Alan Bennett, Peter Cook. John Cleese and Graham Chapman

Musical guests became more prominent in “The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball” (1981), including Sting, Bob Geldof, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, and downright dominate “The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball” (1987), but the skit comedy focus returns in the final benefit film. “The Secret Policeman’s Biggest Ball” (1989) opens with Michael Palin and John Cleese doing “Pet Shop” (with a twist punch line), and features Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (in their first live appearance together in years), Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, and Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. The first four shows were filmed in 16 mm in a manner more like a news event than a performance film – they look pretty primitive and the sound is less than stellar – and they are presented in anamorphic wide screen.

Read the review on MSN here.

Also new this week is the second and final season of the original alien invasion conspiracy series: The Invaders. David Vincent (Roy Thinnes) is still doggedly on the trail of the alien invasion of Earth but this season he’s starting to convince others. Just a few souls at first and then, with the mid-season episode “The Believers,” millionaire Edgar Scoville (Kent Smith) and a small group that slowly grows through end of the series. Created by Larry Cohen for Quinn Martin production, it borrows the structure from the company’s own “The Fugitive” – the man searching for the truth while on the run – and throws in a UFO conspiracy and a paranoid sensibility out of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. You see, they really are out to get him and a lot of his fellow believers are sacrificed to the cause. For all the sixties conventions and slow storytelling, it has held up nicely and, at its best, still strikes an eerie tone of alienation.

Here’s a digest of the other DVD releases featured on my MSN column:

Movies: RocknRolla (“It’s flashy, garish, self-aware and self-satisfied, not exactly smart but exceedingly clever…”)

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (“Woody’s writing hasn’t been this deft in years and his characters are hearty and full-blooded, with a touch of melancholy.”)

Roman Polanski: Wanted And Desired (“Polanski’s treatment by the American legal system… is an appalling portrait of judicial malfeasance, a legal nightmare worthy of Kafka”)

TV: Cheers: The Final Season (“After eleven seasons it’s last call at the Boston bar where everyone knows your name…”)

Blossom: Seasons One & Two (“a happily eccentric goofball, smart and funny and making her own fashion statement like a high school Annie Hall.”)

The Powerpuff Girls: 10th Anniversary Collection – The Complete Series (“Between recess and nap time, the adorable kindergarten dynamos… make the world once again safe for hopscotch and milk and cookies.”)

Special Releases: The Sidney Poitier Collection (“I’m particularly partial to Edge of the City, a low-key drama about the friendship between two longshoremen (Poitier and John Cassavetes) that reaches across racial lines…”)

Waterloo Bridge (“The second screen version of Robert E. Sherwood’s play is hopelessly romantic, helplessly tragic and a completely mired in the chauvinist morality of its era.”)

Blu-ray: The Bourne Collection

All three films starring Matt Damon as the spy who came in from the cold debut on Blu-ray in a box set. Doug Liman directs The Bourne Identity, an adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s novel about an amnesiac human weapon trying to discover his true identity while the CIA hunts him down, but the two sequels directed by Paul Greengrass are even better. Damon becomes the great anti-Bond of Hollywood action cinema with The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum. Greengrass shoots in a rough and ready style, choreographing complex action scenes on location and throwing the audience into the middle of the chaos with a handheld camera that whips and searches and follows the action as if the cameraman was catching it all on the fly.

The weekly column goes live every Tuesday on MSN Entertainment.

King Hu’s 1965 Hong Kong wuxia pian (“martial chivalry” genre) classic stars Cheng Pei-Pei as the avenging Golden Swallow, on a mission to save her kidnapped brother, and Yueh Hua as an amiable beggar with a chorus of scruffy orphans, who plays guardian angel to the warrior woman, his drunken front hiding his true identity. Together they take on the pale and powdered Jade-faced Tiger and his bandit army, in wild battles with magnificent action choreography and comic flourishes. Yueh Hua make a charming rogue with a genuine modesty and easy-going quality in contrast to the cool intensity of Cheng Pei-Pei, whose control becomes a sexy fierceness in the heat of battle. The film soars on a lyrical mix of scruffy singing heroes, cross-dressing heroines, narcissistic villains, and fantastical action choreographed like dance. The film launched a new wave of Hong Kong filmmaking and you can feel its influence in everything from Bruce Lee’s martial arts thrillers of the 1970s to Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master films to the Tsui Hark-led new wave of high energy, special effects laden adventures in 1980s Hong Kong, and of course, the Oscar winning Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee’s tribute the magical, colorful genre that King Hu reinvented with this film.

