Also out… Planet Terror, Transformers, A Mighty Heart, and more.

The first up is Image Entertainment and the National Film Preservation Foundation's box set Treasures III. "Treasures" is short for "Treasures of Early Film," which the first two boxes in this series provided in dizzying abundance. The theme of this four-disc set is "Social Issues in American Film," and the abundance remains dizzying. Anyone needing proof that there's nothing new under the sun need only dip into the films collected here in order to understand that the issues that presently seem to be tearing our nation asunder have always been with us — they've only been articulated in different ways. A 1916 film by Lois Weber (yes, a woman director that far back in the day) called Where Are My Children? takes on the twin-loaded topics of birth control and abortion. Its then "progressive" view of eugenics places it in favor of the former and opposed to the latter. A scene in which a more worldly character accompanies a haplessly pregnant friend to an abortionist's office, and stifles a yawn as her friend is led in for the procedure, is one of those jaw-dropping moments that might make an observer reassess his or her perspective on the "stodginess" of silent films.

The Godless Girl Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer Valentino

Then there's spectacle meister Cecil B. DeMille's 1928 The Godless Girl, in which atheist high-school agitator Lina Basquette and holy roller Tom Keene wind up in adjoining prisons after a school riot, and Lina and cohort Marie Prevost (whose name was later misspelled by Nick Lowe in a song inspired by the actress's grisly death as recounted in Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon) receive cross-shaped quasi-stigmata after clutching an electrocuted fence…as you might infer, words can't do justice to this loopy and, um, charged vision. There's a whole lot more, including a 1906 Mafia miniature called The Black Hand, all of it contextualized with notes and commentaries. Amazing.

Equally amazing is the three-disc set Warners has built around its, and America's, first proper talkie, 1928's The Jazz Singer. Because the film frequently depicts its titular character, star Al Jolson, in minstrelsy black face, the picture is a multi-facetedly vexed issue in these times. Part of the beauty of this set is how sensitively but unostentatiously it contextualizes the film. The commentary on the main feature by Ron Hutchinson and ace musician Vince Giordano is an enlightening window on the hows, whens, and whys pertaining to Jolson's reign as the world's most popular entertainer. There's a doc on the second disc expanding on this, and the third disc consists of shorts that transport us back into the wide world of vaudeville, including a clip of "Baby Rose Marie" when she was really a baby and not a third banana on The Dick Van Dyke Show. All of this, including the priceless Looney Toon "I Love To Singa," is presented with a clarity you've never seen before.

Finally, there's Flicker Alley's compendium Valentino, subtitled "Rediscovering an Icon of American Film." Before Pitt, before Dean, before Gable, before whoever, there was silver-screen heartthrob Rudolph Valentino, a performer whose lack of self-awareness was maybe a part of his charm. This set, containing still-based reconstructions of two of his lost films and vivid renderings of two others, as well as all manner of DVD-presentable documentation and memorabilia, is bracing and entertaining in the same way the other two boxes are — as a reminder that our present peculiar condition is hardly without precedent.