DVD Rental Blog

The Waiting Room tells the story of two groups of friends, both living and working in South London, which have no connection with one another - until a chance encounter in a railway station waiting room throws their lives into disarray.

Roger Goldby’s wistful debut drama about love and loneliness in London opens in a golden autumnal haze. The pretty single mum Anna (Anne-Marie Duff) is seen sneaking off upstairs with her lover George as they grab a brief passionate moment together while the children watch TV.

But when the whimpering househusband is later seen taking his own child back home to his career driven wife, who happens to be Anna’s best friend, we realise that the trio’s lives are far more broken than the initial rosy tableau would suggest.

Read the rest of this entry »

I missed out on Mad Men when it first aired on BBC Four earlier this year, despite several friends and my better half urging me to check it out, and so I recently decided to invest in the Season One box set, which I’ve been watching in between episodes of The Wire. All this great telly to watch with long, complicated overreaching narrative themes and interlinking storylines… there’s just not enough hours in the day! A guy’s got to get some sleep sometime. Moving on…

It’s fitting that I should mention The Wire; much like that series, Mad Men is a very finely crafted and executed series which is of a commendably high calibre in terms of writing, acting and presentation. And just like The Wire, the initial pace of the series is glacially slow, but once things get moving…

Set in New York in the early 60’s New York, the show is concerned with the fictional Madison Avenue advertising agency Sterling Cooper (chiefly one Don Draper a high-powered ad exec) and the changing social backdrop of 1960’s America, (chiefly relationships and the shifting roles of men and women in western society).

Read the rest of this entry »

Featuring bullying, suicide, casual sex, hard drugs, organized crime, murder, all involving fresh faced teens,  the film Kidulthood caused quite a stir when it was released in 2006. Now, six years on, Dr Who actor Noel Clarke returns as the thuggish, baseball bat wielding killer Sam Peel in follow-up Adulthood. He and his posse are still leading a life of crime, having graduated from happy slapping to drug-dealing, but this time the film comes with a conscience.

It also comes with a new director in the form of Noel Clarke, who starred in and wrote the screenplay for Kidulthood. Clarke’s character Sam is back on the streets after a six-year stint in prison for murdering his rival Trife. With friends of the dead boy angling for his blood, Clarke is determined to keep his head down – but those aware of his release have other ideas.

As with Kidulthood, the action all takes place over a single day. Having had all the violence kicked out of him – cue prison flashback – Sam is looking to make amends for his actions. Finding no-one in, he visits Trife’s grave, where he is confronted by a man who tries to stab him. Later he meets up with his former girlfriend Claire (Madeleine Fairley) who is now with a new boyfriend, Hayden (Danny Dyer). Read the rest of this entry »

All around the world, millions of people are members of street gangs. Clubbing together in groups they fight, stab, shoot, rob, rape and murder anyone outside of the fold. In his BAFTA award winning documentary series Ross Kemp on Gangs which has just been released on DVD, the hard-man of EastEnders travels round the world in an attempt to infiltrate these criminal gangs and discover who they are, what makes them tick and what the law is doing to curb their criminal activity. In his quest he talks to gang members, locals who have been affected by gang violence, and the authorities who are attempting to combat the problem.

Starting off in El Salvador, where earthquakes, volcanoes and gun war terrify the population, Ross meets members of the MS13, considered by the US to be “the most dangerous gang in the world”, including those who cannot walk to the end of their street without running the risk of being shot down and killed. Moving on to Pollsmoor High Security Prison in Cape Town, South Africa, he learns the fearsome power of the inmates who subject new arrivals to violent attacks and gang rape as part of their brutal initiations. During the course of his harrowing journey, the actor cum journalist joins an elite police riot squad in Poland as they escort a notoriously violent Neo-Nazi football hooligan, meets families in St Louis facing daily intimidation from gang members as well as a man trying to leave his gangster lifestyle behind him, and is set on fire as part of the initiation rites for a Neo-Nazi group from Moscow.

Read the rest of this entry »

Cor blimey guv’nor, apples and pears, Jacob’s Crackers, and other assorted foodstuffs, it’s Guy Ritchie inneet? Rocking in with his new picture, RocknRolla right, which is like a revisting of his familiar, bankable roots after a two exercises in epic failure.

No new territory is covered here, it’s very much Lock Stock by numbers, so if you’re expecting Shakespeare, then you’d be better off looking elsewhere. However, if you’re after a slick, cheeky mockney comedy thriller full of guns, geezers and Gerard Butler, then you could do worse. Calling RocknRolla a return to form would be pushing it, but it’s safe to say that it’s a country mile better than the overly ambitious and confusing Revolver, (not to mention that total guff-bubble Swept Away) and plenty of fun.

