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DVD, Blu-ray and TV

The Shape Of Things

Neil LaBute had gone off the boil, but this low-budget version of his own stage play (with the same cast, including Rachel Weisz and Paul Rudd, who'd acted in London and Broadway) is a quite brilliant examination of the evil women do, a kind of flipside to In The Company Of Men. It's also a clever debate about the interface between creativity and love or sex. Weisz relishes the chance to be acid on legs.

Paycheck

Based on a Philip K Dick short story and directed by John Woo, Paycheck plays like a made-for-TV Minority Report. It boasts a screenplay from, ahem, Dean Georgaris (Tomb Raider 2—nuff said), it stars Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman at their charmless worst, and it's Woo's dullest action-direction in years. No John, slo-mo doesn't make it better!

Great Eastern

Magnificent, melancholic moodpiece concerning two lost souls in Tokyo

The Longest Day

This stunningly realised 1962 restaging of D-Day is the last great war epic. The stars include John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Ryan, Rod Steiger, Sean Connery and a wounded Richard Burton, but the greatest stretches come on the inclement grey Normandy beaches, where General Robert Mitchum tries to lead his beleaguered men up the dunes, and get his cigar to light.

Coming Home

The Vietnam war had been over for three years by the time Hal Ashby made Coming Home in 1978. Those who'd survived the combat zones of South-East Asia had returned to find themselves shunned and quarantined, like lepers in their home towns; a living, breathing reminder of a shameful war many back home would rather forget had ever happened. Some of those who came back perhaps wished they'd died out there in the jungles—the paraplegics, the traumatised, forever dreading the nameless, shapeless things that whispered to them in the night.

Stand-Up For Your Rights

Tragicomic genius and founding father of black American humour filmed at his peak

To Kill A King

Slow-moving account of the events leading up to the execution of King Charles I (Rupert Everett) and its aftermath, focusing on the stormy friendship of rebel leaders Oliver Cromwell (Tim Roth) and General Thomas Fairfax (Dougray Scott). Despite lavish period detail, a good supporting cast and an excellent performance from Everett, the leaden and historically dubious script renders this duller than the driest of documentaries.

American Splendor

Paul Giamatti, a character actor who's embodied a host of losers and creeps, always merited a lead role, and was surely born to play Harvey Pekar, the grumpy but ultimately likeable (not lovable) hospital clerk who finds a means of expression through his comic books/graphic novels. Inspired by friend Robert Crumb (and this is a superior film to the 1994 documentary Crumb), our obsessive-compulsive antihero depicts and ponders the mundane and everyday through his work, and the world and his wife relate.

Primal Dream

The original grunge-pop heroes' '88 tour footage plus essential documentaries

The Hired Hand

Classic 'revisionist' western from '71, Peter Fonda's directorial debut is bookended by two acts of fumbling, clumsy yet brutally violent gunplay, but is otherwise concerned with the delicately evolving relationships between two wandering cowboys (Fonda and Warren Oates) and Fonda's once abandoned wife (Verna Bloom). The photography from Vilmos Zsigmond (McCabe & Mrs Miller) is worth the price of the DVD in itself.
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