This comedy about a Sunday league football team getting sponsored by a tandoori restaurant stars Sean Pertwee and Keith Allen, has a laughable plot, a shocker of a script, even the football is terrible. It is a brilliant spoof on rubbish British films of the 1970s. Isn’t it?
A restoration of the original four-hour epic starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, a wordy exercise in outrageous Hollywood camp that killed the sword and sandal epic for 40 years.
Box Sets
Broadchurch (Acorn, cert 12, DVD £25.99)
Olivia Colman in Bafta-winning form, playing a detective on a child-killing case down on the Jurassic Coast. And it was a hell of a performance, overshadowing even the ubiquitous and effortlessly excellent David Tennant.
The Complete (Existing) Films of Sadao Yamanaka (Eureka, cert PG, DVD £24.99)
Dead by the age of 28, Yamanaka made 22 films in six short years in the 1930s. The three here (Tange Sazen: The Million Ryo Pot, Kochiyama Soshun and Humanity and Paper Balloons) are all that is left in their entirety, testimony to his taut, elegant storytelling.
The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection Volume 2 (Network, cert PG, DVD £14.99)
Four almost forgotten Ealing films for fascinated archivists, including Carol (The Third Man) Reed’s debut, 1935’s Midshipman Easy, and The Big Blockade, the debut by Charles (The Cruel Sea) Frend.
Released Mon May 13
Les Misérables (Universal, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD)
Hugh Jackman sings, Russell Crowe barks, Anne Hathaway wins an Oscar for performing that Susan Boyle song. This lavish adaptation of the perennial stage musical won’t convert non-believers but it does successfully retain the original’s theatrical intimacy while adding cinematic sweep.
The Sessions (Fox, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD)
Sounding like something unbearably icky – paralysed guy seeks sex therapist for downstairs action – The Sessions is actually wise, intelligent and funny and, thanks to John Hawkes and Helen Hunt, never feels sorry for itself.
Side By Side (Axiom, cert 15, DVD)
Keanu Reeves is producer/interviewer in this documentary about the digital revolution in movie-making (from cameras and editing to SFX and projection). Great access – Scorsese, Lucas, Cameron, Lynch, Soderbergh, the Wachowskis – and solid research deliver a documentary that should fascinate even non-buffs.
Broken English (Moviolla, cert 15, DVD)
The great Parker Posey injects iron into the role of a dithery old silly trying to find a man, anything in trousers really, to settle down with, as the most reviled of genres – the out and out romance – tries to get back on its hind legs.
Hors Satan (New Wave, cert 15, DVD)
Bruno Dumont follows Hadewijch with a similarly austere and naturalistic drama about an impressionable girl who is almost religiously devoted to a shaman-like stranger. Powerful, if almost terminally French.
Frozen Silence (Metrodome, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD)
A Spanish drama about the troops Franco sent off to help Hitler fight the Russians. A war film, then? Bizarrely, it’s a police whodunit, a solid one too, like Foyle’s War with more mud, snow and explosions.
The King of Pigs (Terracotta, cert 15, DVD)
Two adults hark back to a shocking incident from their schooldays in this old school, almost Scooby Doo-style, 2-D animation from South Korea. It’s a bit wet and slow, though the manipulation of a now neglected form is worth a squint.
Box Sets
The Ricky Gervais Show Seasons (Warner, cert 15, DVD £40.84)
Ricky Gervais uses Flintstones-style animation to repurpose all 39 episodes of what were at one point the world’s most downloaded podcasts – himself, Karl Pilkington and Stephen Merchant being naïve, ridiculous and funny.
Van Veeteren Volume 1 (Arrow, cert 15, DVD £29.99)
The latest Scandi-crime kid on the block is Sven Wollter, playing the retired Swedish copper helping former homicide colleagues. There are three well-crafted feature-length cases here; all moody, mournful and murderous.
Fringe: The Complete Series (Warner, cert 15, DVD £100.99)
Star Trek director JJ Abrams’ sci-fi series found itself once it realised that its Mulder and Scully (Joshua Jackson, Olivia Dunham) couldn’t upstage John Noble, playing the crazy hippie scientist whose fondness for psychotropic drugs mirrors the show’s love of alternative universes. Way better than Lost.
Released Mon May 6
Quartet (E One, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD)
Who would have thought that Dustin Hoffman's directorial debut would be set in a home for aged musicians for aged musicians, with Maggie Smith playing a retired diva being coerced into performing Rigoletto by Pauline Collins, Tom Courtenay and Billy Connolly? A Midsomer-ish guilty pleasure.
The Impossible (Entertainment One, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD)
The tsunami of 2004 as seen through the eyes of a holidaying family. The acting by Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts is almost as impressive as the waterwall of destruction and shows you can, if determined, make a drama out of a crisis.
The Facility (Momentum, cert 18, DVD)
A bunch of Brits who don’t know each other spend the weekend as drug-testing guinea pigs at an isolated clinic. What could possibly go wrong? Good, cheap, nasty fun that knows how to tweak genre expectations.
The Tower (Entertainment One, cert 15, DVD)
A Korean Towering Inferno knock-off set in a spiffy double skyscraper, where the cute kid, the pretty young woman, her prospective beau, the stuck-up bitch, the dodgy builder, the fireman and so on are subjected to disaster movie (and acting) excess.
Billy Liar (StudioCanal, cert PG, Blu-ray/DVD)
Tom Courtenay again, in one of the British New Wave films that made his name, as the penpusher whose fantasy life helps him escape the daily grind. This 50th anniversary restoration really shows off John Schlesinger’s widescreen, deep-focus cinematography.
Midnight’s Children (Entertainment One, cert 12, DVD)
Salman Rushdie’s own adaptation of his novel about the birth of modern India manages to be charming, funny, lavish, thoughtful, political, personal, epic even, though it’s so episodic, so bitty, that it never really engages.
Gangster (High Fliers, cert 15, DVD)
An efficient Canadian biopic about Edwin Boyd, the WWII veteran who became a bank robber and folk hero. Scott Speedman is Boyd, Kelly Reilly his wife, and Brian Cox blurs on to lend much needed weight.
Box Sets
Bedtime: Complete Series 1-3 (Acorn, cert 15, DVD £25.99)
From ten-plus years ago, two series (plus a trio of Christmas episodes) of Andy Hamilton's beautifully shaped, written and played comedy tracking bedtime conversations in various households on the same street.
Prisoners’ Wives Series 1&2 (2entertain, cert 15, DVD £25.52)
Footballers Wives with prison bars, some soapy storylines and a cast – Polly Walker, Pippa Haywood, Emma Rigby and Natalie Gavin – who show that once free of the limitations of Hollyoaks, or wherever, they’re spectacularly good actresses, actors, whatever
Penguin Drum Box Set (Manga, cert 15, DVD £29.99)
Cult Japanese anime following the Takakura siblings from this world into the next – via a spirit who lives in a penguin shaped hat – for an inventively drawn, imaginatively scripted series of funny, mysterious, surreal adventures.
