DVD, Blu-ray and TV

Ween – Live In Chicago

Though Ween spent over a decade growing into one of America's biggest cult bands, renowned for a live show of bad taste and dizzying chaos, this is a curiously tame, professional fair. Brothers Dean and Gene blow through a lengthy 26-song set with flawless musicianship, but with the passion of a band who know they are knocking on and that the juvenile japes are wearing thin. One for Ween devotees.

Women In Love

The simmering sexuality. The blood lust. The savaging of bourgeois restraint. The horse flagellation. Ken Russell and DH Lawrence were made for each other. The nude wrestling scene is the one that everyone remembers, but the satire bites best in the form of Hermione, Eleanor Bron's caricature of avant-garde pretence. Made in 1969, this is probably the last time Russell showed restraint before he hurtled into kitsch overkill.

What’s New Pussycat?

Definitively 'zany' '60s farce, written by Woody Allen, with Peter O'Toole as a Paris fashion editor inundated with willing, eager ladies. This sends him to mad shrink Peter Sellers, who's jealous. Meanwhile, Allen longs for O'Toole's fiancée. Basically an excuse for thousands of hit-and-miss jokes, strippers, much daft over-acting and Ursula Andress. Fantastic.

Sparks – Li’L Beethoven: Live In Stockholm

Recorded in March, this is the same stylish stage show that Sparks brought to London earlier this year. Built around the Li'l Beethoven set, you also get a big helping of bonus tracks from that beguiling back catalogue, including the scarily prescient "The Calm Before The Storm". The motorik medley of "The Number One Song In Heaven" and "Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth" takes some beating.

Les Dames Du Bois De Boulogne

This dark treasure from 1945 was Robert Bresson's second feature. Scripted by Cocteau, it's erotic longing and revenge, as spurned spider woman Maria Casares seeks the downfall of her ex and his lover. In contrast with the grey, static textures of Bresson's celebrated work, there's near-noirish lustre, but the intriguing, deceptive narrative bareness, the sense of forces moving beneath the surface, are his alone.

The Station Agent

In a New Jersey backwater, Fin (Peter Dinklage), a dwarf fed up with the way the world reacts to him, moves into the derelict train station he's inherited and tries to ignore offers of friendship from a lonely snack-van man (Bobby Cannavale) and a divorced artist (Patricia Clarkson). Tom McCarthy's gem has something like the drift and precision of early Jarmusch—nothing much happens, except life.

Parka Life

Now that Oasis have been written into British rock history alongside The Beatles, The Sex Pistols and all those other elder statesmen they so publicly admired and absorbed, 1984's Definitely Maybe survives as a revered, although sometimes distant, memory. These days when Oasis play Glastonbury, there are waves of excitement but no huge hullabaloo about their perfunctory parade of greatest hits, and their albums have ceased to generate the expectation, the queues around the block in Oxford Street, that was once the norm.

The Girl Can’t Help It

It wasn't until Frank Tashlin's 1956 screwball comedy, starring Jayne Mansfield at her most buxom, that Hollywood finally exploited the nascent rock'n'roll boom. The result is a Technicolor feast of Gene Vincent, Little Richard and Eddie Cochran in their hip-swivelling prime, rivalled only by Julie London's (literally) haunting shiver through "Cry Me A River". Camp, corny, but classic.

The Charge Of The Light Brigade

Tony Richardson's 1968 version of the military disaster mirrors the decade it was made in, with a strong anti-war theme. David Hemmings is a young trooper, Trevor Howard his brutal commanding officer and John Gielgud the high-ranking buffoon who orders the attack. An ambitious mess, but still compelling.

The Untouchables

Talk about narrow fucking escapes. Halfway through one of the interviews with Brian De Palma that make up the raft of extras on this special edition of his lavish gangster epic, the director mentions that Paramount's first choice for the central part of Eliot Ness was Mel Gibson. It's an appalling thought. I mean, imagine Mel hamming it up here, his narcissistic gurning turning De Palma's operatic vision into mugging farce. Fortunately, Mel had other commitments, and the role of Ness, as De Palma had always intended, went to the then relatively unknown Kevin Costner.
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