and the craziness that came with it to comment on Nazism.

Alexander Nevsky is an anti-German Eisenstein film, with a remarkably wooden performance from Nikolai Cherkasov as the titular character. It isn't a film as much as an excuse for Russians to kill Germans. In the 13th century, which they're very careful to point out a few times. But really, Eisenstein definitely made better films, and the suppression of it after the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact may not have been all that bad. It really is just a horribly anti-German and Christian film. Also, the DVD is crap, with barely legible subtitles.

Love in the Time of Hysteria is an early Almodovar-esque sex farce, but made by Alfonso Cuaron (consequently much less gay sex), as the film that made him famous. And it's beautifully filmed with lots and lots of greens, as Cuaron is wont to do. And funny, but oh so wrong. A cad, who enjoys running down to get his paper in the nude, sleeps with his nurse, who gets very offended when he ends up having sex with a different woman in the next apartment basically at the same time, fakes tests so that he thinks he has AIDS. And then learns life lessons as he unwittingly sexually harasses his neighbor, a flight attendant. And there's a luchador and a conquistador in a bizarre dream sequence. And an American who microwaved her poodle is a running joke.

Also on that DVD are two short films, one from Alfonso, and the other from his brother. Alfonso's Quartet for the End of Time is about a loner. It doesn't work at all, but it's one of his earliest films, and as such, has a built in excuse. Carlos Cuaron's Wedding Night, on the other hand, shows his brother's focus on sex and comedy is a family trait, and is pretty funny.