I don’t know of another American filmmaker who brings such joy to the act of cinematic storytelling as Quentin Tarantino.

From his attention-grabbing debut with “Reservoir Dogs” (1992), a deviously clever heist film where the heist is never seen and the drama is all in the conversation and the ingenious structure, to his acclaimed “Inglourious Basterds” (2009), his thrilling rewrite of World War II history as a magnificent movie fantasy, Tarantino has gone his own way, snatching up ideas strewn through decades of film history and hundreds of genre movies like a magpie, rethinking them completely, and weaving them into entirely new stories that unfold at a leisurely pace so he can enjoy every word and gesture along the journey.

“Tarantino XX: 8-Film Collection” (Lionsgate) celebrates his love of movies and moviemaking by collecting all seven feature films directed by Tarantino — plus one film written by Tarantino and directed with an appreciation for his sensibility — in a single box set (beautifully designed with a fold-out mural by Mondo artist Ken Taylor) with two new discs of supplements.

The films have all been available on Blu-ray before and those discs are essentially reproduced for this set, supplements and all, from Tarantino’s commentary on “True Romance” (his sole commentary track for any of his films) to interviews with Tarantino and his collaborators on “Jackie Brown” and “Inglorious Basterds.”

What’s new to this set are the extras on the two bonus discs. On Bonus Disc One is “Critics’ Corner: The Films of Quentin Tarantino,” a discussion with film critics Scott Foundas, Stephanie Zacharek, Tim Lucas, and Andy Klein, moderated by Tarantino fan and friend Elvis Mitchell. All eight films in the set are covered in a discussion that runs 290 minutes — almost five hours altogether. Portions of this presentation were used in the earlier Blu-ray releases of “Pulp Fiction” and “Jackie Brown” but this disc presents an extended cut of the conversation, which you can watch straight through or access film by film.

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HBO’s epic fantasy set in a medieval world of warring kingdoms, cutthroat royal families, barbarians, dragons, and some undefined evil kept at bay (at least up until now) behind a massive wall taller than a skyscraper, is the pay cable network’s most ambitious original series to date.

It has already concluded its second season on cable (due on disc in February 2013) with a third season to come in March, 2013, but it’s an expensive production and bills need to be paid. Thus “Game Of Thrones: The Complete First Season Collector’s Edition” (HBO), essentially a rerelease of the original Blu-ray edition with some bonus goodies.

Based on the ongoing fantasy series by George R. R. Martin and faithfully adapted for the small screen with big screen production values, the shows offers a vast canvas of characters, stories, and landscapes. Sean Bean is the ostensible hero of this first series as Eddard Stark, ruler of the northern kingdom and the Hand of the King (Mark Addy), a once fearsome warrior married to a ruthlessly ambitious queen (Lena Headey) who plots to put her clan on the throne and eliminate Stark.

But that’s just the broadest strokes of a very complicated story with where family dynasties plot their way to power through marriages, war, and political gamesmanship, and an exiled princess (Emilia Clarke) unites the barbarian hordes of a land across the water to take back her family legacy. And it doesn’t begin to trace the equally compelling story of Tyrion Lannister, the debauched “black sheep” of the ruling family played by Peter Dinklage (who won an Emmy for his performance). Like a medieval answer to “I, Claudius,” he’s a dwarf with a sharp mind and a fierce understanding of the ways of power that he hides under his court jester antics. It’s a form of protection as well as escape; he’s not perceived as a threat.

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“Film Noir Collection: Volume I” (Olive) presents four films previously available on DVD only: “Rope of Sand” (1949), “Dark City” (1950), “Union Station” (1950), and “Appointment with Danger” (1951).

“Rope of Sand,” set in the unforgiving desert badlands and cutthroat diamond trade of North Africa, with a cast that could be the burned-out, ruthlessly mercenary evil twins of “Casablanca,” recasts the exotic thriller with a noir sensibility under the harsh light of a desert sun. Burt Lancaster is the American hero, turned bitter and vengeful after his mistreatment at the hands of the sadistic head of security of the diamond company, and Corinne Calvet (“introduced” to American audiences here) the doll-faced femme fatale Suzanne, a mercenary gold-digger whose first act is to blackmail middle-aged company man Arthur Martingale (Claude Rains).

Director William Dieterle really sinks his teeth into competitive play of blackmail, double-crossing and betrayal and keeps the edge on even as a couple of characters reveal a conscience by the end. And he nicely shifts the film from the hard daylight of the desert, the shadows more about the heat of the sun than the darkness of the soul, into a nocturnal world. It makes for one of the most engagingly entertaining artifacts on the margins of film noir.

