Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Criterion Collection

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's wildly controversial fifteen-hour-plus Berlin Alexanderplatz, based on Alfred Doblin's great modernist novel, was the crowning achievement of a prolific director who, at age thirty-four, had already made forty films. Fassbinder's immersive epic, restored in 2006 and available on DVD in this country for the first time, follows the hulking, violent, yet strangely childlike ex-convict Franz Biberkopf (Gunter Lamprecht) as he attempts to "become an honest soul" amidst the corrosive urban landscape of Weimar-era Germany. With equal parts cynicism and humanity, Fassbinder details a mammoth portrait of a common man struggling to survive in a viciously uncommon time.