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New DVDs/downloads: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's tragic 'Penance,' Jack Klugman as 'Quincy, M.E.'

Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) has for three decades crafted some of the most accomplished horror and suspense stories in Japanese cinema. Spare, with minimal use of special effects and great acting, The Cure (1997), Seance (1999), and Pulse (2000) incite unease and terror in viewers through controlled pacing and atmosphere.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) has for three decades crafted some of the most accomplished horror and suspense stories in Japanese cinema. Spare, with minimal use of special effects and great acting,

The Cure

(1997),

Seance

(1999), and

Pulse

(2000) incite unease and terror in viewers through controlled pacing and atmosphere.

Kurosawa became a critic's darling in North America with 2008's Tokyo Sonata, a brilliant deconstruction of the role of the husband and father in the Japanese family.

Penance, a five-hour mini-series released Tuesday on disc, marks another high point in the director's career. An ambitious project, it follows the entire lives of four women, beginning in childhood when their fates became inextricably entwined after a horrific tragedy.

The story opens on a lovely scene: Five young girls play in a well-kept playground in a quiet, cozy, and well-ordered small town. Then a mysterious stranger abducts and murders one of them.

The survivors are confronted by the victim's mother, who demands they help find the killer - or pay a debt of penance. The following four hours follow each girl as she grows up in the shadow of this tragedy.

"When five tragic paths converged," Kurosawa writes in his director's statement, "I pictured a flowing, inevitable force called fate."

He adds, "I may have captured true tragedy for the first time in my life."

(www.musicboxfilms.com; $29.95 DVD; $34.95 Blu-ray; not rated)

Other titles of note

Quincy, M.E.: Season 7. Body of Proof, Crossing Jordan, CSI - and frankly the entire forensic mystery genre - owe a great debt to Jack Klugman, who single-handedly made autopsies cool in NBC's hit procedural, which ran from 1976 to 1983. What made Quincy so successful as a crime solver? He was so incredibly annoying, so pushy, and so ornery he wore down witnesses and bad guys alike. (www.shoutfactory.com; $29.99. not rated)

Trouble Every Day. Long unavailable in America, Claire Denis' intense, disturbing 2001 film explores vampirism in a way only the French auteur could. Starring Vincent Gallo, Béatrice Dalle, and Tricia Vessey, the film pulls no punches in its depiction of blood-and-sex lust and addiction. (www.kimstim.com; $26.99; not rated)

I Am Ali. Muhammad Ali's family and friends gave filmmaker Clare Lewins unprecedented access to the boxer's personal audio diaries and to other archival material for this exhaustive documentary. (www.universalstudiosentertainment.com; $19.98 DVD; $26.98 Blu-ray; rated PG)

Getting On: The Complete First Season. Based on a British show of the same name, HBO's well-reviewed sitcom is a dark, dark affair set in a women's extended-care unit in California. Laurie Metcalf, Alex Borstein, and Niecy Nash star as health-care professionals whose souls are slowly being crushed by the harsh realities they face every day. (http://store.hbo.com/; $29.98 DVD; $39.98 Blu-ray; not rated)

Unit One: Series 1, 2 & 3. All 32 episodes of this terrific Danish crime drama are now available in three separate volumes from MHz Networks. Starring Mads Mikkelsen, it's about an elite squad of detectives who are sent around Denmark to solve murders the local police can't handle. All the cases are real; scripts were written using police and court records. (www.mhznetworks.org; $39.95 for each set; not rated)