By DEBORAH NICOL & PAUL BRENNER

a·vant-garde (ä´vänt-gärd´) A motion picture that incorporates new or experimental concepts or new and sometimes scandalizing narrative and aesthetic techniques
 

Alice (Neco z Alenky) [First Run]

Czech director Jan Svankmajer achieved his dream of the perfect mixed-media film through the canvas of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland." In 1988's "Alice," Svankmajer utilizes marionettes, stop-motion photography, and live-action characters to create a looking glass world that Carroll would be proud of. Darker than Disney and more creatively pleasing, our title character stalks not a cute, fuzzy, woodland creature, but a rabbit that was killed, stuffed, and comes back to life with the occasional loss of sawdust. Characters range from mischievous skeletons to rooms of hole-digging socks, and the rabbit tunnel is transformed into a writing desk (perhaps answering the question, "Why is a raven like a writing desk?"). DVD extras include the director's clay-squashing short, "Darkness, Light, Darkness." - DN

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Mulholland Drive [Universal]

In the film "F. for Fake," Oja Kodar quizzes Orson Welles by saying, "Up to your old tricks, I see?" Welles replies, "Why not? I'm a charlatan." Oja could just as well be addressing David Lynch with the same question. And Lynch might very well have had the same answer as Welles. "Mulholland Drive" lays it all bare for Lynch. In this nightmarish examination of Hollywood as a "dream place," Lynch cuts loose in a hallucinogenic phantasmagoria that either exposes him as a flimflam artist, or reveals him as a cinema genius capable of surreal poetry. But if he teetered into chicanery with "Lost Highway," "Mulholland Drive" has Lynch reclaiming his status as obscurantist artist. "Drive" is a brutally satiric journey into the bowels of the Hollywood id and its batted human debris -- one can almost envision Lynch smirking behind the camera and in the cutting room. Originally a pilot for a rejected ABC television series, Lynch reworks and ransacks his previously shot source material into an opium den dénouement. Watch it if you have a hankering for the outré and you wish to see a supreme film stylist at the peak of his form. While this Universal release offers sharp image quality and a moody Dolby 5.1 Surround track, the extras are sub-minimal. Although the theatrical trailer is there, the DVD has not even been encoded for chapter stops -- it is hard to determine whether this is a malicious Lynch joke or simply lack of concern on the director's or Universal's part. Also, in a curious biography of David Lynch in the extras, the entire Lynch bio consists of the revelation that Lynch was an Eagle Scout. - Paul Brenner - PB

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