Movie DVD Reviews

• Monsoon Wedding

  Mira Nair's sumptuous Indian saga was a surprise hit, especially in the US, in the early years of this decade.

   
• Maurice

  An unnecessary re-release of a truly superb film is brought to us on the platter of FilmFour's newly developed, though predictably old school, "Classic Collection" label.

   
• Heat And Dust

  The long-running collaborative pairing of Merchant Ivory films and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala began with the adaptation of her own Booker prize-winning novel into the fitfully interesting film, Heat And Dust.

   
• Assembly

  Arresting, compelling and poignant, Assembly is a war flick that primarily eschews the heavy hitting guts and glory approach, focusing instead on the fundamentals of unflagging loyalty, camaraderie, pride and honour.

   
• Bonnie And Clyde: Special Edition

  It’s mad to think that Bonnie And Clyde has been around for forty years, though on a more recent viewing, it’s easy to see the relevance to both today’s film industry and society.

   
• Wind Chill

  Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes play two college students who end up sharing a rust-bucket drive home for the Christmas holidays - one needs a ride and one needs a passenger. With a distinctly chilly atmosphere in the car before the key’s even turned in the ignition, we’re set for an hour and a half of surprisingly good scare-fare.

   
• The Good Night

  There are odd leanings early on in this comedy drama, featuring Gary (Martin Freeman), a joyless, life-weary type who now works for his ex-bandmate Paul (Simon Pegg), generating advertising jingles instead of the gold discs he stares at morosely from time to time.

   
• The Backwoods

  The Backwoods is an intriguing curio: a direct-to-DVD film featuring two of Britain's finest actors (Gary Oldman and Paddy Considine) and yet the sum of its parts adds up to a low key Euro-pudding that manages to squander their talents on a very inauspicious Deliverance derivative that neither offends or excites half as much as it should.

   
• Flashpoint

  Flashpoint (Dou fo sin) combines the skills of Donnie Yen (producer, action director and star) with director Wilson Yip for their third film in just over as many years. Frantically paced, nonsensically scripted and impressively performed, this is an Asia action fan’s dream.

   
• Shrooms

  Young, fit, previously-TV actors are running around a misty forest rife with hallucinatory mushrooms and a local ghost story. It would be lazy of one to assume that this might make for a cliché-ridden teen-fest of a horror flick. Alas, Shrooms is not an argument to the contrary.

   

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