Kino has two essential Buster Keaton releases this week, including the two-disc “Ultimate Edition” Steamboat Bill, Jr. ($30) and The Lost Keaton, with sixteen sound shorts he made for “Educational Pictures” from 1934-37 ($35). Kino explains what’s in the new Steamboat Bill, Jr.: “In the silent era, it was common practice for filmmakers to create two separate negatives of their films, each comprised of differing takes and camera angles. This definitive DVD edition contains both versions… each mastered from archival 35mm materials, as well as a 13-minute documentary comparing the two.”

The shorts, made for very little, were made after Keaton had lost his big-budget supporters; glimmers of the great man are reported to emerge now and again. Without time to savor these at length, the next best thing to turn to is Dave Kehr’s NYTimes.com piece, which draws on and refines that writer’s thirty-five-plus years of thinking about the Great Stoneface. A passage: “Again and again he returns to the same composition: his small figure, isolated in the center of a vast, empty space—the desert, the ocean, the bare stage of a theater. When other people enter the frame, they provide no companionship. The male characters in his films tend to be hulking authoritarians, like the father—a tough-as-nails riverboat captain—played by Ernest Torrence in Steamboat Bill, and his women are either implacably angry or doll-like and ineffectual. (Marion Byron, in Steamboat Bill, falls into that second category.) Machinery often fills the emotional void left by people in Keaton’s world (his affection for his locomotive in The General runs far deeper than his interest in his bubbleheaded fiancee), and the one force that can be counted on is not love or friendship, but simple Newtonian physics. What goes up, must come down.”
A Single Man (Sony, $28)
Colleagues and his circle of friends (especially Charlie, a brittle socialite played with relish by Julianne Moore) want to lighten his burden. George hopes to check currents of sorrow with Bayer’s and whiskey. A blond young student (Matthew Hoult) seeks his attentions. But he’s weighted, and Ford’s visual style is freighted. The intent design, however, is less about Mammon than about Memory. Working in a variable color palette, with hues of blue pulsing like Hitchcock’s shades of green in Vertigo, Ford’s play with subjectivity intrigues. Striking images abound, such as the teacher of words with his mouth mottled by black India ink. George stops to sniff a stranger’s terrier inside a car: a whiff, a twirl of desire. He references the “smell of buttered toast,” reminiscent of poet Philip Larkin’s infamous line about Englishness, about “listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with c–ty fingers.” This is life, and he’s leaving it. It’s a modern world he lives in, just not ours. Ford also measures lovingly attenuated homoerotic gaze, especially in a scene that mingles a fading Psycho billboard with the vision of a Spanish, James Dean-like hustler. What heterosexual filmmaker has shot a sustained heterosexual dance of desire in such a way? (Other than Wong Kar-Wai.) It’s all Almodóvar now, baby blue? No; Ford’s found his own way. Stlll, there are moments where the actors have their extended play, especially in a splendid passage where George reacts to the news of Jim’s death. Firth’s face is a study in emotional depths. The score, credited to Abel Korzeniowski and Shigeru Umebayashi, moves from stirring Bernard Hermann pastiche to “In the Mood for Love”-like tip-toe of a waltz, appropriate considering Umebayashi’s contribution to that WKW film. Equally important is Leslie Shatz’s sound design, where the tock of clock is like the flick of time. Young cinematographer Edward Grau’s images are impeccable, abounding in influences (an ICE cooler with bold red letters in parching, falling California afternoon light, a Ruscha-slash-Eggleston that never was) but stylistically consistent, always coolly adroit. (University of Minnesota Press may have issued its first movie tie-in with a new paperback of the book [$15].)
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Music Box, $30)

“The Men Who Hate Women” is the blunt original title of the late Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s worldwide bestseller; its harsh portrait of that country’s industry and welfare state earns it. But can a story about misogyny inadvertently traffic in it? The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a barn-burner of a page-turner, the first of three novels Larsson left behind (films have been made of all three; the second, The Girl Who Played With Fire is released Friday; The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest is set for October). The adaptation by director Niels Arden Oplev (Portland) is an adroit compression of its angry themes and doesn’t stint on the graphic material. Financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), convicted of libel, is going to prison, which allows an aging industrialist from the fractious Vanger clan to hire him before that stint to investigate a 40-year-old mystery about a missing girl. Before he’s hired, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a wasp-tiny young investigator with epic hacker skills, investigates him. Their paths cross, and soon they are in league in a spiraling search for a serial killer. (Chunks of subplot from the novel are notably absent, including details about two of Blomkvist’s affairs.) The two-and-a-half-hour running time never feels leisurely, although three scenes involving rape and retribution involving Salander and an advocate assigned to her by the state go well into NC-17-level cruelty. (It’s one of the key differences between page and screen, especially involving violence: you imagine only as much as you need to while reading.) While made for television, Oplev’s widescreen visual style, from design to lighting to framing, has cinematic sweep (and the men’s cardigan budget must have been daunting). While several plot strands are swept away, there are lingering glances and hints toward them which suggest the filmmakers thought most of their audience would be familiar with the novels. One bit of compression that takes the place of pages of exposition suggests Blow-Up mingled with the brief clip that exists of Anne Frank turning her head as seen in a window: it’s the sort of creative solution that lands its own punch.

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