Vanishing Point.

Vanishing Point Directed by Richard C. Sarafian (Fox Home Entertainment) A cool white muscle car guns across the empty plains of the West. The driver, a shaggier, scruffier ringer for Elliott Gould, lets the engine's rumble do most of the talking for him. As his Dodge Challenger growls along the open expanse of highway, the frame freezes on an image of two cars crossing paths. "California-Sunday- 10:02 AM," the screen reads.

That's right, boys and girls?we're in the gonzo epic/car chase flick Vanishing Point, a priceless relic of late 60s/early 70s scuzzball esthetic, newly issued on DVD.

Kowalski (Barry Newman), a one-named man of mystery, is an ex-cop-turned-car-deliverer whose mission is to drive a car from Denver to San Francisco for pickup. Along the way, he attracts the attention of local police, who ignite a cross-country chase for the lawbreaker, while meeting a wide assortment of the lost and the damned.

As with any good outlaw-hero movie, Vanishing Point provides the slow burn of outrage at authoritarianism run amok. In addition, Kowalski's trek across the desert to the promised land of California (which, as always, turns out to be a false paradise) is a journey into the old, weird America?an outpost of snake charmers, holy rollers, mystics and solitary women. Kowalski is assisted in his quixotic journey by Super Soul (Cleavon Little), a blind DJ whose mysterious rantings will be familiar to fans of Primal Scream's excellent, VP-sampling 1997 album Vanishing Point. Super Soul speaks directly to Kowalski over the radio, his musings on the nature of our hero's journey providing ballast for the film's aspirations to pulp grandeur.

Vanishing Point functions as something akin to a first-person video game in which players, placed in the shoes of outlaw for freedom Kowalski, must compete against other drivers, staying out of the hands of the police while avoiding pitfalls, roadblocks and strange obstacles, like a road-painting crew. Director Richard C. Sarafian does the you-are-here, behind-the-wheel sensation better than just about any film this side of Frankenheimer's Ronin. The film's narrative is confused at times (white supremacists attack DJ Super Soul's radio station for no apparent reason; a woman Kowalski meets has clippings of his previous exploits conveniently handy), but the propulsive force of the Challenger's onward motion, and the pleasingly elegiac tone, carry Vanishing Point over such rough patches in the road. The DVD contains both American and British versions of the film; check out the longer British release to see an impossibly young, scandalously beautiful Charlotte Rampling as a mysterious hitchhiker.

Diary of a Country Priest Directed by Robert Bresson (Criterion Collection) Based on the novel by Georges Bernanos, Robert Bresson's third feature film announced the arrival of a talent that seemed out of time. Like the work of Carl Theodor Dreyer and Yasujiro Ozu, two filmmakers to whom Bresson is often compared, Bresson's advocates describe his work as embracing a spiritual truth and timelessness that is more akin to the stability and placidity of pre-Industrial Revolution life than the urgent agnostic bustle of modernity.

And yet, while the spiritual cast of Bresson's work is obvious, what emerges on screening Diary of a Country Priest is its depiction of prewar France, and its close relationship with the "cinema of quality" so reviled by Truffaut and recently resurrected by Bertrand Tavernier's biopic Safe Conduct. In Diary's study of corrupt morals in a small French town, reflections of this forgotten pre-New Wave era of Gallic filmmaking abound, and while Bresson was a greater filmmaker than his contemporaries (with the possible exception of Marcel Carné), he was not distinctly outside the milieu in which they all worked. It is doing Bresson a disservice to render him some medieval artisan, brother to the anonymous icon painters of Byzantium, rather than a modern filmmaker, living in the modern world, who made films about the intersection of the spiritual with the everyday.

Bresson's otherworldly ambiance and spartan filmmaking style render him an acquired taste for some filmgoers. But in his desire to put only what was absolutely necessary onscreen, and to avoid the theatricality of conventional acting by virtue of using untrained "models" (as Bresson dubbed them), he crafted a cinematic model that remains sui generis. Diary of a Country Priest is a powerful study of a young priest's (Claude Laydu) initiation into the complexities of his parishioners' lives. The priest suffers for his own failure to live up to his lofty goals, and for his inability to adequately minister to his congregants. Much like the outstanding acting by non-professionals in the Iranian films of Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, Bresson depended almost entirely on non-actors, and by virtue of their greater malleability, compelled them toward a realistic urgency most actors would be unable to match.

The DVD version of Diary has been given the traditional Criterion treatment, with a marvelously clear transfer of the film's chiaroscuro imagery. Added bonuses include a helpful running commentary by film historian Peter Cowie and an entirely unintelligible essay by Frederic Bonnaud, included in the accompanying booklet. Praise must be given to Criterion for the remarkably attractive packages they turn out for each and every DVD they release, of which Diary of a Country Priest, with its wintry black-and-white motif, is no exception.