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New on Disc: 'Seconds' and more …

19 Aug, 2013 By: Mike Clark

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Seconds

Criterion, Drama, $29.95 DVD, $39.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Rock Hudson, Salome Jens, John Randolph, Murray Hamilton.
1966. Playing something like a “Twilight Zone” episode that would have been too unhinged for CBS to air, John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, adapted from a David Ely novel by screenwriter Lewis John Carlino, has to be one of the most uncompromised major studio releases before the 1970s.
Extras: The disc includes new and archive interviews, Frankenheimer audio commentary, a good Criterion essay, a 1965 promotional short with Rock Hudson and a visual essay.
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Nova: Manhunt — Boston Bombers

Street 8/20
PBS, Documentary, $19.99 DVD, NR.
2013. Future documentaries will, of course, warn of surveillance-spurred privacy abuses or chronicle those that have already occurred. But for now, this Boston-bombing springboard exists as a much more positive head-shaker in the manner it shows us the degree of technological wizardry governments already have at their disposal for tracking down criminals, including (as here) some unequivocal human slugs. Make no mistake: there’s plenty of on-the-scene footage on prominent display, including what you’d expect to see here from the April 15 explosion during the city’s Marathon and the immediate street aftermath of a tragedy that killed three people and injured more than 250 others. There is, in addition, some tape of the April 18 Watertown, Mass., police shootout with the two suspects, plus helicopter shots of suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (or at least his outline) when he was hiding in an ordinary citizen’s backyard boat. But more of this documentary is devoted to how the technology works.
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