DVD, Blu-ray and TV

Pink Sunshine

DVD-Audio 5.1 Surround Sound version of Coyne and co's biggest-selling album

Whale Rider

A contemporary coming-of-ager about a fiery 12-year-old Maori girl (Keisha Castle-Hughes) and her bid for the hyper-masculine tribal throne, Whale Rider is full of apposite Disney pluck, yet simultaneously shot through with a worthy, odd and inexorably cloying adoration of the mystical juju in Maori tradition.

David Bowie – Sound And Vision

A strange one, this, with Bowie's usually obsessive control seemingly relaxed enough to have allowed packaging that looks cheap and hurriedly slung-together. The content, though, is better—a straight documentary, punctuated with live and video clips, and interview snippets with Bowie, Iman, Iggy Pop, Trent Reznor and Moby. There's lots of rare early stuff but, for all his eloquence, the music does the talking best of all.

City Of Ghosts

Directing, co-writing and starring, Matt Dillon does a pretty solid job. Set in a modern-day Cambodia full of outcasts and fugitives, the plot slowly curdles from globe-trotting crime thriller into primal psycho-weirdness. Dillon never shakes off the second-hand influences, notably David Lynch and Apocalypse Now, but a rich cosmopolitan texture is added by an eccentric cast including Gerard Depardieu, Stellan Skarsgård and James Caan.

Belle And Sebastian – Fans Only

Since much of B&S' cult appeal stems from the fact they're seldom seen on telly, this two-hour compendium of videos, concerts and interviews (basically their entire career from 1996 to 2002) feels like a sneaky peep into the world's most secretive band. Unashamedly twee, but eccentric, funny, and quite beautiful.

Buffalo Girls

Originally a TV mini series, this is a satisfying, three-hour adaptation of Larry McMurty's offbeat and poignant take on Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok. A strong cast (Anjelica Houston, Sam Elliott, Peter Coyote) get blown off the screen by Jack Palance as a grizzled, dusty old trapper.

Guided By Voices – Watch Me Jumpstart

Name-checked by everyone from Thurston Moore to The Strokes, US indie rock icons Guided By Voices espouse an ethic so heroically DIY it borders on the professionally suicidal. Watch Me Jumpstart profiles their idiosyncratic career, via Banks Tarver's charming, lo-fi documentary, extensive live footage and an engaging selection of the band's videos to date.

Android

Quirky variant on the Frankenstein riff. Klaus Kinski is a scientist working on a space station with his android assistant Max404 (Don Opper, who co-wrote). Max is going through android adolescence—he's restless, sulky, curious about sex. Then a trio of escaped convicts invade, and one of them's a girl. Funny and compelling, and worth catching for Opper's geeky performance alone.

Cowboy Junkies – Open Road

Hard to tell what's the main feature and what are the extras in this excellent four-part, three-hour package from Canada's heroes of spooked alt.country. There's an hour-long documentary on the Junkies' 2001 world tour, a Quebec festival appearance, Margo and Michael Timmins playing an acoustic set and the same pair in lengthy conversation to make it a must for all Cowboy Junkies fans.

Brannigan

This late John Wayne movie has The Duke as a Chicago cop trailing his man to London, while a hitman seeks to fulfill a contract on Wayne's life. It's middling, fish-out-of-water fare, the kind of bawdy, roustabout stuff Wayne did far too often, but by way of compensation you get Richard Attenborough as Wayne's finicky Scotland Yard sidekick.
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