George Bernard Shaw can talk your ear off, but it’s brilliant talk. The Shaw Collection contains 10 plays shot for the British Broadcasting Corp. in the 1970s and 80s, and supplements them with audio addresses by Shaw and, particularly welcome, a 1972 film made for the CBC by writer-director-producer Harry Rasky, The Wit and Wisdom of George Bernard Shaw.

This seems to be Rasky’s year. The recent set Tennessee Williams Film Collection devoted an entire disc to his 1973 film Tennessee Williams’ South, notable both for Williams’s enthusiastic participation and for having Jessica Tandy, who created the role of A Streetcar Named Desire’s Blanche DuBois on Broadway, enact a moving scene from the play. Rasky peppers both films with readings or performances by John Colicos, Barry Morse, Geneviève Bujold and the like, with music by collaborator Lou Applebaum. The Shaw film has Christopher Plummer as host, eerily channelling the vocal delivery of Orson Welles, and adds a few quirky touches, such as a clip from a Japanese-language staging of My Fair Lady, based on Shaw’s Pygmalion. On the phone last week, Rasky noted with regret that the BBC trimmed his Shaw documentary by about 15 minutes, to just under an hour, excising some of the archival clips of Shaw. Question: Why isn’t the CBC itself releasing the Rasky oeuvre?

The Shaw Collection’s treats include Lynn Redgrave as Eliza in Pygmalion, John Gielgud in Heartbreak House, Helena Bonham Carter in Arms and the Man, Patrick Stewart (with flowing locks) and Ian Richardson in The Devil’s Disciple, and Maggie Smith and Tom (about to become Dr. Who) Baker in The Millionairess, a much different animal from the 1960 movie with Sophia Loren and Peter Sellers. Shaw’s voice prevails throughout, always engaged, always argumentative. "I regard much current morality as to economic and sexual relations as disastrously wrong," he is quoted as saying. "I write plays with the deliberate object of converting the nation to my opinion in these matters." En garde!

Three DVDs overseen by director David Lynch and previously available as imports received their official Canadian release this week. Eraserhead (1978), his first feature film, is a fever dream in which the lead character (Jack Nance) must deal, among other hypnotically odd events, with the grotesque baby he and his girlfriend have spawned. The disc includes a 90-minute talk by Lynch that veers from making-of anecdotes to an obsessively detailed recounting of his time at film school. The Short Films of David Lynch is for diehard Lynch-o-philes with the patience to sit through experimental early films, but includes a 26-minute work from 1988 made at the behest of French television, in which cowboys Harry Dean Stanton and Nance lasso a stereotypical Frenchman whose luggage is full of wine, cheese and snails. Dumbland offers eight crudely animated cartoons about the neighbour from hell, an inarticulate misanthrope whose reaction to everything is violence. Lynch’s humour, apparently.

The film of the Broadway musical version of The Producers has Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick reprising their award-winning double act. Atypically, the deleted scenes are really worth seeing — in particular two fully realized six-minute song-and-dance numbers with the marvellous Lane that were cut from the film for length. Director Susan Stroman’s commentary is less successful; she reads it, too quickly, with too much the air of a prepared promo.

John Hazlett’s Canadian film These Girls stars Caroline Dhavernas (who was great in the TV series Wonderfalls), Amanda Walsh (former MuchMusic VJ) and Holly Lewis as young women who insinuate themselves into the bed of a married man (David Boreanaz, star of TV’s Angel). It was panned by the critics, but the DVD has an ingratiating extra — a 40-minute, sometimes giggly discussion by the three female leads on making the film.

Also out: "unrated, extended" editions of three action films produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, Enemy of the State (with Will Smith), Con Air (with Nicolas Cage) and Crimson Tide (the submarine film with Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman), and two excellent archival music DVDs from Eagle Rock Entertainment, which specializes in this sort of thing. Blondie Live 1978 captures Blondie’s performance for German TV of songs from their first two albums. Mike Oldfield Live at Montreux 1981 captures Oldfield and crew, including Maggie Reilly on vocals, promoting his album QE2 but playing lengthy excerpts from Tubular Bells.