DVDS ADULTERY - IT TENDS TO GET COMPLICATED.

Byline: Rob Lowman

Entertainment Editor

Ah, fidelity, it's a (fill in your own word).

In different ways but in thoughtful manners, "The Painted Veil" and "Breaking and Entering" address the sensitive subject.

Adapted from the W. Somerset Maugham novel, "The Painted Veil" is set in the China of the 1920s that is suffering from political unrest and disease. Naomi Watts and Edward Norton play an unhappy British couple, Walter and Kitty. He's a doctor, whom she has married in an impulsive gesture, who has been posted to Shanghai. Not in love with her husband and feeling stifled, she falls for a charming married man (Liev Schreiber) there. When Walter discovers the affair (he is livid but controlled), he takes Kitty to a remote area in China to battle a cholera epidemic.

In the lush green countryside, Kitty discovers something worthwhile in her stuffy (he's a Brit raised in the Victorian era, after all), serious husband, and intimacy slowly grows.

And director John Curran gives both the actors and the story plenty of room to grow. Perhaps too much. The film is slow at times, but the actors and gorgeous scenery breathe life into it. Watts and Norton are marvelous at projecting deep emotions with small gestures. It's on their performances that the film turns as the couple grapples with the betrayal, one that signals a beginning rather than an end -- and that's what gives "Veil" its resonance.

In Anthony Minghella's "Breaking and Entering," Jude Law plays Will, a successful London architect who discovers the identity of a thief, a teen, who has broken into his office.

That leads him to the apartment of the young burglar's attractive mother -- Amira (Juliette Binoche), a struggling Bosnian immigrant -- with whom Will begins an affair. At home, Will lives with girlfriend Liv (Robin Wright Penn), a half-Swedish woman with a 13-year-old autistic daughter, Bea (Poppy Rogers).

While "Breaking" also deals with widening economic disparities in Britain, the film, like "Veil," uses the betrayal, in a sense, as a starting point. Instead of wallowing in guilt and recriminations, the films seem to be saying, an emotional crisis can be a wake-up call to new possibilities.

'Fur'

The strange "Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Dian Arbus" is another of Nicole Kidman's odd film choices of late. The tall, fair-skinned Oscar winner bears no resemblance to the short, dark-haired photographer, although like Virginia Woolf (another famous artist Kidman has played), Arbus did herself in with pills -- and making sure by slitting her wrists.

But "Fur," as it says, is an "imaginary portrait." The title refers to the ermine that kept her clothing-store family in money and which she photographed on slinky models and her hairy New York City apartment-house neighbor Lionel (Robert Downey Jr. under Stan Winston makeup). It is the relationship between Diane and the former circus freak that this imaginary portrait says liberated Arbus to wander the city after dark photographing the "freaks" -- or, if not freaks, the freakiness of life.

Can you buy into this? Well, only to a small degree. It overlooks the fact (as if her talents needed no refinement) that Arbus studied with some top-notch photographers, and it slithers by her mental state (plying instead that romantic notion of creativity and madness going hand in hand).

Perhaps if the film had been more liberated itself, it would have had more flashes of inspiration.

And in the two-degrees-of-separation world: Photographer and actor Allan Arbus -- Diane's husband (played in the film by Ty Burrell), who many people know from his role on the TV series "M*A*S*H" -- starred in the 1972 cult satiric film "Greaser's Palace," which was directed by Robert Downey Sr. and in which young Jr. has an uncredited role.

MORE NEW FILMS

"Catch and Release" is a lightweight romantic comedy that -- in keeping with the fishing term of the title -- fails to hook you in the end. The first directorial effort by Susannah Grant (the screenwriter of "Charlotte's Web," "Erin Brockovich" and "In Her Shoes"), "Catch and Release" stars Jennifer Garner as a young woman named Gray who is shellshocked by the accidental death of her fiance on the eve of their wedding.

Forced because of financial reasons to move in with her fiance's friends Sam (Kevin Smith), Dennis (Sam Jaeger) and visiting Fritz (Timothy Olyphant), Gray discovers things about herself and her dead fiance that she didn't know. To her credit, Grant tries to avoid the usual romantic-comedy cliches in this pleasant-enough film, but in doing so never gives it much emotional impact.

Even less successful as a romantic comedy is "Because I Said So," in which Diane Keaton plays a mother intent on finding Mr. Right (her version, anyway -- a wealthy architect played by Tom Everett Scott) for her youngest daughter (Mandy Moore), who's already dating Mr. Wrong (in her mother's eyes), a musician played by Gabriel Macht. Complications ensue, but few of them result in laughs, and the so-called romantic lessons are obvious.

