One of my favourite transitions in any movie is the scene in Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel when the aristocratic guests at a dinner party begin to overstay their welcome; lounging around the salon, they start to lie down on the floor, curl up on the divans, fall asleep. “Aren’t they going a bit far,” one woman complains, “taking off their tuxedo jackets?” No one quite notices it at first, but they eventually realize that they can’t leave; it’s the party that literally won’t end.

It’s a strange, surrealist and completely brilliant film that gets better with every viewing, so it’s great to see it finally released on DVD, courtesy (not surprisingly) of Criterion. They’ve put together a two-disc set; the first contains the film, with a new subtitle translation, and the second features a new documentary about Buñuel. Included is a booklet with a ’70s-era interview with the eloquent director (incidentally, his memoir, My Last Sigh, is a must-read if you have even a passing interest in the man, his works or his times).

A very different kind of surrealism is on display in Summer Heights High, an Australian comedy series imported by HBO and now available on DVD. The show, in a mock-documentary format, is a portrait of a typical-seeming high school focusing on three characters in particular: a troubled bully, a flamboyant drama teacher and a hot, bitchy private-school student at the school for a term on an exchange program.

The thing is, while everyone else in the series is played by an appropriately-cast actor, the three main characters are all played by the same guy, the show’s writer, Chris Lilley, who pulls off the trick of being a 30-something guy acting like a 15-year-old girl disturbingly well. (It helps that everyone else in the cast plays it completely straight.) A truly strange and extremely funny show with shades of Christopher Guest, only a lot weirder.