New DVDs

A round up of newly-released DVDs in brief

The Orphanage/El Orfanato

Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona. Starring Belén Rueda, Fernando Cayo, Roger Princep, Geraldine Chaplin, Montserrat Carulla, Mabel Rivera 15 cert

Laura (Rueda) decides to return to the remote orphanage in which she grew up and run the establishment as a home for mentally disabled kids. Soon ghostly children are in touch with her own son. It is a measure of the brilliance of this singular Spanish horror film that it calls to mind a dozen classics of the macabre while still remaining very much its own sinister beast.

Man On Wire

Directed by James Marsh 12 Cert

Marsh draws extensively on home movies, archival footage and photographs, which are seamlessly interspersed with dramatised recreations in his fascinating film. It closely observes Philippe Petit's obsession with walking across a steel cable wire suspended between the peaks of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, as he did on August 7th, 1974.

Eden Lake

Directed by James Watkins. Starring Kelly Reilly, Michael Fassbender, Jake O'Connell, Thomas Thurgoose 18 cert

Fassbender (from Hunger) and Reilly play a couple on a romantic camping weekend when they are harassed by five boys and a girl who are in the early-to-mid teens and fuelled with mindless aggression. Writer-director Watkins takes a bleak view of contemporary society in his taut, gory and deliberately disturbing English thriller.

The Love Guru

Directed by Marco Schnabel. Starring Mike Myers, Jessica Alba, Justin Timberlake, Romany Malco, Megan Good, Omad Djalili, Ben Kingsley 15 cert

In the nadir of his career, Myers irritatingly overplays a guru hired to resolve an ice hockey player's marital problems. The flimsy, witless screenplay seems predicated on the assumption that some audiences are so indiscriminating that they will relish any comedy as long as it ladles out jokes about sex, penis size and toilet functions.