Artificial Eye, cert 18, rental and retail Lars von Trier’s latest shocker is extremely beautiful in places. Its black and white opening, shot with digital cameras at 1,000 frames per second, indelibly records the death of the young son of Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, falling out of the window in the snow while his parents are having sex. The rest of the film is in three sections …
Studio’s plan to bring forward UK DVD release date for the Pixar film blocked by British cinema owners Kids in Britain won’t be getting Pixar’s Up in their Christmas stockings this year following a clash between Disney and UK cinema owners. Last month, Disney decided to bring forward the DVD release of Up from 15 February to December
Inglourious Basterds DVD & Blu-ray, Universal It’s taken a decade for this to arrive (no time wasted on spellcheck, though), and Quentin Tarantino’s epic second world war romp is the best thing he’s done in ages. It’s deceptively Tarantino-esque; just because it’s a period piece doesn’t mean he skimps on his trademark pop-culture references. It’s just that here he geeks out not on Les Big Macs …
The DVD/Blu-ray box set of the year has to be the Alien Collection (20th Century Fox), due in no small part to the fact that it’ll probably take you a year to get through all the incredible extras and alternate edits.
Artificial Eye, rental and retail Andrea Arnold’s uncompromising Âsecond feature film, which has more in common with her Oscar-winning short film Wasp (included with the DVD) than her feature debut, Red Road. Debutant Katie Jarvis is in virtually every scene as the elder daughter of a feckless mother in an Essex tower block.
A Serious Man DVD & Blu-ray, Universal Refreshing to see the Coen brothers are still in love with making movies enough to ditch their big star casts and large budgets every now and then – you couldn’t imagine someone like Martin Scorsese pulling a similar move. This isn’t a film with what you’d call massive commercial potential, but then great films seldom are. It starts with a non-sequitur, a …
Anne Billson on the most tasteless and inappropriate DVD cover ever
The Exiles DVD, BFI In 1961 British-born director Kent Mackenzie made The Exiles, one of the first films to show the lives of Native Americans.
E1 Entertainment, cert 15, retail It’s about dolphins, but beware, there’s nothing cuddly to see here, and anyone with an interest in animals will be angry and sad at the end of this documentary about Taiji, Japan, described as “kind of like the Twilight Zone” in that it has a hidden bay with a shocking secret. Central figure Ric O’Barry is a longtime dolphin trainer who worked on the TV series …
After the intensity of Shane Meadows’ last two features, Dead Man’s Shoes and This Is England, this feels like a small holiday project. Tomo (Thomas Turgoose) is a teen escaping a bad home life and a refugee of sorts; he meets a genuine one in Polish teen Marek (Piotr Jagiello), left to his own devices while his father works on the St Pancras redevelopment (Eurostar was the main financier). The …