DVD, Blu-ray and TV

Touch

Offbeat Elmore Leonard yarn brought to the big screen by Paul Schrader. Juvenal (Skeet Ulrich) is a stigmatic ex-monk with miraculous healing powers, Tom Arnold is the religious fanatic obsessed with him, Bridget Fonda the nice girl who loves him, Christopher Walken the hustler who wants to exploit him. Nicely satirical about the modern media circus.

The L-Shaped Room – Darling

The L-Shaped Room is a stagy 1962 adaptation of a Lynne Reid Banks novel about pregnant French socialite Leslie Caron in a London bedsit, and is famous only to Smiths obsessives due to it being the source of the opening sample from The Queen Is Dead. John Schlesinger's 1965 Darling is a key text from the Swinging London canon, breezily and brilliantly skewering vacuous underwear model Diana Scott (Julie Christie) as she seduces her way into wealthy despair.

The Cure—Trilogy

Inspired by a Bowie gig, Trilogy sees The Cure perform three of their LPs in full over two nights at Berlin's Tempodrom—the classics Pornography and Disintegration plus the more recent Bloodflowers. With the band, as usual, brilliantly lit and the event shot with 12 separate cameras, this is far superior to normal live fare. The music, too, benefits from perhaps the band's strongest line-up. Pornography, originally performed by a trio, here becomes a maudlin monolith, with the ageless Smith somehow reinfused with a bitterness now 20 years old. Thrilling.

The Young Lions

Like a title fight between the two greatest actors of their generation, The Young Lions cares less about adapting Irwin Shaw's anti-war bestseller (which it subsequently mangles) than allowing Montgomery Clift's neurasthenic Private Ackerman and Marlon Brando's fey Nazi officer to out-Method each other on camera. Though the two icons only share one incidental scene, their separate contributions are still electrifying.

The Last Minute

Belated DVD release for Stephen (Blade) Norrington's flaccid 2001 meditation on the nature of, wince, 'celebrity culture'. Max Beesley, ineffably irritating in Alfie mode, is Billy Byrne, a talentless wannabe whose driving desire for fame sends him on a Hellish Journey™ through London's criminal drug-dealing S&M underworld. Hateful characters, no discernible narrative voice, and hackneyed visuals. A mistake.

Crime And Punishment

Leone's ferocious four-hour gangster epic, first time on DVD

Un Chant D’Amour

Writer Jean Genet's sole completed film (albeit only 25 minutes long), despite his lifelong fascination with cinema. Once outlawed due to the presence of an erection, this erotic fever-dream of prison-cell sexual tension represents a remarkable distillation of Genet's poetic themes and preoccupations. The transfer of this 1950 classic is pristine.

The Mark Of Zorro

One of the best swashbucklers ever made. Tyrone Power is Don Diego de Vega—the son of a nobleman out to save the peasants of Olde Californy (and Linda Darnell) from the villainous Basil Rathbone. Fantastic swordfights (Rathbone was an Olympic duellist), and Power shows exactly how derring-do should be done.

Slap Her, She’s French

Totally rubbish teen comedy which sees a French girl (Coyote Ugly's Piper Perabo) invading Texas and fiendishly ruining the life of star cheerleader Jane McGregor. Not content with being bland and dull, its national stereotyping stops just short of "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" gags.

Catch Me If You Can

After the ponderous Al and the not-as-clever-as-it-thought-it-was Minority Report, Spielberg delivers a sleek, slick 1960s-set caper movie based on a true story, with Leonardo DiCaprio as the teen con artist attempting to stay one step ahead of Tom Hanks' FBI agent. Leo's smug, Hanks is nerdish, but Spielberg carries off the action with flair.
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