Some welcome optimism from America’s greatest living movie critic here on my favourite subject: the way DVDs are changing movies. Surely the biggest factoid of the year is that, as the editor of Sight & Sound has said, theatrical releases are now seen in the biz as ‘loss-leaders’ for the versatile discs. The second half of Rosenbaum’s piece is endearingly blog-like, being a list of ‘import DVDs I have enjoyed’. (No doubt the Chicago Reader‘s lawyers enforced such delightful anachronisms as: ‘Reportedly there are also ways to “hack” some single-region players into multiregional ones, but you’ll have to look elsewhere for advice on how to do that.’) But the key line here, which ties in nicely with — by contradicting — J-Ro’s consistent stance on how the corporate marketplace is marginalizing ‘difficult’ product, is: ‘We’re rapidly approaching a time when anyone living anywhere in the world can theoretically enjoy access to the canon of world cinema once reserved for film students in world capitals like New York or Paris.’ DYS readers may flinch at the c-word there, and the argument may well resemble ‘free-market’ ideology, but for me the shift has been an incredible liberation.