DVD, Blu-ray and TV

Shooting The Breeze

Disappointing documentary about the making of Zevon's final album

Cabin Fever

Five photogenic college chums, one backwoods cabin, a local villager with his flesh peeling off and something nasty in the water. Eli Roth's visceral, wicked and witty bloodbath evokes George Romero panics and Evil Dead riots gone by, yet retains a strong enough sense of itself to remain more than merely the sum of its faultless influences. A (decaying) head and shoulders above other recent attempts at '70s-esque late-night retro-horror.

Memoirs Of An Invisible Man

So-so sci-fi rom-com from John Carpenter, with Chevy Chase as a stockbroker who gets caught in a nuclear accident that turns him invisible; Daryl Hannah plays his love interest, Sam Neill the CIA heavy chasing him. Totally dependent on hackneyed visual gags and special effects that were superseded long ago, what remains is indulgent fluff.

The End Of Summer

A Kyoto skyscraper is contrasted with a crematorium chimney, gravestones abound, as do sinister black crows. And yet despite the lugubrious undertow of this, Yasujiro Ozu's penultimate movie (made two years before his death), there's a warmth to the tale of the Kohayagawa family, their ailing business and their eccentric patriarch that somehow transforms post-war angst into sublime acceptance.

Watching the fabbest of all fours in their first US press conference, puffing away on cigs and deflecting inane enquiries, you feel proud to be a Brit. "Sing something for us!" "No, we need money first." Could Justin Timberlake—or Julian Casablancas, for that matter—be half as sarcastic? Imagine waking from a 40-year coma and coming afresh to these extraordinary scenes: four scouse charmers off the plane with their matching suits and Pan Am shoulder bags.

The Tenant

Filmed in '76, the conclusion to Roman Polanski's evil-rooms trilogy returns to the urban paranoia and fracturing psyches of Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby. Polanski—who'd just taken up residence in France—himself plays the vulnerable, mouse-like new occupant of a forlorn Paris apartment, whose creeping schizophrenia grows as he feels himself falling under the influence of the previous resident, a female suicide victim. A perverse slow-dazzle.

The Horse Soldiers

Another Cavalry Movie from Ford, and this time Johnny Reb's in the firing line as Yankee Colonel Wayne leads his troops on a demolition mission and kidnaps feisty southern belle Constance Towers. Here Ford's portentous 'Civil War is Hell' message doesn't quite gel with his trademark tomfoolery-drunken gags, funny fistfights and casual misogyny. The resulting film is strangely blank.

Blood Shot

Stunningly underrated, ferocious portrait of Wild Bill Hickok

House Of Games

The original Mamet movie, a bravura directorial debut and a punchy manifesto, 1987's...Games pits frigid psychologist Lindsay Crouse against louche confidence trickster Joe Mantegna in the eponymous Chicago poker joint. Crouse is intrigued, Mantegna applies the charm, but soon the cons escalate and, in true Mametian style, the line between 'shark' and 'mark' disintegrates.

Closely Observed Trains

From the brief heyday of the Czech new wave, Jiri Menzel's 1968 Oscar winner (Best Foreign Language Film) retains much bawdy charm and a bravely downbeat ending. A young railway station apprentice in a small town, oblivious to the climax of WWII, longs to get laid, finding relief with a comely Resistance fighter. More witty, imaginative and romantic than it sounds.
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