To be released tomorrow on DVD

Those who fail to learn from history should repeatedly watch films like Vincere. The untold story of how fascist strongman Benito Mussolini rose to power by trampling on the woman who loved him is a bracingly cinematic lesson in how all politics is personal.

Fascism is an extreme right-wing philosophy, an alliance between government force and corporate power. That’s why the Italian socialists shun the brash young Mussolini (Filippo Timi), who repudiates Catholicism, advocates racial purity and agitates for his nation’s entry into World War I. Director Marco Bellocchio dramatizes the right-left divide in a scene in which fascists and socialists snipe at each other across a movie theater aisle while watching a war newsreel.

The propaganda value of images is a recurring motif. It’s straight out of a silent melodrama that Mussolini marches into a battle as an adoring woman named Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) ties his shoes. Dalser was an Austro-Italian who financed Mussolini’s newspaper and bore him a son. For years, she proclaimed that she and the Italian dictator had been secretly married. Vincere is as much the story of this long-forgotten woman as it is Mussolini’s.

While convalescing from battle wounds, Mussolini marries a peasant woman named Rachel Guidi. As Mussolini consolidates his power with speeches about resurrecting the Roman Empire, Rachel becomes the model of the silent fascist wife, while the volatile Dalser is erased from Il Duce’s dossier. Dalser is separated from her infant son and sent to a series of mental institutions, yet she refuses to renounce her claims. Through barred windows and over asylum walls, she continually flings letters to the authorities, including the Pope and the king of Italy.

Mezzogiorno is almost fascistically focused as the undeterred Dalser, while Timi is remarkably protean, playing both the magnetic Mussolini and the grown son who goes mad in the shadow of his estranged father.

Vincere, which translates as the battle cry “Win!,” is like invisible ink on the ledger of war, a secret record of love and loss. Grade: A

Other recent movies to be released on DVD tomorrow:

Clash of the Titans (2010) If he is to save the life of the beautiful Princess Andromeda (Alexa Davalos), the valiant Perseus (Sam Worthington) — born to a god but raised as a man — must lead a team of intrepid warriors on a quest to battle a host of powerful, beastly enemies. Clanging swords, thundering gods, shrieking monsters — about all that’s missing from the self-consciously kitsch retread of Clash of the Titans is Laurence Olivier pitching a fit in a toga. If you don’t remember the original 1981 film or the myth, not to worry: there are titans, they clash. Along the way Perseus triumphs, and a villainess loses her head, though by the time that happens, you might wish the reverse were true. The remake doesn’t as much improve on the original as match it goofily amusing moment for moment. The director Louis Leterrier, who started out working for the French producer Luc Besson (Unleashed) before graduating to bigger-budgeted junk (The Incredible Hulk), brings nothing new or noteworthy to Clash of the Titans. The characters, including the inevitably valiant warriors who aide Perseus during his computer-assisted adventures, are as predictable as the action scenes, which is what some companies want when they manufacture global products of this type. But enough of the myth remains to keep your eyes open, as do some of the performances — Ralph Fiennes earns his pay — even when the frenetic editing at times pitches the movie into near visual incoherence. The finale, which lurches among locations, destroys all notion of time, space and sense. Grade: D-plus

Repo Men (2010) In the futuristic world of this film, humans have extended and improved lives through highly sophisticated and expensive mechanical organs created by a company called The Union. The dark side of these medical breakthroughs is that if you don’t pay your bill, The Union sends its highly skilled repo men to take back its property with no concern for the recipient’s comfort or survival. The first third or so of Repo Men is good-natured, albeit in a sick way, and the movie works so hard at having a style that you might be momentarily distracted from the fact that there’s no real story here -- at least not one worth following. The script, by Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner (adapted from Garcia’s novel The Repossession Mambo), devolves into a ho-hum narrative of deception and betrayal, with a handy surprise twist at the end. If you squint hard enough, Repo Men might be read as a treatise on the ruthlessness of the American healthcare system — but that’s a stretch. Mostly, newcomer director Miguel Sapochnik borrows gimmicky editing techniques from movies like Trainspotting (he was, incidentally, a member of that movie’s art department) and in general betrays a fanboyish enthusiasm for pictures like Fight Club and anything made by Guy Ritchie. But Repo Men isn’t even flashy enough to be engaging: Its action sequences are disjointed and dimly lit. There’s no passion in them — they clank but never dazzle. Sapochnik tosses in some camp touches for fun, scoring one of the ruthlessly efficient organ-harvesting forays to Rosemary Clooney’s Sway, for example. But he doesn’t have the light touch this kind of grisly-funny violence requires. Everything in Repo Men feels belabored and overworked, except, perhaps, the performances. Those have been pretty much tossed off: Jude Law squints, scowls and flexes his exceedingly obvious muscles, but he barely seems connected to the story Sapochnik is trying to tell, much less committed to it. And while Liev Schreiber might have made a devilishly slick bad guy, he has so little to do here that his presence barely registers. Repo Men could have been a sick little number laced with disreputable thrills. Instead, it’s a self-conscious exercise that keeps advertising its stylishness without actually having any. All of its vital organs are missing in action. Grade: D