DVDs reviews: There Will Be Blood and more
culture_reviews culture film_reviews
Jotam Confino Alex Barton Kieran Kelly Mike McGrath Telegraph Reporters Pip Rich
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The Telegraph
The best of the small-screen releases

15, Disney, 2 discs, £19.99

Paul Thomas Anderson's ragingly intense There Will Be Blood, dazzlingly unlike his last offering, the brilliant, spiky Punch Drunk Love (2002), is the most ambitious film of the year, an experimental historical epic with mythic overtones. Violent as it is, it's drenched less in gore than in another fluid, the oil - what topic could be timelier? - that his capitalist anti-hero Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) rips, by drilling and dynamiting, from the California hinterlands.

The startlingly unconventional narrative starts confidently and sinisterly - with Jonny (Radiohead) Greenwood's unsettling loud atonal music marking the evolution (in a series of time-dissolves) of Plainview's original 1898 enterprise from one-man prospecting to large-scale industrial exploitation. The sequence echoes - and in its way equals - Kubrick's caveman-inventing-missile opening to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But this grand conception of the foundational drives and dysfunctions of America offers a superbly detailed, poetic, off-kilter vision of the oil business (and the church business) that's quite unique. It demands to be seen at least once. Philip Horne

Gérard Depardieu: Screen Icons (Le Colonel Chabert; Mon Père ce héros; Buffet Froid; Tous les matins du monde)

15, Optimum, 4 discs, £32.50

An officially dead Frenchman startled doctors recently by reviving on the slab. Returning from the dead seems a French habit - see Orphée, Les Diaboliques, The Return of Martin Guerre - and another Depardieu film, Yves Angelo's Le Colonel Chabert of 1994, based on Balzac.

This melancholy, beautiful, unsettling fable, set in 1817, has Depardieu as a shabby, spectral-seeming figure claiming to be the titular colonel, who died after the Napoleonic battle of Eylau in 1807. Revived, "Chabert" has come back to claim his due.

Unfortunately, his widow, Fanny Ardant, remarried with two children, denies all knowledge of him. He therefore starts to haunt the law-office of the charismatic hot-shot lawyer Derville (Fabrice Luchini) - who subsidises his efforts, because if he's a conman he's "the finest actor of our epoch".

It's a moving, delicate and subtle fable, directed by the cinematographer of Tous les matins du monde (1991), the lovely period biopic of lutenist Martin Marais. The anarchic energy of Blier's Buffet Froid (1979) and the frothy Oedipal holiday fun of Mon Père ce héros (1991) make up this delightfully varied set. PH

Diary of the Dead

18, Optimum, 2 discs, £17.99

"The mainstream had just vanished, with all its power, wealth and money. Now it was just us - bloggers, hackers, kids." George A Romero's low-budget Diary of the Dead returns to his roots as an independent maverick (see 1968's Night of the Living Dead), and this fresh, intelligent fiction imagines the zombie plague starting right now. In this enjoyable (though apocalyptic) post-Blair Witch video-diary quasi-documentary on the end of life and death as we know them, the wit and wisdom of Romero run rings round the recent Cloverfield, which tried the same trick and cost 12 times as much to make.

His hero is a budding filmmaker, so obsessive filming is in character. The film students escaping by Winnebago through rural Pennsylvania find a second camera, and what we see is explicitly presented as edited together subsequently, and as including various internet and CCTV downloads.

Diary targets the betrayal of duty - triviality, dumbing-down, or outright mendacity - by the US media. By contrast, Romero, through his "undead" metaphor, is "trying to tell you the truth" in this cheap-and-cheerless jeremiad, spry and venturesome stuff for a 68-year-old. PH

The Sex Pistols: There'll Always Be An England

Fremantle Home Entertainment, £15.99

For those who missed them at the Isle of Wight festival last month, here is proof that the ongoing Sex Pistols reunion is a good thing. Julien Temple's concert film from the band's five-night stint at the Brixton Academy last November is as exciting and celebratory as were the gigs themselves.

Playing indoors for once, the original quartet were clearly out to prove their mettle. Given their lack of proficiency back in 1976-77, these were quite probably the best ever live renditions of Anarchy in the UK et al.

The reason for Jones's paunch can be found in the bonus feature, Pistols Psychogeography of London, where he lustily revisits his favourite pie and mash shop in Shepherd's Bush. Lydon, meanwhile, rants from the top deck of a tourist bus about the capital's declining standards.

The whole piece is hilarious, but also critical of corporate landscaping, and patriotic for a British paradise lost. Andrew Perry

Rambo

18, Sony, £24.99

John Rambo has used the 20 years since we left him in Thailand well. He has found time to reflect on what it all means, undergoing a Buddhist education and achieving a Zen wisdom.

No, not really: he catches snakes for a living, forges machetes in his spare time and says things like "Killin's as easy as breathin'" while gently sweating and staring into the middle distance.

But no one hoping for anything different is likely to seek out this film, and those wanting more of the same will probably be satisfied. The explosions are huge, the baddies are evil and Sylvester Stallone gets to mow down half the Burmese army with a massive machine gun. Blood, guts and limbs squelch all over the place for an hour and a half.