DVD, Blu-ray and TV

On the generally acclaimed Let England Shake, Harvey gave her music a bony, volkish edge, flaying it back to strummed autoharp, electric guitar and crude drums, mongrelising it with awkwardy intrusive sampling of Middle Eastern singers, dub interjections and huntsmen’s horns. Seamus Murphy’s cinematography complements this approach perfectly: not storyboarded, but collaged from various journeys around the island made during 2011, from the remotest hedgerows to the heart of London.

The birth of the hippy dream, caught on camera...

Black America’s militant years, captured on rediscovered Swedish documentaries. Right on!

HBO's handsome, if flawed, Prohibition era crime drama...

Cameron Crowe's feature length documentary celebrates the grunge legends...

Cabaret Voltaire's Steel City noir, now rewired with extras...

Intimate portrait of a legendary bluesman...

It’s 1978 and the Rolling Stones have just left the soggy vagueness of their mid-70s career behind, only to come across punk and new wave.

“David Byrne, all neurasthenic nettles pointing inward. He looked like someone who’d just OD’d on Dramadine – all cold sweat clammy and nerve net exoskeleton… just looked like some nut just holidayed from the ward with a fresh pocket of Thorazine, that’s all. There was something gentle, shy, reflective and giving about his hideous old psychosocial gangrene.” That’s Lester Bangs, in full flow, recalling the first time he saw Talking Heads live, around 1976, in a rambling, sometimes flashing essay written in 1979 as a review of the Fear Of Music album, but only published for the first time now, as accompaniment to this superbly conceived DVD.

One (or rather, three) from the heart of Coppola’s American Zoetrope dream...Hammett was intended by Francis Ford Coppola to be one of his American Zoetrope studio’s first movies, a calling card for the Zoetrope vision and the American debut of German director Wim Wenders. In the event, the film, an homage to novelist Dashiell Hammett boasting a rare lead from Coppola regular Frederic Forrest, did become synonymous with the studio. Just not the way Coppola had hoped.