New Releases

“I’m gonna tell you the story and I’m not telling you who your mum is, you have to figure that out for yourself. I’m gonna change all of the names and some of the facts…”

This is the way that advertising manager Will Hayes (Ryan Reynolds) introduces his confused premarital history to his precocious ten-year-old daughter Maya (Abigail Breslin from Little Miss Sunshine), who has come home after a school class on the birds and the bees. And whilst Hayes presents his philanderings in the sweetest way possible, this is definitely no children’s fairy tale. As Maya puts it, “it’s like a love-story-mystery!”, and the poor girl is stuck in the middle, wondering whether she is nothing more than the result of a drunken party.

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Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla has one thing in its favour: it is better than his last two movies - Swept Away, the awful Madge-on-a-beach romantic comedy that fared so badly in the US it never even made it to British cinema screens, and the nearly incoherent Revolver. Here Guy Ritchie returns to the familiar territory of London’s seedy underworld that we saw in the 1998 Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and its 2000 follow-up Snatch.

The problem with RocknRolla is that despite a homoerotic twist and a fresh cast, we’ve basically seen it all before. With the exception of a couple of tough-talking females, Ritchie essentially offers us ‘geezer’ cinema created around his trademark formula - gangland parody packed out with well-mounted action sequences, slick visuals, eclectic scoring and some witty hardman banter from an array of mockney thesps.

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Seasoned action man and all-round geezer Jason Statham (Collateral, Snatch) and Saffron Burrows (Frida, Deep Blue Sea) star in this comic thriller documenting the 1971 robbery of the Baker Street branch of Lloyds Bank. Oddly enough, the robbers’ walkie-talkie conversations were recorded by a radio ham, but when he reported the incident, no action was taken…

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This DVD, which contains all of the band’s promo videos to date, has been rushed out as an accompaniment piece to the Best Of CD released by EMI, as a sort of counter to Radiohead’s now infamous going solo gesture, effectively releasing their ‘In Rainbows’ album for free on the internet, inviting fans to pay as little as £0.00 for the album if they so wished.

This is worth checking out, not just for the famous videos such as ‘No Surprises’ and ‘Just’ – you can have fun freeze-framing the video and trying to work out what the guy on the street is saying – but for the less well-known latter-day Amnesiac/Hail to the Thief stuff such as ‘There There’ and the strange wireframe glitchscape of the ‘Pull Pulk/Like Spinning Plates’ video(s), which looked to us like a cross between a car advert and the movie Tron (also worth renting by the way, especially if you’ve got an HD set).

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Will Smith, a sci-fi legend himself, stars in the latest version of Richard Matheson’s classic chiller I Am Legend. He plays the last human survivor in a post-apocalyptic New York City.

After the pretty average reviews, we at DVD Rental didn’t have high expectations of this film, but have to say, we were pleasantly surprised when we got out copy through the post.

For those who have not read the book, nor seen The Omega Man (the 1971 version starring Charlton Heston) the plot follows Robert Neville, who has only his dog Sam for company (and a few shop window mannequins he’s made friends with) and his struggle to both discover the cure for a virus that has spread throughout the world, and see through each day in the streets of an empty New York.
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With the second season of the hit sci-fi serial Heroes due to touch down on BBC2 anytime soon, everything Heroes-related has been flying off the shelves like hotcakes of late.

According to our sources, the Season 1 box set has been one of the most requested items on customers wish lists, as subscribers have been keen to take advantage of the fact that multi-disc box sets (sensibly) only count as one order, and those on unlimited plans can keep hold of an order for as long as they want. (more…)