Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain! was one of last year’s highlights, a kaleidoscopic, psychosexual Super-8 odyssey about a mysterious island’s dark past, involving teen detectives, weird experiments and lots of very funny nods to filmmaking’s silent era. It’s great to see that this wonderfully weird film is now out on DVD, and on a Criterion edition disc, no less, surely the North American gold standard for cult and classic films.

One of the drawbacks of the film’s theatrical release was the loss of the live narration and sound effects that enhanced its festival appearances. The DVD makes up for that with multiple narration tracks by the likes of Isabella Rossellini, Laurie Anderson, Crispin Glover, Eli Wallach and Maddin himself. There’s also a making-of doc and two new Maddin shorts, It’s My Mother’s Birthday and Footsteps. Let’s hope My Winnipeg gets this kind of fancy treatment as well.

Yes, yes, yes, we’ve all heard and said it a million times: The Wire was the best show ever. But it really was, and that’s evident even in the show’s fifth, final and weakest season, now out on DVD. Continuing the show’s crime narrative while adding a new dimension in the form of the Baltimore Sun newsroom, season five’s writing wasn’t quite as strong as its predecessors (especially the absolutely brilliant season four), but it was still better than pretty much anything else on TV at the same time, excepting The Sopranos, and it deserves to be seen through to the end.

Meerkats aren’t mere cats; they’re actually a type of highly socialized mongoose, and they’re the subject of Animal Planet International’s popular and very charming Meerkat Manor, which follows a real-life gang of the animals, who stand on their hind legs to great comic effect, and whose lives play out like real-life dramas. At times both silly and serious, this is a very entertaining take on the traditional animal-watching nature show and it’s now out on DVD.