Charlton Heston made his Hollywood debut as the stony leading man of “Dark City,” a hard-hearted veteran turned gambler who becomes hunted by a psychotic killer out to revenge one of his marks. Heston doesn’t have much dimension beyond his flinty gruffness and emotional distance but he’s got confidence, strength and a solid screen presence that anchors the film. Lizbeth Scott is his soggy sometime girlfriend, Viveca Lindfors the widow who melts his icy heart and Dean Jagger, Don Defore and Ed Begley co-star, and watch for Jack Webb as a sneering hyena of a bully and Harry Morgan as the target of his grinning cruelty: the future “Dragnet” team as uneasy partners in crime. Also directed by William Dieterle, one of the modest pros of the classic studio era.

The set is filled out with “Union Station,” starring William Holden, and “Appointment With Danger,” starring Alan Ladd. These aren’t the classics of genre but they are interesting artifacts in a genre defined by style and attitude, and with so little classic film noir on Blu-ray, it makes for an attractive package for the die-hard fan. Four discs in a single case with hinged trays, not available separately.

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Otto Preminger is one of the most fascinating directors of his time, a quiet moralist, an austere, understated stylist, and a director who maintained his independence by operating with the savvy and bottom-line awareness of a producer. This week, four films from the second half of his career debut on Blu-ray.

Bonjour Tristesse (Twilight Time) is one of the director’s most understated films: cool, introspective, sleek, and removed. Adapted from the novel by Francoise Sagan by playwright Arthur Laurents, the 1958 film explores the repercussions in a rift between gadabout bachelor playboy David Niven and his partner in party-going daughter Jean Seberg when smart, sensible, and mature Deborah Kerr enters their lives. Told in flashback from a sleek but shadowy B&W Paris, the film erupts in vivid Technicolor to explore the gorgeous French Riviera but the film is anything but sunny.

Seberg flatly drones her narration but her impish, often petulant performance is perfect for the spoiled teenager and Kerr’s middle-aged working woman seems puritanical compared to the irrepressible jet setters but is never less than honest, true and forthright. Preminger’s camera prowls through the drama just removed enough to be respectful, and intimate enough to get under their skin. The Twilight Time release has limited run of 3000 copies and features its usual isolated score track and a booklet with notes by Julie Kirgo. Available exclusively from Screen Archives.

The Otto Preminger Collection (Olive) presents the respective Blu-ray debuts of three more films recently released on DVD: “Hurry Sundown” (1967), “Skidoo” (1968), and “Such Good Friends” (1971)

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“Lawrence of Arabia” is not simply one of my favorite films, it’s a treasured film experience and to my mind the most glorious big screen film ever made. It won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, but  the complete version was unavailable for decades, and David Lean himself never completed his definitive cut of the film before the film was premiered and subsequently edited down for wide release

In 1988, the film was famously reconstructed and restored with the close participation of Lean, who took the opportunity to finally fine-tune his definitive cut, and it was re-released in grand manner in 1989, with new 70mm prints struck for show palace presentations in addition to conventional 35mm prints. At that time, however, photochemical restoration could only repair so much of the age- and heat-related damage to the original materials.

“Lawrence of Arabia: Fiftieth Anniversary” (Sony) presents the long-awaited Blu-ray debut of the film mastered from an exhaustive 4k digital restoration of David Lean’s masterpiece. This new efforts builds on the 1989 version with newly-available digital tools to repair previously irreparable footage and pull out a clarity beyond what was not possible before. Which is just what Sony was awaiting before releasing one of the most beloved film classics and most intelligent cinema epics to Blu-ray.

How does this look? To quote T.E. Lawrence: “It’s clean.” Yes, and it’s clear and sharp and strong, as beautiful a Blu-ray as you’ve seen. The original camera negative was scanned at 8k, creating an enormous digital snapshot of every frame of film to work from, and then the finished production was “down-rezzed” to 4k for digital projection and digital mastering on Blu-ray. Home Theater Forum contributor and veteran film archivist Robert Harris, who worked on the original 1989 restoration, gives this digital restoration and the Blu-ray production the highest marks possible.

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“Doctor Who: Series Seven, Part One” (BBC) – The 21st century BBC “Doctor Who” revival has turned into one of the network’s most popular exports. With only a few new episodes every year, the demand is great enough for BBC to release the season in sections.

So while we await the seventh series to conclude on BBC / BBC America, the five episodes of the first half of the season arrive on disc for those who simply can’t wait for the full season release next year.

