New on dvd

tool name

tool name

DVD Picks

Here's a Blu-ray release I've been waiting on for years. " Angel Heart ," the 1987 Mickey Rourke supernatural noir, is one of the great overlooked films of the 1980s. Directed by Alan Parker ("Midnight Express," "Pink Floyd The Wall"), it's a near-perfect genre piece, a cross-pollination of "Chinatown" and "The Exorcist" with terrific location cinematography and one of Mickey Rourke's best performances.

Rourke - in his scruffy, charismatic prime - plays Harry Angel, a small-time private detective haunting New York's mean streets circa 1955. Called to a meeting with a prospective client, Harry finds himself suddenly in the employ of the sinister Mr. Cyphre (Robert De Niro). Cyphre, who likes to meet in churches and eat hard-boiled eggs in a most disturbing fashion, wants Harry to track down a missing person: Johnny Favorite, a B-list Sinatra-type crooner who disappeared after the war.

The film tracks Harry's case in classic noir fashion as he chases leads from Harlem to New Orleans. Trouble is, everyone

'Poor man's Hemingway' lingers

To admirers of North Carolina native Robert Chester Ruark, it's like people 50 years from now saying, "Who's Oprah?"

Ruark was one of the most popular writers in the 1940s and 1950s, penning syndicated columns that ran in hundreds of newspapers and memorable sporting articles for Field & Stream. But 40 years after Ruark's death, his fans say he is underappreciated and nearly forgotten.

"I had read his books and felt that he had not been adequately recognized as a UNC graduate," said Jim Cheatham, a UNC-Chapel Hill undergrad and law alumnus. "We want to make sure he's remembered as an outstanding writer. A lot of his older fans remember him, but the young ones did not."

Correction

A story in Friday's sports section incorrectly reported that the ACC had four College World Series titles, all won by Miami. Miami was not a member of the ACC when it won the titles. Wake Forest won the College World Series in 1955.

Love through three lenses

"Eros" is a collection of three short films by two internationally recognized masters, Italy's Michelangelo Antonioni and Hong Kong's Wong Kar Wai, and an occasionally superior American, Steven Soderbergh.

The assignment was to film a story of each director's choosing on the subject of sex and desire. The outcomes, I'm a bit reluctant to report, run pretty close to archetypal for their respective national cinemas. Boiled down to their primary impressions, the Chinese story is tragic, the American one's neurotic and, after some emphatic arguments about love, the Italian one gets down to the business of buxom nude women jumping up and down.

Wong's "The Hand," dreamily photographed by Asian cinema's favorite Australian, Christopher Doyle, charts the decline of a high-class 1960s courtesan (Gong Li) through the eyes of her young tailor (Chang Chen, the desert brigand from "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"). She gave him his first sexual thrill, then no more than dressmaking business as the years took their

A trip through the '60s, Harvard-style

In the winter of 1960-61, when their lives began to overlap in Cambridge, Mass., Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Andrew Weil and Huston Smith resembled tweedy extras from "Mad Men." These future psychedelic pioneers were still buttoned-down intellectuals and careerists, men who leaned more toward martinis than marijuana.

Leary and Alpert (soon to be known as Ram Dass) taught in Harvard's psychology department. Leary was a charismatic West Point dropout with a doctorate from Berkeley. Alpert was a brilliant lecturer - later in "The Harvard Psychedelic Club," Don Lattin compares him to "a psychedelic Mort Sahl" - and a closeted gay man whose father was president of the New Haven Railroad.

Weil was a chubby Harvard freshman with an interest in botany. (He ultimately would write his undergraduate thesis on "The Use of Nutmeg as a Psychotropic Agent.") Smith, for his part, was a professor of Asian philosophy at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the author of a soon-to-be-classic book called "