DVDs of the week

DVD OF THE WEEK
BE KIND REWIND
Pathe Distribution, 15, £19.99
****
Thanks to the new-fangled invention of DVD, Mike and Elroy's New Jersey video rental store is down on its luck. So what it doesn't need is Mike's crackers pal (Jack Black) accidentally wiping all the VHS tapes following a bizarre powerplant accident that's left him magnetised. Happily for us, though, it's the moment this perfectly cast comedy from Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind), hits its stride. Since their original video copies are kaput, Mike (Mos Def) and Jerry ~ lm (or, in the ~ lm's lingo, swede') their own versions, starting with a string and tin-foil Ghostbusters, zooming through Robocop (I know robot karate!' yells Black) and heaps more. Their adorably amateurish efforts become a community hit, but the big guys – demolition crews and copyright lawyers – are just around the corner. What it amounts to is a David and Goliath story more sophisticated than the japes suggest – and with a lot of heart.

Extras: Making-of, portrait of New Jersey town Passaic, Mos Def and Black improvising songs.
Sharon Lougher

Mad Men: Season One
Lions Gate Home Entertainment, 15, £29.99
*****
Matthew Weiner, the producer of The Sopranos, has struck small-screen gold again with this stylish yet understated period drama, which lovingly recreates the rapidly changing world of 1960s New York. Set in the smoke-filled offices of Madison Avenue ad agency Sterling Cooper, it follows the lives of the fiercely ambitious men and women who work there, fighting to stay ahead in their cutthroat industry. Jon Hamm is superb as leader of the pack, Don Draper, a hotshot egomaniac as smooth in the boardroom as he is in his mistress's bedroom. But the series masterfully explores darker truths behind the glamour as Draper tries to keep his American Dream together when his private life starts to fall apart. Similarly, repressed female characters struggle to fulfill the stifling gender roles of the era while confronted with changing social mores. Fortunately, there are plenty of guilty laughs in the glorious period detail, not least the dazzling technology made simple enough for women to understand'. Beautifully shot, smartly written and brilliantly acted – Mad Men is a pitch that's hard to refuse.

Extras: Audio commentaries, Scoring Mad Men and Advertising The American Dream featurettes.
Damian Tully-Pointon

Diary Of The Dead: Two-Disc Special Edition
Optimum Home Entertainment, 18, £22.99
****
George A Romero may be the zombie-movie king but his films are anything but brain-dead. Having reinvented this once (OK, still) derided genre with his 1968 debut Night Of The Living Dead, a seminal scary movie spurting with as much social commentary as gore, he's back, 20 years on, with its fourth, topical sequel. Blog Of The Dead' would be a better title for a self-referential concept horror that sees a bunch of ~ lm students record, then YouTube, the inexplicable zombie outbreak around them. Most of the action is shot POV on grainy DV videocam – a cracking innovation if Cloverfield hadn't gazumped its release date. Still, nudge-wink laughs and a zestily high ketchup count will please undemanding viewers, while Romero's higher-brow fans will ~ nd his usual bit of politics' good to chew on. As a louche professor says with a weary postmodern groan, it's a stupid f*****g zombie movie with an underlying thread of social irony'.

Extras: An entire extra disc with behind-the-scenes, interviews, Romero documentary and director commentary.
Larushka Ivan-Zadeh

The Other Boleyn Girl
Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 12, £19.99
This promised to be a prestige project for BBC Films; fresh from writing The Queen, Peter Morgan returns to monarchical matters with an adaptation of Philippa Gregory's historical novel. Instead, The Other Boleyn Girl proves to be a right royal disaster for director Justin Chadwick, doomed from the start by woeful international casting; the wayward accents on show are more suggestive of happy hour in a backpackers' hostel than royal intrigue at the court of King Henry VIII.

Natalie Portman never seems comfortable as Anne Boleyn but she's not helped by Scarlett Johansson playing jealous sister Mary like she's some dim teenager wandering glazed-eyed through a shopping mall. Worse still, Aussie hunk Eric Bana looks more like a hungover Eric Cantona than a charismatic king. As with Elizabeth: The Golden Age, anachronistic dialogue and nice frocks can't compensate for a bubble-brained version of history that offers all the sultry sophistication of a daytime soap. With an unimaginative gloss on historical events, it's not what you'd expect from a BBC production.

Extras: None.
Eddie Harrison

The Edge Of Heaven
Artificial Eye, 15, £19.99
****
Fatih Akin must have felt the pressure following his Golden Bear-winning Head-On (2004). An intense film that confronted the Turkish-German community with tense social realities, it led to Akin being deemed the voice of Turkish immigrants. It's a relief, then, that his first feature since cements his reputation as a film-maker with his finger on the pulse of a culture. More serene, sprawling and political than Head-On, The Edge Of Heaven is set in both Turkey and Germany and sees the lives of six characters collide through coincidence.

Yeter is a prostitute hired by Ali; her daughter, Ayten, is a lesbian activist who falls in love with Lotte and stays with her mum Susanne; while Ali's son, Nejat, is the link that binds them. As lives intertwine, the film quietly mulls over themes of identity, heritage, courage and forgiveness, sensitively portraying two countries through their similarities rather than their differences.

Extras: Making-of.
Zena Alkayat