This round opens with The Doctor (Matt Smith) arriving to find the Ponds, Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory (Arthur Darvill), on the verge of divorce and kidnapped by the Daleks, a situation that spurs a fairly quick reconciliation in the name of survival. So once again the only married couple to accompany The Doctor hops into the TARDIS for another round of adventures that take them to the planet of the mad Daleks, the crippled freighter of an interstellar poacher (an episode with not one but two regulars from the “Harry Potter” series), a 19th century frontier town in the American west under threat from an alien gunman, a “slow invasion” by alien cubes, and a return visit from the “Weeping Angel” statues as they move on Manhattan.

It’s also the farewell run of the Ponds on “Doctor Who,” who make a poignant and profound exit. A new companion is slated to join him when the series returns in 2013. And you just may get a clue as to who that will be in this round.

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“I am big! It’s the pictures that got small!”

Sunset Boulevard (Paramount), the blackest of Hollywood’s self portraits, is an old dark house of a ghost story inhabited by the living shadows of its discarded stars.

Gloria Swanson is magnificent as Norma Desmond, the former silent movie queen living in her memories while plotting a fantasy of a comeback, and she understands both the monstrous and pathetic dimensions of her demented diva. William Holden is the failed screenwriter with a mercenary streak who plays the gigolo to hide from creditors. Director/co-writer Billy Wilder makes his scabrous and acidic expose of Hollywood’s living graveyards both ghoulish and tragic, thanks in part to the quiet devotion of Erich von Stroheim’s performance as her butler and, once upon a time, her director. It was a biting in-joke for tinseltown historians at the time, as von Stroheim’s directorial career was destroyed by “Queen Kelly,” where he directed Gloria Swanson. Wilder even fit some of that footage into the “home movie” scene.

The long-awaited Blu-ray debut comes from a new digital master from the best surviving  elements. Not only does it look rich with detail and texture, but Home Theater Forum restoration guru Robert Harris remarks that he’s “thrilled” with what he’s seen based on the materials at hand.

New for this disc is the never-before-release​d deleted scene: “The Paramount Don’t Want Me Blues,” a party sing-along scene with Jack Webb and, in the final frames, William Holden’s entrance. Nothing revelatory but it’s a fun piece of ephemera.

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“Wolf Lake: The Complete Series” (eOne), a supernatural melodrama of a werewolf pack living as humans in a rural Washington State town, arrived on TV between “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and the current revival in fantasy / horror TV. Only nine episodes were produced before it was cancelled but the show definitely looks ahead to shows like “The Vampire Diaries” and “Teen Wolf.”

Lou Diamond Philips stars as a Seattle cop who tracks his missing girlfriend (Mia Kirshner) to a small town in the middle of Washington State, where there are definitely some strange doings: the women are extremely fertile (in fact, they seem to give birth in litters!), there are inordinate number of wolf sightings and attacks, and everyone is really cagey about their nocturnal activities. Yet cagey sheriff Tim Matheson hires him anyway because, well, he’s a pretty good cop and with the pack leader (Bruce McGill) dying of cancer and a young thug (Scott Bairstow) vying for the alpha dog spot, he’s got his hands full. Did I mention that Matheson run an AA-styled group for shapeshifters trying to keep the wild wolf at bay? The show also features early appearances by Paul Wesley (now on “The Vampire Diaries”) and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and features Graham Greene as town elder with a droll sense of humor and a little coyote spirit in him and Sharon Lawrence as a den mother with a ferocious streak. I can’t say it’s a transcendent example of the genre, but it’s great fun as a rural supernatural show with noir style and a knowing sense of itself.

The three-disc set also features the documentary “Wolf Lake: The Original Werewolf Saga” and the unaired original pilot episode, which comes at the same basic concept with a radically different approach, with Lou Diamond Philips as a Forest Management agent secretly tracking the shapeshifter community, Graham Greene as his local counterpart, and no Mia Kirshner in the equation. Interesting to see how the show was radically retooled to become more of a gothic melodrama with factions fighting for power in the wolf pack and teens struggling with their legacy. DVD only.

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You can argue that They Live: Collector’s Edition (Shout! Factory) would have been a perfect Halloween week release. And you’d be right, of course. John Carpenter’s skewed invasion movie is witty and weird and has the most extreme knock-down, drag-out fistfight ever.

But I have to say, it’s weirdly even more perfect as an election-day release. Because really, who are these economic invaders from outer space but… Mitt Romney and the 1%.

Before I get inundated with hate-mail from conservative-leaning readers, let me make clear that, although Romney was nowhere in John Carpenter’s mind back in 1988 when the film was released, the politics were always pointed in his direction. The story is science fiction but Carpenter was driven by the inequities in society where the rich were getting richer, the middle class was disappearing, and the economic game was rigged by those with money and power. It was timely then and looks even more prescient now.

