Revenge of the nerds: Cambridge Spies and X2: X-Men United, both new on DVD, show how talented outsiders can mess with the status quo.

Cambridge Spies * Written by Peter Moffat * Directed by Tim Fywell * Starring Toby Stephens, Tom Hollander, Rupert Penry-Jones, Samuel West * Warner Home Video * $34.98

X2: X-Men United * Written by Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris, David Hayter * Directed by Bryan Singer * Starring Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellen, Alan Cumming * Fox Home Entertainment * $29.98

The recent BBC miniseries Cambridge Spies tells the kind of story you'd never believe if it weren't true: Four blue-blooded and well-connected graduates of Cambridge, led by their hatred of Hitler and their idealism about communism, become spies for the USSR in the 1930s. Their social status--no one seems to mind that two of them are gay--allows them to climb to high ranks within the Foreign Office, the BBC, and even MI5, until they are eventually found out and forced to flee to Moscow with the authorities at their heels.

It's that real-life story--and not the rather pedestrian script by Peter Moffat--that makes one want to sit. through this four-hour extravaganza. While Tom Hollander's Guy Burgess gets some juicy lines (and pretty much walks away with the whole show), much of the script reads like The 1930s for Dummies, with characters explaining the obvious to each other for the edification of the audience ("There's fascism and communism; everything in between is pure appeasement"). Still, points to the filmmakers for being more unflinching than their American counterparts would be in presenting the gay love lives of Burgess and of fellow spy Anthony Blunt (Samuel West).

And while there's nothing explicitly gay about X2: X-Men United--the casting of Alan Cumming and Sir Ian McKellen notwithstanding--this exhilarating action flick contains one of the cinema's greatest coming-out scenes ever. Granted, Bobby Drake (Shawn Ashmore) is coming out to his parents as a mutant, but you can't have everything. What you can have with X2 is pretty much all that you'd ever want out of a comic book movie--it's smart, it's breathlessly paced, the characters have at least 2 1/2 dimensions, and the action sequences are jaw-droppers, even on the small screen. (The DVD includes a second disc of outtakes, behind the-scenes footage, and other goodies for fans to lap up.) Director Bryan Singer, along with his talented cast and crew, continues to redefine the Big Summer Movie, most daringly through his insistence that these techno epics have a soul.