A roundup of this week's DVD releases
A SERIOUS MAN *****
Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. Starring Michael Stuhlbarg, Fred Melamed 15 cert
This masterpiece from the Coens goes among a tight-knit Jewish community in 1960s Minnesota to update the story of Job. Stuhlbarg plays a professor whose life is steadily falling apart. Both hilarious and nihilistic, the film has one awful message: there’s no reason why bad things happen to good people. When a film is this good, who cares that the DVD is so sparsely appointed?
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY ****
Directed by Oren Peli. Starring Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat 15 cert
Intensely creepy no-budget horror – presented as a series of home videos – detailing the haunting of a bland house in California. Produced for just $15,000, the film is, by some measures, the most profitable ever. The DVD comes with the alternate ending that many viewers feel is superior.
SAVIOURS ****
Directed and produced by Ross Whitaker and Liam Nolan PG cert
The awful death of Darren Sutherland adds an extra poignancy to this fine documentary on St Saviour’s Olympic Boxing Academy in north Dublin. The young film-makers limit the amount of boxing footage to focus on the personal journeys undergone by Sutherland and his colleagues. They and their coaches are genuinely inspiring.
THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON ***
Directed by Chris Weitz. Starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner 12 cert
The second, impressively atmospheric episode in the teen vampire saga finds Bella (Stewart) falling in with lycanthropes. It’s pointless to complain that the werewolf transformations are perfunctory because the Twilight epics are not really horror films. They’re slick, efficient audiovisual representations of adolescent neuroses. The two-disc edition features all the usual guff.
2012 **
Directed by Roland Emmerich. Starring John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover, Woody Harrelson 12 cert
Roland Emmerich destroys the world again with an absurd natural disaster. Much of this apocalypto- porn is relatively fun. LA crumbles spectacularly and skyscrapers implode with much digital panache. Everything else – and there’s hours more – is, however, a raging, painful bore. The HMV version comes in a metal box. Nice.
