4 BY AGNÈS VARDA

The only female director in the boys’ club that was the French New Wave, Agnès Varda—now nearly 80 and still making movies—has a filmography that rivals those of any of her confreres. This extras-laden box set from Criterion contains her little-seen 1956 debut La Pointe-courte, as well as Le Bonheur, Vagabond, and the Dictator’s favourite, 1961’s Cléo de 5 à 7.

TORCHWOOD: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON

Rearrange the letters in Doctor Who and you get the title of this Doctor Who spinoff—and rearrange the basic elements of The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and you’ll get an idea of its premise. The episodes are pretty hit-and-miss—to put it charitably—but John Barrowman’s bi-friendly performance as the unkillable Captain Jack Harkness is consistently charming.

MOLIÈRE

The 17th-century French playwright gets the Shakespeare in Love treatment with this highly speculative costume romp starring Romain Duris (from The Beat My Heart Skipped). Not exactly highbrow, although the references to Tartuffe and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme will require a little more theatrical smarts than Shakespeare in Love’s gags about Romeo and Juliet.

THE REAL DIRT ON FARMER JOHN

This Al Gore-endorsed documentary profiles John Peterson—like his grandfather before him, a proud independent farmer. Unable to cope with the new economic realities of the agriculture business in the 1980s, Peterson sold off most of his assets—only to re-emerge with a new sense of purpose in the 1990s as a leader in the organic, chemical-free farming movement.