New DVD releases

Time Out's critics round up the best of this week's DVD releases

DVD of the week
Dirty Harry: Special Editions
4/6
Certs: 18 (DVD £15.99 each; Blu-ray £24.99 each; DVD Boxset £39.99)
Directed by Don Siegel, the first ‘Dirty Harry’ hit the streets in 1971 to real controversy. It follows Clint Eastwood’s taciturn San Francisco police detective Harry Callahan as bureaucracy thwarts his pursuit of a psychotic Vietnam veteran. Whether the film was consciously challenging liberal attitudes or indulging in ‘transgression for its own sake’ – as Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel mischievously suggests in his commentary – depends on your outlook, but it remains a powerful piece of cinema.

Ted Post’s excellent 1973 follow-up, ‘Magnum Force’, was designed as a rebuttal to critical claims that its predecessor had glorified might over right with fascistic fervour. It puts Harry firmly to the left of David Soul’s death-squad of overzealous motorcycle cops who are executing the big-hitters of the Frisco crime scene. Commentary this time comes from gung-ho scriptwriter John Milius, who seems barely familiar with the finished film.

The flat lighting, scaled-back production values and weak script of ‘The Enforcer’ (1976) suggest little care had been taken and that Eastwood was by now using these sequels to fund more personal projects. This time Harry’s lumbered with a rookie female partner, while the ‘baddies’ are a bunch of jittery student reactionaries. The finale, where Harry chases around Alcatraz with a bazooka, exemplifies the lack of ideas on show.

Although the highest grossing of the films – and containing the famous ‘make my day’ line – 1983’s self-directed ‘Sudden Impact’ feels nothing like a Harry Callahan adventure. Clint is packed off to a seaside town and his .44 Magnum is traded in for some gimmicky hand-cannon. The commentary is once again by Schickel, and even he, by this time, admits the series is listing.

Nevertheless, it was still a country mile better than 1988’s ‘The Dead Pool’, which plays out like a staggeringly violent episode of ‘Murder, She Wrote’. It’s a dire, negligible entry that doesn’t even make the 90-minute mark.

With Clint rumoured to be bringing Harry out of retirement for the upcoming ‘Gran Torino’, one can only hope that he goes back to the no-nonsense approach of the first couple of films. Because if the decline of this series proves anything, it’s that a man’s gotta know his limitations… Adam Lee Davies
Extras Individual discs include commentaries, documentaries/puff-pieces and various shorts. The box set also comes with books, maps, etc.

The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration
5/6
Certs: 18 (£29.99)
Another reissue for Coppola’s two-thirds-masterpiece Mafia saga, this time digitally remastered by the director. It’s Gordon Willis’s high-contrast camerawork that benefits most from the restoration process, the rich, brooding darkness of those dim, oak-panelled interiors lending added weight to the unfolding drama. The films themselves are a part of our culture now, endlessly watchable, quotable and artistically unapproachable, with the exception of the confused, superfluous (but still hugely entertaining) third chapter. Special features include everything from the previous set, plus a new disc of random mini-docs populated by enthusiastic, often very funny celebrity fans. One question though: when are we going to see a DVD release for Coppola’s fascinating, massively extended chronological recut ‘The Godfather: A Novel for Television’? Tom Huddleston
Extras Four ‘making of’ featurettes, four short films, hidden Easter egg.

A Walk with Love and Death
2/6
Cert: 15 (£12.99)
This 1969 film from John Huston is no cool noir or sparkling two-hander: it’s a medieval romance, set in France in the era before automated weaponry and shot by an American director whose films work best when they’re packing pistols. Heron of Fois (Assaf Dayan), a gentle student bunking classes in Paris, rescues lady Claudia (Anjelica Huston) from rebellious peasants. The two find time to fall in love despite a hectic programme of near-death adventures. It all looks gorgeous, but Huston’s history is patchy in the weirdest way: the armour is historically accurate and the emptiness of the countryside is perfectly plausible. But it’s as hard to believe in Huston senior as a knight who opts to join the peasantry because – get this – right is on their side, as it is in his daughter as a medieval lady fair. A historical curiosity – but that’s film history, only. Nina Caplan
Extras On-set documentary.

In the Valley of Elah
4/6
Cert: 15 (DVD £19.99; Blu-ray £24.99)
Watching this accomplished and delicately compelling Iraq war procedural from Paul Haggis, you get the sneaking suspicion that the director has taken to heart some of the criticisms levelled at his hysterical, callously emotive 2005 Oscar-winner, ‘Crash’. With its sand-blasted photography and a performance from Tommy Lee Jones that effortlessly straddles the line between melancholy and vengeful, this pared-down and tender film solemnly treads a similar path to Paul Schrader’s ‘Hardcore’, with Jones as a retired military policeman who decides to take on the task of tracking down his son who has gone Awol from a US army base having recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. Though it tails off slightly in its final scenes, the underlying idea about a father being forced to reconfigure the virtuous impression of his son to a sordid reality hits home perfectly. David Jenkins
Extras ‘After Iraq’ featurette, interview with Paul Haggis, additional scenes.

Savages
4/6
Cert: 15 (£19.99)
It’s been a decade since Tamara Jenkins’ last writing-directing effort, the terrific ‘Slums of Beverly Hills’; perhaps it required that long to make these characters lovable, but the wait was worth it. Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Wendy Savage (Laura Linney) are textbook outcomes of parental indifference: he’s an academic with intimacy issues, she’s an aspiring playwright and serial fantasist having an affair with a married man that doesn’t even look fun. Then their estranged father starts to degenerate into dementia and suddenly the Savage children have to grow up. Jenkins has the sense to realise her script is great and her actors are better, and plays it straight, without any of the melodrama that normally makes films about family so cloying. The pathos is all in the detail: the grown man who cries when his girlfriend makes eggs; the woman who lies to make the world a better place; and the old man who evidently finds death preferable to spending time with either of them, and probably always did. Nina Caplan
Extras On-set interviews, photo gallery.

Angels One Five
4/6
Cert: U (£12.99)
John Gregson’s stoical young pilot, ‘Septic’, provides a hook on which to hang a series of Battle of Britain character studies as he arrives at a hard-pressed Home Counties base eager to see action. Ushered into a closed world with its own codes and disguised hierarchies, Septic is initially at the centre of some fish-out-of-water fun. But one rash act leads to his grounding and to the real heart of the film – the screwed-down tension of the control room where those left behind plot the war to a soundtrack of pilots’ voices beamed direct from battle. It’s a scenario with such impact that it’s become almost a cliché, even surfacing in ‘Star Wars’, but here the unsentimental depiction of claustrophobic heroism makes for an affecting and unusual war story. Paul Fairclough
Extras None.