Must be Drew love

The Perfect Catch is an appealing, utterly undemanding comedy, Cronos: Special Edition has the wondrous touch of the unsentimental Roald Dahls and a swish of Dracula's cape and five Fantomas episodes have been brought back to life...

The Perfect Catch
***
Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, his resolutely British novel of permanent adolescence and football obsession, was reimagined without the football for The Perfect Catch. Instead, Ben (Jimmy Fallon) has a consuming love of perennial baseball losers the Boston Red Sox.

His team may be permanently unlucky but Ben hits the jackpot with Lindsey (Drew Barrymore), a career-minded beauty who doesn't even seem to mind his addiction. Well, for a while... This is romcom by numbers but, while boy-men are two a penny on screen, it's nice to see a workaholic girl up there for once. Barrymore steers a canny line between gloop and hardball and the Farrelly brothers turn off the vomit effects and turn in an appealing, utterly undemanding comedy.

Extras: Directors' commentary, deleted scenes and featurettes.

Cronos: Special Edition
****
There's a wondrous touch of the unsentimental Roald Dahls as well as a swish of Dracula's cape about Cronos, the commandingly distinctive debut from genre wonderboy Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy). Elderly Spanish antique dealer Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) discovers an intricate, gold, mechanical insect which once belonged to a 16thcentury alchemist. The sting in the tale is that it houses a parasite that grants eternal life to its host - while sucking it dry.

Masterfully directed, this macabre, borderline surreal and bitingly funny fable from 1993 stalks territory familiar from later del Toro works: blood ties, immortality, boundaries of fantasy and, of course, beetles. Nasty, skin-tearing effects may have dated a tad but this is as likely to stand the test of time as the intriguing Cronos device itself.

Extras: Director's commentary, interviews and making-of featurette.

Fantomas
****
Fantomas was a legendary pulp-fiction villain, as dastardly as any crime fan could wish and as skilled at evading the police, the press and any other decent citizen foolhardy enough to cross his path. He and his gang of street thugs lied, stole and murdered their way through a bundle of film adaptations but these five episodes directed by Louis Feuillade were the first.

Rene Navarre is the coldhearted fiend, Edmond Breon the much put-upon Inspector Juve who has (in the finest tradition) made Fantomas's capture his life's work. These carefully restored silent films are fascinating, if inevitably a little slower than the modern audience is used to; but the non-stop action pulses along, helped by cleverly timed music, and there are visual touches (such as the wall that bleeds) rarely matched in the 90-odd years since Feuillade made these films.

Extras: Introduction to the character, Feuillade biog, galleries.

The Sun
****
The Sun, the third in Alexander Sokurov's trio of dictator films, takes on Japan's Emperor Hirohito, the pampered, so-called divinity whose taboo-breaking entreaty to his people to cease fighting saved countless lives on both sides at the end of World War II.

Issey Ogata gives an exceptional performance as the emperor - detached, steeped in tradition yet unable to ignore his people's predicament. Sokurov cleverly centres his film on Hirohito's meetings with US General MacArthur (Robert Dawson), commander of the occupying forces, who is in his own way as honourable and unconventional a man as his Japanese counterpart.

Extras: Sokurov production notes, filmographies.