Read my review on my MSN DVD column here.

Also notable this week is the release of the complete first season of the great (or at the very least, the way-cool) cult alien invasion series of 1960s The Invaders. It’s cold war paranoias that turns the Red scare into a UFO infiltration and colonization of America, and it anticipates everything from “UFO” to “The X-Files.”

The first great blast of conspiracy TV throws a traveling architect, David Vincent (Roy Thinnes), into a nightmare when he witnesses a flying saucer and stumbles across evidence of an alien invasion (the give-away: a stiff pinky finger). Which, of course, no one will believe. Created by Larry Cohen for Quinn Martin production, it borrows the structure from the company’s own “The Fugitive” – the man searching for the truth while on the run – and throws in a UFO conspiracy and a paranoid sensibility out of the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” You see, they really are out to get him, and they play rough; in the second episode, they blow up an entire airplane in flight to kill another pesky witness. Handsome leading man Thinnes hardens to a steely determination by the end of the pilot, driven to find the truth as the narrator intones: “Perhaps, for David Vincent, it will never end.”

Here’s a digest of the other DVD releases featured on my MSN column:

Movies: Stallone revives his cold warrior for a pre-retirement killing spree through the corrupt armies of Burma in Rambo; Woody Allen delivers another “serious” film in his third London-set production Cassandra’s Dream; and Paul Schrader directs Woody Harrelson in The Walker:

Woody Harrelson shifts gears to play the smooth, languidly charming, proudly gay escort to the rich and powerful women in Washington D.C.’s political elite in Paul Schrader’s drama of politics and power and personal redemption. Schrader calls this the third film in the “lonely man” trilogy that began with “American Gigolo” and continued in “Light Sleeper.” The silky Carter Page (Harrelson), black sheep of a southern political dynasty, could be the spiritual son of Julian Kay from “Gigolo,” a man who moves comfortably through the social elite but is abandoned by everyone in his circle when he’s implicated in a scandal after trying to cover for a friend.

TV: Every episode of Absolutely Fabulous is collected in Absolutely Everything; the landmark mini-series Holocaust debuts on DVD; and the British TV production The Buddha of Suburbia:

A first-generation Pakistani-British youth comes of age in the seventies in this rich 1993 mini-series adapted from Hanif Kureishi’s novel by Kureishi and director Roger Michell. Naveen Andrews stars as Karim Amir, a typical British teen into Kerouac, the Stones, getting stoned and looking for sex. His father (Roshan Seth) has become minor celebrity as a trendy Buddhist guru but Karim is still looking for his identity in a world where racism simmers and culture is in such a state of flux that anything seems possible. Michell lets the cultural collision and confusion mix together in the backdrop of this lively snapshot of the decade with a unique sensibility. Brenda Blethyn and Steven Mackintosh co-star and David Bowie composed the original music.

Special Releases: Box sets of the entire Rambo series and 5 Films by Dario Argento (featuring his classics Tenebre and Phenomena) and Criterion’s new edition of Alexander Korda’s 1940 fantasy The Thief of Bagdad:

This lavish 1940 “Arabian Nights” fantasy, produced by British mogul Alexander Korda, stars Sabu as the vagabond street kid who fights the evil Grand Vizier (Conrad Veidt in high villain mode) with the help of his giant genie in the bottle (Rex Ingram, joyfully hamming it up). Romantic leads John Justin and June Duprez feel like dull afterthoughts next to the flamboyant fun had by these three. At least four directors helmed pieces of the film, including Michael Powell (this was his color film debut), which is held together by the glorious art direction by William Cameron Menzies, who creates an amazing world for the fantastical wonders of flying carpets, mechanical horses, and a fifty foot genie with a bellowing laugh.

The weekly column goes live every Tuesday on MSN Entertainment.