The new box set opens with “No Regrets” and concludes with “I Live in Fear,” Kurosawa’s 1955 attempt to come to terms with the war’s nuclear legacy. Toshiro Mifune, fresh from “The Seven Samurai” but nearly unrecognizable under a mask of old-age makeup, plays an industrialist so terrified by the radiation from the atomic attacks that he decides to move his family to Brazil, but ends up in a mental hospital for his trouble. The bluntly didactic film is far from Kurosawa’s best; it says something about the nature of movies that the subject was treated far more effectively in the pop-metaphorical terms of a monster movie directed a year earlier by Kurosawa’s longtime assistant, Ishiro Honda. The title of that film: “Godzilla.” (Criterion/Eclipse, $69.95, not rated)  Nature red in tooth and claw is the subject of Cornel Wilde’s 1966 “Naked Prey,” which is getting the full-blown Criterion treatment this week: audio commentary by the film scholar Stephen Prince, an essay by the critic Michael Atkinson and an account read by Paul Giamatti of the 1913 incident — a fur trapper’s escape from Blackfoot Indians — that was the inspiration for the screenplay by Don Peters and Clint Johnston.  One suspects that Richard Connell’s often-filmed 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game” was also an influence: In “The Naked Prey,” shot in South Africa and set in the 19th century, Mr. Wilde also stars as the leader of an ivory-hunting safari that runs into trouble with a band of roving tribesmen. The other members of the hunting party are tortured and killed, but Mr. Wilde’s character (identified only as “Man”) is released into the bush, with the leader of the tribe (Ken Gampu) on his trail.  “The Naked Prey” remains the best known of the eight features directed by Mr. Wilde, otherwise remembered as a darkly handsome, somewhat stolid leading man of the 1940s and ’50s (“Leave Her to Heaven,” “The Greatest Show on Earth”). Like Mr. Wilde’s “Beach Red” (1967) and “No Blade of Grass” (1970), “The Naked Prey” burns with Darwinian fury: the struggle between Man and his pursuers is played out in the context of fierce, interspecies predation, much of it courtesy of stock footage far too rough for the Discovery Channel.  Mr. Wilde avoids the sentimental pictorialism that overwhelms so many movies shot on the African continent: the landscape is not the standard “spectacular backdrop” but a living, dangerous presence, buzzing with constant struggle. A boy’s own adventure with a nagging consciousness of death, “The Naked Prey” is a singular achievement that makes you wish Mr. Wilde had caught the directing bug much earlier. (Criterion Collection, $39.95, not rated)  PERSUASION Rupert Penry-Jones and Sally Hawkins star in a new BBC/Masterpiece Theater adaptation of the Jane Austen novel, directed by Adrian Shergold. (BBC/Warner Home Video, $19.98, not rated)  SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT Spike Lee’s debut feature from 1986, about a young woman (Tracy Camilla Johns) spinning among three suitors (one played by Mr. Lee), gets a long overdue DVD release. (MGM DVD, $19.98, R)  SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY The Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (“Blissfully Yours”) imagines the lives of his parents before they were married in this much acclaimed feature from 2006. (Strand Releasing, $27.99, not rated)
“Payday,” the 1973 film about a second-tier country-and-western singer, was released two years before “Nashville” and completely overshadowed by it.