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Say hello to a marine gastropod mollusk known as Acera. Fully extended, it's shorter than your little finger. It resembles a creepy sock puppet with a shell at one end, but when floating in the water, with what resembles a billowing white dress, it is as graceful as any ballerina.

That's the tale of Acera, or the Witches' Dance , one of 200 short films made by French scientist-educator Jean Painlevé from the 1920s until the 1980s. Armed with a degree from the Sorbonne in physics, chemistry and biology, and intrigued by the natural world, he spent his life recording the movements of jellyfish, shrimp, vampire bats and any other creatures whose mysteries repaid close scrutiny. The short subjects in Science Is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé , a three-disc DVD on the Criterion label, range from four to 27 minutes. Some are in black and white, some in colour. Some look fine; others could use restoration. Some were made for other scientists; most were made for popular consumption in schools or theatres, in partnership with friend Geneviève Harmon. All couple a serious approach with wry French narration; English subtitles are available, though they block the view.

The scientific bits are not dry. A minuscule creature in the 1960 short How Some Jellyfish Are Born is described as “essentially a stomach attached to the algae by a foot.” As a male seahorse goes through labour, having had 200 eggs deposited in his pouch by the female, “an anguished expression accompanies a rolling of his eyes.” Painlevé is enchanted by these creatures, but he's not sentimental. The delivery of the newborns is interrupted by a shot of a scalpel splitting open a seahorse to indicate how the creature's insides operate.

In 2001, the San Francisco International Film Festival commissioned an instrumental score for eight of Painlevé's films from experimental pop group Yo La Tengo; the result is seen here in a 2005 performance called The Sounds of Science . “A lot of it just seems like compelling abstract art,” guitarist Ira Kaplan says about Painlevé's work, “which, you know, just happens to be done with fish.”

Those not impressed by Yo La Tengo's take can turn to the original scores on these and other films, which are as varied as a trumpet fanfare for 1933's The Sea Horse , Duke Ellington's swing for 1945's The Vampire (about nasty Brazilian bats) and an electronic score by Pierre Henry for 1967's The Love Life of the Octopus , sounding as if it came from a 1950s sci-fi film.

Fans of opera will delight in an atypical offering: the gorgeous 1938 animated short Bluebeard , filmed in stop-motion with clay figures and set to songs written for the film by Maurice Jaubert. (Warning to parents: Clay heads are lopped off and/or skewered.) The third disc is given over to an eight-part French TV series from 1988, in which Painlevé reviews his career over a couple of hours, with copious film clips. There are glimpses of a darker nature, as when he talks of refusing to hire a filmmaker who had accidentally ruined one of his negatives 40 years earlier. The man died of starvation, Painlevé recalls without noticeable distress. Painlevé himself died a year after the series aired, at 86.

BEYOND SPARTACUS

Dalton Trumbo wrote such movies as Spartacus and Exodus , and acquired unwanted fame as one of the Hollywood Ten, writers and directors who were blacklisted in the 1950s by Joe McCarthy's anticommunist congressional committee. But Trumbo was also a novelist, and in 1971, in his only stint as a movie director, he filmed his popular 1939 antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun .

The central character, Joe Bonham (Timothy Bottoms), was in a battlefield explosion. He lies in a military hospital bed, all his limbs amputated, without the power of sight, speech or hearing. In a running interior monologue, he tries to make sense of what has happened to him. The film flips between his colour memories of growing up and going to war and the black-and-white reality of an unfeeling military doctor squaring off against a sympathetic nurse over his treatment.

The film has its weaknesses. Some of the dialogue is delivered flatly; some scenes drag; powerful images are milked too hard. But much of what's here sticks in the mind. Donald Sutherland plays an alternately jovial and despairing Jesus Christ as Joe's memories blend reality and fantasy. In a powerful, surreal scene, young soldiers going off to fight tell each other precisely how and when they will die. “I'm going to get buried in a trench cave-in and smothered to death. Now isn't that a hell of a way to go?” Jason Robards plays Joe's late father and, in Joe's fantasy of how he might re-enter society, a carnival barker promoting the boy in a freak show.

The Shout! Factory DVD contains a documentary on Trumbo and a 1940 radio dramatization with Jimmy Cagney as Joe. In a 2009 interview, Bottoms says John Lennon told him Johnny Got His Gun was his favourite movie. As for Sutherland, Bottoms says, “he's had a good career since then. Most people who play Jesus, their career goes down.”

Also out: Battle in Seattle (2008) recreates the massive 1999 protest against a meeting of the World Trade Organization. In The Hit (1984), Terence Stamp is taken for a ride by hired killers Tim Roth and John Hurt; Roth and Hurt participate in the commentary. And Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson tear each other to pieces in the critically unloved Bride Wars (2008).