DVDs of the week

Will Ferrell and Jon Heder team up in the brilliant Blades of Glory, and Primal Scream's debut live DVD are among this week's offerings.

Blades of Glory
Paramount, 12, £19.99
****
If dull Nascar spoof Talladega Nights seriously dented your faith in Will Ferrell movies, then ice-skating parody Blades Of Glory will restore it. Jon 'Napoleon Dynamite' Heder is 'skating's little orphan' Jimmy MacElroy, a pale lad blessed with volumised hair and perfection in the technical stakes. Chazz Michael Michaels (Ferrell, pictured, left, with Heder), meanwhile, is an 'ice-devouring sex volcano' who thinks Jimmy's a right old girl. When the rivals finally wind up having a scrap on the winners' podium, they're banned for life from solo skating. Their only hope of a return to the fray is to enter the couples' competition in the World Wintersport Games as the first all-male duo, much to the chagrin of the others. The sheer, brazen campness of it all induces fits of giggles, as do Chazz and Jimmy's puerile exchanges, which burst out from a script that sparkles as brightly as the protagonists' sequinned costumes. Top scores. Almost.

Extras: Loads, including making-of, deleted/alternative scenes, gag reel, music video, gallery and featurettes.

Bamako
Artifical Eye, PG, £19.99
****
In the vibrantly bustling yard of a mud-walled house in Mali, a strange trial is taking place. Amid washerwomen and villagers going about their daily lives, international lawyers in ceremonial robes battle it out against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This is the setting of Abderrahmane Sissako's refreshingly unusual, genre-confounding movie. There are personal stories: a nightclub singer's relationship breakdown; a wedding. There's also a playful film within a film: a western called Death In Timbuktu starring Danny Glover, with a message about not blaming everything on the West. But Bamako (named after the capital of Mali) is not really about conventional narrative. Complex and impassioned, it uses cinema as a vehicle for revealing injustice. Sissako gives a valuable and dignifying voice to a nation normally in thrall to the West. As he says in the disc's extras: 'Africa is a continent about which people have a lot to say but also one that rarely says anything about herself.'

Extras: Enlightening director interview, gushy unenlightening interview with Glover, trailer. Larushka Ivan-Zadeh

The Family Friend
Artificial Eye, 15, £19.99
****
The opening shot is of a nun buried up to her chin in sand. Rock chords thrash crazily, the tide rises... and it all gets odder from there. Hotshot one-to-watch Italian director Paolo Sorrentino's extraordinary fable of human manipulation and venal desire is the stuff of silent movie melodrama. A repulsive elderly miser mockingly called Geremia Heart-of-Gold (Giacomo Rizzo) is locked in a pathological relationship with his even more elderly and fetid bedridden mother. Until one day he falls in love with a beautiful, stone-hearted girl (Laura Chiatti) he meets while playing loan shark to her parents. Dazzling to watch, this throbs on screen with all the pulsing eroticism and super-charged Technicolor of a Pasolini melodrama. Pitilessly unsentimental, it is frankly amazing you sympathise with any of the characters in this grotesque comedy. That you do is testament to Rizzo's captivating brilliance as a performer. You hate him but you can't take your eyes off him, and not just because he spends most of the film with raw potato slices sticky-taped on his head. Truly, once seen never forgotten.

Extras: Director interview, trailer, biography.

Blue
Artificial Eye, 15, £19.99
****
A long-anticipated DVD release for this last, remarkable work by late, great British film-maker Derek Jarman. And yes, Blue by name, blue by nature. Visually, it's just one big blue screen for 75 minutes. Yet you've scarcely experienced a richer, more emotionally affecting film. Narrated by Nigel Terry, John Quentin and long-term muse Tilda Swinton, and accompanied by Simon Fisher-Turner's ethereal, chime-heavy music, this comprises Jarman's musings on colour, art, love and his illness. At this stage, he was blind from Aids-related disease; a tragedy that Jarman uses to paint lyrical word pictures that turn a blank blue screen into a boundless blue vista where, freed from the disintegration of his body, his imagination soars towards the immortal sublime. Shot in 1993, this is both timelessly poetic and time-specific: the Aids epidemic is at its height and the Bosnian war is raging.

Extras: Glitterbug - an intimate, playful and often indulgent collage of Jarman's Super-8 footage from 1970 to 1986 scored by Brian Eno.

Primal Scream: Riot City Blues Tour
Liberation Entertainment, 15, £15.99
**
Primal Scream's debut live DVD should be a real treat. Part backcatalogue material and part tracks from last year's Riot City Blues album, the eclectic tracklist on the sleeve promises raucous pleasures - especially for fans too young to have experienced tracks such as Loaded, Damaged or Jailbird first time around. Sadly, the British rockers have been let down by a disc that feels frenetically thrown together in a mad 'we've just realised it's the band's 25th anniversary, let's make a DVD' hurry. Camerawork is choppy, flashing from panoramic scenes of a euphoric crowd to close-ups of the band's mainstay Bobby Gillespie and his tired face. Meanwhile, the extras seem as pitiful, with the frontman and his infamous, loud-mouth bassist Mani making a short and unenlightening attempt at an interview. But there are a few shining moments. An incredible, mostly instrumental performance of Loaded builds on its status as an unbeatable classic, while Country Girl and Nitty Gritty prove the stellar band's recent material stands up just as well.

Extras: Promo videos and interview. Zena Alkayat