DVDs of the week

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Watchful eye: Javier Bardem won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor

Haunting: No Country for Old Men

Rewarding: 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 Days

Message delivery: In the Valley of Elah

Music video: Radiohead

Charmless: I Think I Love My Wife

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DVD OF THE WEEK
No Country for Old Men
Paramount Home Entertainment, 15, £19.99
*****
The undoubted king of the world' at this year's Oscars, this outstanding thriller not only scooped Best Film but also Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (for Javier Bardem) and Best Direction for The Coen Brothers, whose recent efforts had been looking distinctly ropey – The Ladykillers remake, anyone?

Indeed, this return to form could even be pitched as 'Fargo in the desert': the plot sees Texan hunter Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumble across a bunch of dead Mexicans, a truckload of heroin and $2million. Unwisely he snatches the cash and finds himself on the run from both Javier Bardem's eerie Angel of Death with a psychopathic fringe' figure and Tommy Lee Jones's kindly sheriff, who reluctantly represents good in a godless country where good' has long gone west. Roger Deakins's panoramic cinematography is resplendent, the direction superb, the fluid editing a thing of beauty and the acting subtle, while the Coens consummately translate Cormac McCarthy's trademark economical prose into their own cinematic language. A must-buy, because you'll yearn to rewatch it barely moments after the hauntingly enigmatic ending.

Extras: Making-of, featurettes, sadly no director commentary.
Larushka Ivan-Zadeh

4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days
Artificial Eye, 18, £19.99
*****
Universally acclaimed as one of 2007's few true masterpieces, this Cannes Palme d'Or winner was also one of last year's hardest sells. Set in the last, bleak years of 1980s communist Romania, Christian Mungiu's deceptively rough-looking, unsentimentally intimate film follows a day in the life of Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and her college roomie Gabita (Laura Vasiliu).

Given the plot pivots around Gabita's immensely harrowing illegal termination, it's no surprise this became known as the Romanian abortion movie'.

You may have found Vera Drake gruelling but it ain't a patch on this. However, it's all so tensely dramatic, so delicately acted, so subtly directed and just so captivatingly real that, despite the grim subject matter, you can't bear to look away – even when you almost can't bear to look. It's a difficult watch – but a profoundly rewarding one.

Extras: Interviews with Mungiu and Marinca, trailer, filmographies.
Larushka Ivan-Zadeh

In The Valley Of Elah
Optimum Home Entertainment, 15, £19.99
****
Crash director Paul Haggis's affecting drama burrows deep into the psychological wounds of combat. The title refers to the Biblical story of David and Goliath; Haggis, admittedly in laboured fashion, suggests war creates as many monsters as it slays. Based on a horriffuc real-life case, it follows ex-military policeman Hank Deerfield (Oscar-nominated Tommy Lee Jones) as he searches first for his soldier son Mike – who has vanished after returning from a tour in Iraq – and then for his murderers; chillingly, men Mike fought alongside. The police procedural plot line allows a standard meeting-of-opposites relationship with Charlize Theron's put-upon detective. But as the story of Mike's time in Iraq starts to coalesce around pixelated video retrieved from his frazzled mobile, the film asks uncomfortable questions about what we are doing to the young men we send to war.

Jones offers a tremendous performance as the gruff, old-school military man beleaguered by modern horrors, which carries us through some heavy-handed message delivery.

Extras: Two featurettes, Haggis interview, additional scenes.
Siobhan Murphy

Radiohead: The Best Of
Parlophone, 12, £17.99
****
Coinciding with the release of Parlophone's Best Of audio collection, this 21-track anthology spans Radiohead's ten years at the label, from early singles Anyone Can Play Guitar and Pop Is Dead to There There and 2+2=5 from 2003's Hail To The Thief. With

a couple of minor exceptions, all their pre-In Rainbows releases are here, the majority available for the first time – this is the band's first video collection since 1998's 7 Television Commercials. As well as creating probably the most singular popular music in recent years, Radiohead are associated with some of its most arresting images, such as the office worker splayed on the pavement (Just, directed by Jamie Thraves), the slow-motion acrobatics of Jonathan Glazer's still mesmerizing Street Spirit and Magnus Carlsson's boy perched on a lamp post for Paranoid Android.

Like the latter video, many that best capture the mood of alienation pervading much of the band's music are animations, such as Pyramid Song, where a blank-faced figure dives into his now flooded city to revisit his home and sit in front of the telly.

Extras: None.
Nadine McBay

I Think I Love My Wife
Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 15, £15.99
**
Chris Rock is undeniably a great performer, as proved emphatically this year in his first British stand-up performances. But don't go rushing out to buy this update of Eric Rohmer's 1972 film Chloe In The Afternoon; this stab at grownup comedy is a disappointment. Here, director, writer and star Rock is investment banker Richard, married to attractive but sensible Brenda (Gina Torres), who is failing to put out under the sheets. Then in walks old friend and stunner Nikki (Kerry Washington), who tediously seduces the weak-willed Richard into fun, lazy lunches and, eventually, the bedroom, where he's finally forced to face up to his relationship crisis.

As a drama of self-discovery, this is strangely charmless and its key players are difficult to love; as a comedy, it isn't sharp or funny enough to stick. Trivia buffs will like the in-jokery of the bank's name, Pupkin And Langford, which doffs its hat to The King Of Comedy – though sadly, this isn't in the same league.

Extras: Commentary, cut scenes, blooper reel.
Sharon Lougher

 

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