Faring better is "Music and Lyrics," which stars Hugh Grant as a fading '80s pop star, Alex, whose career is getting a boost from a current hot pop tart who wants him to write a tune for her. Not much of a lyricist, help comes in the way of Sophie (Drew Barrymore), a literary type whose ex-boyfriend (Campell Scott) has put a sad-sack character based on her in his best-selling book. The stars could play these roles in their sleep, especially Grant, although he's no Cary -- see below).

Luckily, Hugh has managed to create an amusing film persona (a stammer here, an awkward pause there), and Barrymore has the "I'm adorable but don't know it" shtick down cold. Writer and director Marc Lawrence ("Two Weeks Notice," also with Grant) throws in funny takeoffs of MTV-style videos to keep things moving, if not make them memorable.

OLDER FILMS

"To Catch a Thief" may not have been Alfred Hitchcock's deepest film, but it is a delightfully entertaining souffle, with Cary Grant at his suavest and Grace Kelly at her coolest in the story of a reformed cat burglar who's suspected of heisting some jewels. The French Riviera and Kelly, playing an heiress with a naughty side, supply the scenery. The new special edition of the 1955 film has commentary by the always witty filmmaker and film historian Peter Bogdanovich and documentarian Laurent Bouzereau.

TV

The thing you may have forgotten about the first season of "Cagney & Lacey" is that -- far from making an impact on the American TV landscape for being the first female-buddy cop show -- it was canceled.

It took a write-in campaign and an Emmy in 1982 to bring it back. "Cagney & Lacey" had had a circuitous birth, anyway. It started as a TV movie and went through casting changes before settling on Sharon Gless as the single, more attractive Chris Cagney over Meg Foster, who was deemed too tough. The show's feminist aspects were also toned down, focusing more on the personal lives of Cagney and married mother Mary Beth Lacey (Tyne Daley).

The 22 first-season episodes featuring Gless and Daly are on the DVD set, along with a documentary about the show.

Other notable releases:

"Celebration of Gospel -- Taking You Higher!," a spirited BET special featuring Yolanda Adams, Pastor Shirley Caesar, Coko, Fantasia and Kirk Franklin; and USA's sci-fi series "The 4400 -- The Complete Third Season," which digs deeper into the mystery of those returnees with special powers who had been abducted by aliens.

Rob Lowman [phone]

[e-mail]

NEW FILMS

"The Painted Veil" (Warner; $27.95)

"Breaking and Entering" (Weinstein; $28.95)

"Catch & Release" (Columbia; $28.95 DVD, $38.96 Blu-ray)

"Music and Lyrics" (Warner; $28.98)

"Because I Said So" (Universal; $29.98)

"Fur -- An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus" (New Line; $27.98)

"Deliver Us From Evil" (Lionsgate; $27.98)

"The Secret Life of Words" (Universal; $29.98)

"Into the Great Silence" (Metropole; $81.49)

"Comedy of Power" (Koch Lorber; $29.98)

TELEVISION

"Celebration of Gospel -- Taking You Higher!" (Paramount; $19.99)

"Battlestar Galactica -- Seasons 2.0 & 2.5" (Universal; $69.98)

"The Waltons -- The Complete Fifth Season" (Warner; $39.98)

"The 4400 -- The Complete Third Season" (Paramount; $38.99)

"Everybody Loves Raymond -- The Complete Eighth Season " (HBO; $44.98)

"Cagney & Lacey -- Season 1" (MGM; $39.98)

"That '70s Show -- Season 6" (Fox; $49.98)

"Daniel Boone -- Season Three" (Goldhil; $49.98)

"McLeod's Daughters -- Complete Second Season" (Koch; $59.98)

"Clatterford -- Season 1" (BBC Warner; $29.98)

"Little Britain Live" (BBC Warner; $24.98)

"House M.D. -- Seasons One & Two" (Universal; $69.98)

"National Geographic: In the Womb" (National Geographic; $19.99)

"American Experience -- Summer of Love" (PBS; $24.99)

SPECIAL INTEREST

"The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success" (Fox; $19.98)

"You on a Diet With Dr. Michael Roizen" (DPTV; $16.98)

"Self: Dance Your Way Slim" (Koch; $14.98)

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1) Naomi Watts and Edward Norton star in "The Painted Veil," set in 1920s China.

(2) "BREAKING AND ENTERING"