Latest DVDs and downloads

Our pick of the latest films to watch at home this week

Welcome to Time Out Film’s DVD page, where you’ll find reviews of the latest DVD and Blu-ray releases, the biggest box sets and reissues of classic movies. Each week we’ll bring you a selection of the most exciting new titles, but we’ll also dig deep to unearth forgotten masterpieces, overlooked oddities and cult classics making their DVD debut.

The Claire Denis Collection

Rated as: 4/5

This new collection of four films by French filmmaker Claire Denis is bookended by her first film, ‘Chocolat’ (1988), and her most recent, ‘White Material’ (2009). Both films indirectly reflect Denis’s own childhood in Cameroon and her continuing interest in people coming together from places – and for reasons – that are varied and far apart, and the tensions and attractions between them.

'Chocolat’ gives us the household of a French colonial official somewhere in west Africa at a time that looks to be the 1960s: when the passengers of a stranded plane come to stay, the quiet order of the home is disturbed and the relationships of the woman of the house (Giulia Boschi) and her young daughter (Cécile Ducasse) with a servant (Isaach de Bankolé) are put under strain. It’s a sign, historically, of things to come. The later ‘White Material’ is set at the fag-end of the colonial cycle: Maria (Isabelle Huppert) is a woman determined to stay put in a distinctly similar setting as war rages all around. Denis’s portrait of war is bold and unsettling. It’s utterly strange and utterly believable.

The other two films in the collection are ‘Nenette and Boni’ (1996), the story of an awkward relationship between young siblings in contemporary France, and ‘Beau Travail’, (1999), Denis’s masterly portrait of a group of Foreign Legion soldiers under the sweltering sun of Djibouti. The latter is a beguiling, brilliant film, as much about the sweaty, hardened, trained bodies of these men as the dynamics between them and their relationship with a strange land. Dave Calhoun

The Ealing Studio Rarities Collection – Volume 2

Rated as: 3/5

Another set of little-known films from the legendary Ealing studios. The highlight here is ‘Brief Ecstasy’, a 1937 precursor to ‘Brief Encounter’, but with a more frank, eroticised undertone. The other three are a mixed bag: spies, seafaring, stiff upper lips and the Suez canal.

Daniel Craig 007

Rated as: 4/5

To many he’s the best Bond of all, so it makes perfect economic sense for 20th Century Fox to box up some Blu-rays of the debonair beef cake’s three 007 films to date – ‘Casino Royale’, ‘Quantum of Solace’ and ‘Skyfall’ – and then sit back and listen to the jingle of the cash registers. Or not, as the case may be.

Twilight: The Complete Collection

Rated as: 2/5

Now you can immerse yourself in every episode of the interminable tween vamp epic, from the original (and best) ‘Twilight’ all the way through to the action-packed finale, ‘Breaking Dawn – Part 2’.

Kore-eda Hirokazu Collection

Rated as: 5/5

For the past two decades, Japanese writer-director Kore-eda Hirokazu has quietly established a reputation as one of the world’s great filmmakers. This set collects four of his finest works, including 2004’s child’s-eye masterpiece ‘Nobody Knows’.

Star Wars: Episodes I-VI – Limited Edition Steelbook

Rated as: 3/5

As if we haven’t had enough of the Lucas sextuplet, here’s another limited edition to put on the shelf while you wait for the next tranche of galactical empire guff sometime in, ooh, 2015? This version adds nothing new. But hey, you get to own the whole set in two chunky, colour-printed tins, which you know will be put on a shelf and never looked at again.