The film is typical Ritchie fare – intertwining strands, stolen MacGuffins, (in this case a ‘lucky painting’) vast sums of money, and an assorted cast of bad boys and girls out for revenge or slice of the pie, or a bit of both.

Read the rest of this entry »

Encompassing shifting tribal allegiances, a good friend turned sworn enemy and a loving relationship that lasts a life-time, Mongol presents an epic account of the dramatic and harrowing formative years of the young tribal warrior Temudgin, who will eventually become the mighty ruler Genghis Khan.

Based on leading scholarly accounts and shot on the steppes of China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan, Sergei Bodrov’s historical biopic gives a full-blooded account of life in this harsh and unforgiving region that sticks closely to the established facts.

Read the rest of this entry »

The family feuds, criminal gangs and hard-eyed women who roam the streets of the gritty South Boston neighbourhood of Dorchester form the setting for Ben Affleck’s directorial debut crime drama.

Like Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone is based on a novel by author Dennis Lehane. Steeped in local colour, the film is a tale of abuse, loss and corruption. The film’s distributors actually pulled it from the Times BFI London Film Festival line-up and put back its UK release date because of the plot’s coincidental similarities to the Madeleine McCann case.

When four-year-old Amanda McCready goes missing, her junkie mother Helene (Amy Ryan) despairs. Unwilling to trust the cops, Amanda’s devoted uncle and aunt (Titus Welliver and Amy Madigan) call in a private detective (Casey Affleck – Ben’s brother) and his girlfriend (Michelle Monaghan) to search for the missing girl. The pair, working alongside the cynical, squinty detective on the case (Ed Harris) and the heartbroken police captain (Morgan Freeman) go down a long, winding road that leads them to the shadowy underworld of drug peddlers, ex-convicts and murderous paedophiles.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since Nintendo unveiled their wireless white wonder to the world (the Wii), practically everybody who saw the infra-red WiiMote control in action at some point thought the same thing: ‘Wouldn’t it be totally sweet if someone made a Star Wars game which allowed you to use the controller as a lightsabre?’

Well, turns out that someone did. The Star Wars ‘Expanded Universe’ – that is, stories set before, beyond and in between the narratives of the six films – is huge. There are hundreds of ancillary novels, comic books and video games set in the Star Wars universe, some of them great (see the Battlefront and the Knights of the Old Republic series’) some of them not so great (Empire at War). The Force Unleashed looks set to neatly slot into the former category.

The action takes place between Episodes III and IV, (so it’s technically Episode 3.241407 or something like that) and see players assuming the mantle of one Galen Marek, the secret apprentice of Darth Vader who is charged with hunting down the remaining Jedi after the Emperor orders their extermination.

Read the rest of this entry »

After the successful fusion of uninhibited bawdiness and showbiz satire in The 40 Year Old Virgin and pregnancy-centric rom-com Knocked Up, current chieftain of Hollywood comedy Judd Apatow looks to have scored another hit with Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Once again he takes a situation that really shouldn’t be funny – in this case the break-down of a long-term relationship – and sucks from it every last drop of laughs.

When Peter Bretter (Jason Segel), a genial underachiever who composes incidental music for American TV shows, is dumped by his beautiful actress girlfriend, Sarah Marhall (Kristen Bell), he is devastated. Standing stark naked in his kitchen and weeping buckets, he begs her to stay, but to no avail – her success has outstripped his and she has bigger fish to fry. He seeks solace in one-night stands but is haunted by Sarah’s memory. Tired of womanising, he takes advice from his step-brother Brian (Bill Hader) and escapes to Hawaii, only to discover that Sarah and her rock star boyfriend Aldous Snow (Russell Brand) are staying in the same hotel. The set up is textbook farce. Fortunately, help is at hand in the form of Rachel (Mila Kunis), the pretty hotel receptionist with whom Peter strikes up a relationship.

Read the rest of this entry »

Named after the sticky mixture of lemon, sugar and water that is used as an alternative to leg wax, Caramel is an ensemble comedy set in and around a Beirut beauty salon where the women struggle to make the best of a society which so often limits their options.

Director Nadine Labaki plays thirty-something salon owner Layale. The daughter of Christian parents, Layale is in the throes of an ill-advised affair with a married man.

Her Muslim co-worker Nasrine (Yasmine Al Masri) is about to be married to the man of her dreams, but goes to desperate measures to hide the fact she is not a virgin from her conservative in-laws. Rose (Sihame Haddad), the seamstress from upstairs, would llove to be in a relationship, but must spend all her spare time caring for her senile older sister.

Read the rest of this entry »