Holiday Buying Guide 2008

The German F.W. Murnau was arguably the greatest director in the silent era. Frank Borzage, a Catholic from Salt Lake City, was widely considered the movies' most passionate romantic. At the first Academy Awards presentation, Murnau's Sunrise was voted Best Artistic Production, and Borzage won Best Director of a Drama for Seventh Heaven. These supreme achievements — plus 10 other Borzage and Murnau films, two feature documentaries and a couple of lavishly illustrated books — are collected in this sumptuous box set. If it doesn't quite equal last year's Ford at Fox in weight or archival revelations, it is still an invaluable and entertaining education in the language of early cinema: how eloquently the camera spoke before the actors could.

—Richard Corliss

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