Out on DVD: Nuns, treachery and subversive drag

The week's new DVDs run the gamut from Meryl Streep as a suspicious nun to Kiki & Herb's outrageous cabaret act to the machinations of Alexis Carrington.

Read on for more!

The week's big film release on DVD would have to be the Oscar-nominated Doubt, director John Patrick Shanley's adaptation of his own Broadway hit about a progressive priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) accused of improprieties with a 12-year-old boy by a nun (Streep) who resents his liberal methods.

Streep and Hoffman are a gas to watch, even when Shanley's direction gets over-the-top, but it's Viola Davis who walks off with the movie after just a couple of scenes. The pragmatism and emotional truth she brings to the role of the boy's mother will blow you away.

On the opposite side of the acting scale, but no less enjoyable in its own way, we find Dynasty: Season Four, Volume 1. It's the first half of the 1983-1984 season, when the show was just coming into its own. (If you like that sort of thing, of course.) The late Aaron Spelling's mansion in Bel Air may be for sale, but his equally excessive prime-time soap will live forever.

Two people who I'd love to watch Dynasty with are the subversive cabaret performers Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman, but until that happens I'll have to settle for watching them in Kiki & Herb: Live at the Knitting Factory, which features 15 numbers from the duo's Year of Magical Drinking tour.

And finally, for Title of the Week, I just couldn't say no to Erotic Diary of a Lumberjack. It sounds like something BearFilms might put out, but alas, it's an exceedingly hetero softcore extravaganza from 1974. Oh, and it's French — do French lumberjacks wear flannel shirts, or just those stripey sweaters? Presumably this one spends most of the movie undressed, so we may never know.