Roddy Piper’s working class hero John Nada, a man with no politics and a deep-seeded belief in the tenets of hard work and essential fairness, becomes a two-fisted activist when the veil is lifted (thanks to a pair of high-tech x-ray glasses). Piper is a brawny, broad presence, not much of an actor but spirited and likable, and Keith David is marvelous as his reluctant partner in rebellion, providing a moral grounding to Piper’s B-movie activism when the lie is revealed. Earth has become a third world colony for interstellar “free enterprisers” who preach the gospel of unregulated capitalism and the promise of advancement through hard work and perseverance while insidiously sabotaging all human efforts to get ahead. Their main took for control: subliminal messages, media control, and consumerist greed.

And two-fisted is the operative term here, as confirmed in the entertainingly interminable knock-down, drag-out alley brawl between Piper and Keith David. This is a classic example of genre filmmaking with a political punch, albeit in broad, sloganeering terms. “I’m here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and I’m fresh out of bubblegum,” shouts Nada in blue-collar guerilla mode when he steps into a bank and starts blasting the skull-faced aliens. It’s a ridiculous line and, weirdly, has become something of a pop culture slogan among a certain breed of genre geek.

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Entourage: The Complete Series (HBO) – Adrian Grenier is Vincent Chase, Brooklyn kid turned rising Hollywood star, and when he follows his career to Hollywood, he brings his buddies along for the ride and for the company.

If Grenier is the poster boy for fame and fortune, Kevin Connolly is arguably the real star of the story as the best friend and brain trust Eric, a manager in everything but name whose streetwise smarts and unflinching loyalty make him a match for Vinnie’s instinctively abrasive and casually offensive super-agent Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven). The entourage is rounded out by Kevin Dillon as Chase’s half-brother, the struggling bit player Johnny Drama, and Jerry Ferrara as the easy-going go-fer Turtle, happy to takes his place at the bottom of the pecking order as long as he gets his share of the sexual spill-off from the throngs of women Vincent attracts.

The HBO comedy series gives off an insider’s vibe mixed with street smarts and wry observations of relationship politics as it surveys the Hollywood subculture of stars and their posses and the tricky dynamics that fame, money, and status bring to old friendships as they become part of the star’s support network.

It also plays the whole trip as a testosterone fantasy of fame, wealth, sex, and surface risks with little on the line but easy money and temporary reputations. Vinnie rises to the top with his own superhero film (“Aquaman,” with guest star James Cameron as the director), trips up with an ambitious, self-produced epic about the rise and fall of the infamous Latin American drug lord that flops spectacularly, and recovers when Martin Scorsese casts him in his new project. Meanwhile Eric stakes out his claim as a professional manager, Johnny searches for his own project, and Turtle makes a play to start his own business. Would you believe that Vinnie’s golden touch rubs off on them all?

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The Amazing Spider-Man (Sony) – Street Date: Friday, November 9

Barely a decade after Sam Raimi first launched the “Spider-Man” film series and helped ignite the superhero big screen bonanza, the comic book hero’s story is rebooted and retold in a universe far from “The Avengers.”

Andrew Garfield takes on Peter Parker this time as a decidedly hipper high school nerd and Emma Stone is spunky girlfriend Gwen Stacy, a pair of bubbly personalities that help buoy this second run through the same basic origin story (high school boy bitten by radioactive spider, sudden powers, death of beloved Uncle Ben, yadda yadda yadda).

Director Marc Webb attempts to retool the whole thing with a more authentic (or at least contemporary) cliché of high school culture and the screenwriters add a conspiratorial twist to the death of Peter’s parents that leads to a potential ally, Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), and the film’s new villain, The Lizard. (Fans of the comic book expected The Lizard to scramble out in the first series, what with Dylan Baker appearing as Connors back “Spider-Man 2,” but that’s another issue.)

None of this approaches the exhilaration of the first thrilling swings through New York City or the guilt, the rush, the angst, the responsibility, the teen emotional life that Raimi brought to the first “Spider-Man” origin. Webb brings momentum and splash to the film without actually pulling us into the charge of Peter’s new power and tosses us into yet another showdown between plucky misfit hero and monstrous supervillain with a personal stake in the fight.

Five years after Raimi closed the original trilogy, the superhero movie has changed the big screen landscape and it’s no longer enough to pretend it’s all happening for the first time in a world where superheroes don’t exist. Give Webb credit for the terrific chemistry between Garfield and Stone, but otherwise this rehash that adds nothing new to what is fast becoming a familiar formula.

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