DVD Review: Gainsbourg (2010)

Sadly, I don't have an arthouse cinema in the area, just the usual couple of multiplex cinemas, neither of which chose to screen Gainsbourg last year. Instead, they to chose show 3D versions of third-rate Hollywood flicks. Shame really, as Gainsbourg really is the type of foreign language movie that really could have appealed to a broader audience. But is it the definite record of Serge Gainsbourg? We'll deal with that later.

But let's start with the movie itself. Directed by Joann Sfar and starring Eric Elmosnino as the man himself, it's effectively the edited highlights of Gainsbourg's life, from his earliest days as a Jewish/Russian refugee in Paris during the World War II, ending as he drives into the sunset with his final partner, Bambou, bizarrely the grand-daughter of General Friedrich Paulus of the German army on the Russian front. I'm guessing that's some kind of symmetry.

DVD Review: The Seventh Seal (1957), 50th Anniversary Special Edition

Not before or since the 1957 release of Ingmar Bergman's haunting masterpiece The Seventh Seal has the momentous theme of humankind's search for existential meaning – within or outside a religious framework – been treated of with such furious grace, intelligence and insight. All cynicism concerning the re-release of a '50th Anniversary Digitally Remastered Edition,' in the year of the great filmmaker's death, must therefore be put on hold. Any reason to publicise or disseminate or roll back the technical decay of this supreme piece of cinematic art, whether or not the companies in question make some extra baksheesh by finagling historical contingency, is a good reason.

Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) is a crusading knight freshly returned to the shores of his native Sweden. He has lost all the moral certainty he left with, presumably having seen and participated in atrocities in the name of Christianity. The hypocrisy of this institution which teaches forbearance, peace and tolerance yet practices murder, torture and empire-like expansionism is too much for his reflective nature to bear without apostasy. He yearns for a meaning to life beyond the circumscribed and vague one offered by the Church.

DVD Review: Kidnapped (1971)

With so many fine Scottish actors around at the time, you do wonder why Michael Caine was cast as Alan Breck in the 1971 adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic novel Kidnapped, which has just been reissued on DVD.

In truth, Caine does a decent job of playing Scottish rebel, even if the accent drifts into the native cockney every now and again. Breck meets up with David Balfour (Lawrence Douglas), a young lad betrayed by his uncle and sold to sea. When the crew realises there's a price on Breck's head, they plot to hand him over to the authorities.

Breck and Balfour fight their way out, aided by the undermanned ship hitting the rocks - leaving them back on the Scottish coast. Both need to make it inland to Edinburgh, but need to avoid the Redcoats to make it one piece.