The Cuban Masterworks Collection

This five-disc set offers a quintet of rarely seen Cuban features considered classics in their home country, but barely known elsewhere. The most accessible is Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's (the only Cuban director with an international reputation, based on Death of a Bureaucrat and the Oscar-nominated Strawberry & Chocolate) mildly amusing 1962 adaptation of The Twelve Chairs, which shifted the setting of the beloved Russian comic novel to Cuba, and is more subtle and subdued than Mel Brooks' 1970 frenetic slapstick farce version. The other four “masterworks” aren't particularly memorable. Two from Humberto Solás offer telenovela-worthy costume melodrama: Cecilia (1981), which serves up an interracial romance in an 18th-century colonial setting, and Amada (1982), which spins a love triangle among Havana's bourgeois, circa 1914. A third Solás effort, A Successful Man (1986), is a fairly dull generation-spanning epic of a Cuban family's sociopolitical turmoil. Rounding out the set, Julio Garcia Espinosa's The Adventures of Juan Quin Quin (1967) is a rare attempt to poke fun at Castro's revolution, following a bumbler through a series of jobs before he ends up as a guerrilla leader. If anything, this uneven collection is a reminder of why Cuba is not considered a prime force in global cinema. DVD extras include short films, featurettes, interviews, photo galleries, and text bios and filmographies. Optional. (P. Hall)