This week, we begin in Germany:

Sony Pictures Classics

Leonard Proxauf plays Martin, a pastor’s son, in The White Ribbon. The black-and-white 2009 movie will be released on DVD on Tuesday.

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The White Ribbon (****) Few movies wield the power to disturb like this Oscar-nominated (best foreign-language film and best cinematography) opus from Michael Haneke (Caché). In a small village in northern Germany before the outbreak of World War I, one by one the town’s children go missing. Guilt falls everywhere and on everyone, as Haneke craftily weaves his tale of building menace.

Rated R, 144 minutes. Coming Tuesday to DVD.

The DVD, also on Blu-ray, holds a 38-minute “making of” featurette, a 14-minute interview with Haneke, and “My Life,” an excellent, comprehensive 50-minute look at Haneke’s career.

*

Night Train to Munich (***1/2) The Criterion Collection has rescued and restored an overlooked gem from one of England’s cinematic masters. Expert craftsman Carol Reed made this espionage thriller earlier in the 1940s than his two masterpieces, Odd Man Out and the sublime The Third Man. Night Train was released just as England went to war with Germany, giving the film license to vilify the odious Nazis seen in the film. Thirty-one-year-old Rex Harrison adorns three personas as he helps rescue a Czechoslovakian father and daughter (Margaret Lockwood) from Nazi capture. Harrison impersonates a German officer in one guise in the often far-fetched script from the legendary writing team of Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder. Reed excelled in technical story construction, keeping his scenes brief and his narratives swiftly moving.

Not rated, 90 minutes.

The DVD includes a 12-page booklet about the film and its restoration from historian Philip Kemp. Plus, a 30-minute featurette has film scholars Peter Evans and Bruce Babington discussing the film and Reed, with plenty of clips from other films.

*

Overture Films

Timothy Olyphant stars in The Crazies as the sheriff in a small town where toxic water turns residents crazy and homicidal.

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The Crazies (***) In this well-paced horror film by director Breck Eisner (who can now be forgiven for Sahara), Timothy Olyphant (Hitman, Justified) plays David Dutton, a small-town sheriff in the Midwest caught in the middle of a place going, well, crazy. A mysterious toxin seeps into the local water supply, setting off a chain of events in which the town’s inhabitants gradually succumb to the ravages of the poison. Government squads move in, everyone is quarantined and Dutton and his wife (Radha Mitchell) are left to fight for survival in the middle of the crazies in this often-chilling film.

Rated R, 101 minutes.

The DVD comes loaded with extras, including director commentary; an 11-minute behind-the-scenes featurette; two comic episodes; featurettes on special effects (13 minutes), Rob Hall’s makeup work (11 minutes), “Paranormal Pandemics” (10 minutes) and George Romero (10 minutes), who wrote and directed the 1973 original; trailers and TV spots; and more.

*

Hot Tub Time Machine (**1/2) This guilty pleasure revels in its bad clothes, bad hair and bad everything, as it relies on an inexplicable gimmick that whisks three disaffected middle-age guys (John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson) and a teenager named Jacob (Clark Duke) back to the 1980s when the three adults once spent a weekend at a ski resort. There, they all had sexual escapades, but one resulted in the birth of Jacob. So, everyone must re-create the weekend — with the same women, same mistakes and same fights — so that Jacob can eventually be born. It makes no sense and shouldn’t, but it is loopy fun — aided further by Crispin Glover’s one-armed bellboy and Chevy Chase’s hot tub repairman. The film was directed by Steve Pink from Josh Heald and Sean Anders’ screenplay.

Rated R, 99 minutes.

The DVD, also on Blu-ray, comes with the theatrical and unrated (slightly longer) versions. Also included are 12 minutes of deleted scenes. The Blu-ray version comes with a digital copy of the unrated version.

*

Several television series prepare for their new summer seasons by releasing collections of their most recent seasons:

Two Syfy series demonstrate how impressive, computer-generated special effects once reserved for big-budget Hollywood movies are now being incorporated into weekly TV shows.

Warehouse 13 — Season One In the premiere season’s 12 episodes, including the pilot, on three discs, Eddie McClintock and Joanne Kelly play Pete and Myka, two Secret Service agents who find themselves reassigned to a huge warehouse in South Dakota. There, they work under eccentric Artie (Saul Rubinek), who oversees a Smithsonian-size vault filled with various artifacts from the nation’s past — all connected somehow to one of the adventures to which he weekly dispatches Pete and Myka.

Not rated, 569 minutes.

The DVD includes commentaries, deleted scenes for each episode, and featurettes on the “Dark Vault,” Artie, the cast and the show’s creation.

Eureka — Season 3.5 In the scientific utopia of the small town of Eureka, everyone seems to work for the same big tech company. Colin Ferguson stars as Jack Carter, the likable sheriff who has acquired impressive scientific knowledge. But this season he develops a romance with a visiting scientist (Jaime Ray Newman). Every week, the town and company face some strange disaster — such as the town freezing over — that can only be explained by a barrage of meaningless pseudo-scientific jargon.

Not rated, 438 minutes.

These 10 episodes are the second half of the show’s third season. They come on two discs, with deleted scenes and commentaries

*

The Closer — The Complete Fifth Season One of cable’s most enduring hits continues to plug along, with 15 episodes on four discs. Kyra Sedgwick plays Brenda Leigh Johnson, the Los Angeles Police Department’s deputy chief of homicide, whose syrupy Georgia accent makes her sound like the quintessential hick until she pounces on unsuspecting killers. In every episode, Johnson weaves her web around miscreants who mistakenly think they are in the clear.

Not rated, 646 minutes.

The DVD includes unaired scenes, a gag reel and a featurette on the show’s Los Angeles locales.

*

Also this week: Creation; When You’re Strange: A Film About The Doors; Leave It To Beaver — The Complete Series; Mad About You — The Complete Fourth Season.

DR. BOO ALLEN is an award-winning film critic for the Denton Record-Chronicle.