Also out this week Factory Girl, The Hills Have Eyes 2, Dynamite Warrior, and more.

Criterion's release of Billy Wilder's legendary 1951 Ace in the Hole (retitled The Big Carnival by Paramount) has to rank as one of the most eagerly anticipated DVDs of the year.

Maybe that "year" ought to be plural. Movie buffs have been clamoring for this title in any video form for quite some time. Ace, a box-office disaster for Wilder and the studio on its release, is one of those pictures whose reputation mushroomed as it languished in home-video obscurity. This vitriolic satire of media frenzy stars Kirk Douglas in one of his even-larger-than-larger-than-life roles, as Chuck Tatum, a one-time journalistic big shot now toiling for a placid Albuquerque daily. He contrives an utterly depraved scheme to get back in the game when he stumbles upon a poor lug who's gotten himself trapped in a mine shaft whilst hunting for an Indian relic. Said lug's wife, a platinum blonde with ambitions similar to Tatum's, plays along, as the reporter claims his "story" and transforms the desert around the mine into a media circus — literally.

Jan Sterling and Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole Buy Ace in the Hole at Amazon Rent it at Netflix Billy Wilder and Michel Ciment Spike Lee A scene from Les Miserables Buy the Raymond Bernard — Eclipse Series 4 set at Amazon

Wilder, cowriting the script with Walter Newman and former journalist Lesser Samuels, studs the story with the acidic, florid dialogue cinephiles and cynics adore him for. Movie writer Jeffrey Wells recently posted a big chunk of one of Tatum's pronouncements as an MP3 on his website, a testimony to his devotion to the picture. The speech is compelled by Tatum's inability to get chopped liver in New Mexico; it begins, "When the history of this sun-baked Siberia is written, these shameful words will live in infamy: 'No chopped chicken livers!' No garlic pickles. No Lindy's. No Madison Square Garden. No Yogi Berra…" And on it goes. It's great stuff, but, really, does anybody actually talk like this? Did anybody talk like this even in 1951? No, of course not, and that's the point. As prescient and trenchant as Ace in the Hole is, it's not exactly a "realist" picture. Rather, it's a super-sour slice of American Gothic, a glorious caricature.

Criterion's package is just about everything Ace lovers could have wished, and more. A superb, razor-sharp version of the film, with a dry but informative and thorough commentary by Wilder scholar Neil Sinyard. A second disc features an engaging 1980 documentary on Wilder, Portrait of a 60% Perfect Man, in which formidable critic Michel Ciment interviews the director. There are a few additional archival interviews and a nice afterword from Spike Lee, who speaks of his admiration for the picture (which he once tried to remake) and shows off his lobby card for the retitled version, signed by both Wilder and Douglas.

Criterion's sister label Eclipse today released the fourth set in its series of underappreciated films, this one focusing on French director Raymond Bernard, whose career began with the silents. One could describe Bernard as a realist with expressionist accents; the two films here, a WWI drama Wooden Crosses and an epic, three-part adaptation of Hugo's Les Miserables, are from the early '30s and add some ammunition to the argument countering the myth that the introduction of sound hobbled visual innovation and fluidity in film. Both these pictures are powerful and passionate; Wooden Crosses in particular is an anti-war film to stand aside the 1930 classic All Quiet on the Western Front.