Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project No. 4 (Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray)

A pair of working-class Budapest roommates have one another's back through their professional and romantic travails, in soon-to-be expatriate André de Toth's Two Girls on the Street (1939). The conscripted labor at a yerba mate plantation may have fatefully had their fill of their sadistic foreman, in Argentine helmer Mario Soffici's social realist saga Prisioneros de la Tierra (1939). Kalpana (1948), the sole directing credit for Indian dancer/star Uday Shankar, finds his bid to open a cultural center striking jealous sparks between his lead performer and his business partner. French West Indies pioneer Sarah Maldoror's 1961-set Sambizanga (1972) follows an Agolan woman's hunt for her husband after his seizure by the Portuguese authorities. A Cameroonian couple face heartbreak when she becomes pregnant and he can't afford the traditional and mandatory dowry, in Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa's Muna Moto (1975).The grasping and dangerous agendas of a Persian family come to light as they wrangle over their matriarch's estate, in Mohammad Reza Aslani's Chess of the Wind (1976). 10 hrs. Total on nine discs.

Rating: NR