Yes, it's DVD Tuesday. And only two stand out:

PICK OF THE WEEK

No contest, it's The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson's lyrical comedy about three Manhattan brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman) on a healing journey through India by train. The movie limped at the box office, so take the trip on DVD. The transfer to disc is beauitifully done. And a major bonus is Hotel Chevalier, a thirteen-minute short that shows Schwartzman's character shacked up in Paris with his girlfriend, played by a harsh, never-hotter Natalie Portman (see photo). The short wasn't shown with the movie during its theatrical run. Big mistake. Watch it now and let it get inside your head.

VICE PICK IF YOU HAVE AN OSCAR HANGOVER

The Last Emperor, which won the Best Picture Academy Award twenty years ago, has looked like crap on DVD ever since.

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Today's DVD releases feature three major Academy Award contenders. Don't make any bets or stupid guesses about who'll win this Sunday before checking them out:

PICK OF THE WEEK: AMERICAN GANGSTER

The scene in which Ruby Dee (see photo) gives holy hell to her murdering, Machiavellian, drug-smuggling movie son (Denzel Washington) may just win the eighty-three-year-old actress her first Oscar. Who wants to argue with that, even if Dee—the widow of her longtime acting partner Ossie Davis—is in the movie for less than ten minutes? She hits sonny boy with a slap —director Ridley Scott did three takes and Dee hauled off and whooped him every time—that invests the movie with genuine moral force.

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Wth Jumper, Definitely, Maybe and The Spiderwick Chronicles opening this weekend, you are in dire movie straits, my friends. So get busy stockpiling today's DVD releases.

PICK OF THE WEEK: GONE BABY GONE

— Amy Ryan (see photo) is up for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar on Feb. 24th. She plays the crack whore mother from hell, and she's dynamite. But I'm a little tired of hearing that she's the whole show. About five people saw this Baby at the multiplex and you were the only smart ones. Rookie director Ben Affleck caught the juicy essence of Dennis Lehane's Boston kidnapping novel and got his kid brother Casey Affleck to give at least as good a performance as the one he delivered in The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, for which he's nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. There's more. Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman show why they're legends in this tale of cocaine, kidnapping, pedophilia and murder. Do you get my point? Gone Baby Gone is a terrific movie. So pick up the damn DVD and you'll see why.

WRONGLY UNDERRATED: WE OWN THE NIGHT

— A lot of critics were blindfolded or just lazy when they dissed James Gray's 1980s-era Brooklyn crime drama as warmed-over Scorsese.

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With Fool's Gold, Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins and—save us, please, from damnation!—Paris Hilton's The Hottie & the Nottie opening this weekend, you'll need to stockpile a few of today's new DVD releases.

DON'T GO NEAR

Elizabeth: The Golden Age—I don't care that Cate Blanchett snagged a Best Actress Oscar nomination for returning to her role as the virgin queen. This sequel to 1998's much better Elizabeth is full of hot air and overacting! Sorry, Cate, loved you as Dylan in I'm Not There, but that DVD is not out till May.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS (i.e. you can use the remote to skip the crap parts)

Across the Universe—Julie Taymor's trippy take on the Beatles songbook, wedded to Vietnam-era student war protests and psychedelia, looks and sounds gorgeous. In spots. "Girl," the opener sung by a Liverpool dockworker (Jim Sturgess) is meltingly tender. And "I Want You," staged at an army recruitment office, is a showstopper. You can skip "Happiness Is a Warm Gun," sung by Salma Hayek as not one, but five dancing nurses, and, well, you decide the biggest irritants. It's a fun movie to browse.

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In Billy Madison, Adam Sandler always thought of Tuesday as "nudie magazine day." But on this blog, Tuesday means new DVD releases—if there's bare flesh, so much the better. Read on to learn what movies get our vote and which misbegotten piece of Hollywood crap earns the Leper's Bell for being so godawful you want to shout, "Unclean! Unclean!"

Top Pick: The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

Who would have guessed that a documentary about gamers obsessed with scoring a world record at Donkey Kong would not only be roaringly funny but serve as a metaphor for the decline of Western civilization? Using Billy Mitchell’s need to stay champ and Steve Wiebe’s need to beat him, director Seth Gordon deftly manages to show how age, marriage, fatherhood and so-called ethical thinking will not stop man’s need to go to war, no matter how stupid the reason. Bonus features are also terrific, and the fact that Oscar snubbed this baby in the Best Documentary category proves its worth. The film's honesty has been questioned. South Park teases the hell out of the movie in episode 1109, entitled "More Crap." Hollywood is planning to make it as a feature. I vote for Johnny Depp as Mitchell and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Wiebe.

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