The Gladiators/Edvard Munch ($29.95 DVD) New Yorker's invaluable series of Peter Watkins continues with two more features from a long-overlooked director who's finally getting his due. Gladiators, filmed in 1969, is clearly a transitional work on the way to Watkins' brilliant Punishment Park, but the notion of a live-fire competition staged between the world's nations for the sake of burning off their bellicose impulses is a brilliant idea that has even more traction in the era of reality TV bloodbaths and video-game war. Generals cozily eat pasta and discuss strategy, while out in the field, their troops, surveyed by an endless network of hidden cameras, race toward unknown and possibly illusory goals. A giant computer oversees all, predicting outcomes with chilling accuracy; Watkins' narrator informs us that a given soldier will die in a matter of minutes, and we watch with sick certainty until he does. An unmodulated leftist, Watkins rarely settles for mere scolding in his films (unlike the published statements he issues instead of doing interviews), and The Gladiators strikes deepest with a telling twist. It's not the long-haired French saboteur who poses the greatest threat to the machine (a suggestion that must have seemed heretical in 1969), but an act of simple kindness that jeopardizes the ingrained antagonism on which the whole game is founded.

Edvard Munch, released in 1974, is Watkins' flat-out masterpiece, combining his fondness for working with nonprofessional actors who compose their own dialogue and his deftness at untangling the strands of culture and politics. Although largely lacking the political edge that characterizes Watkins' explicitly radical oeuvre, Munch brings the same understanding of the link between history, culture and the self. As Munch's canvases grow darker and more frenzied, the narrator points to ongoing traumas in Munch's life as well as the contemporaneous births of Hitler and Goering. As in his most recent work, La Commune (Paris, 1871), Watkins restages historical conflicts with nonactors, rendering old debates—in this case, over the validity of Munch's decidedly unpretty art—with stunning immediacy. When Munch scrapes away at the canvas, Watkins amplifies the sound to a low rumble. It's as if his palette knife has struck bone.