Enjoy Life

Spring 2025 DVDs

Great new home entertainment releases, suggested by Simon Evans

It’s perhaps a sign of changing times that in 1968 one of the most popular, and garlanded, films of the year was The Lion In Winter, which concerned not perhaps one of the better-known moments in British history, the struggle for the succession to the throne in the late 12th century. Now, as then, it is absolutely riveting however, helped by sumptuous cinematography that at times give the film the quality of a medieval painting, an evocative, Oscar-winning score by John Barry, and a cast that includes Peter O’Toole in all his pomp, Anthony Hopkins, a young Timothy Dalton and, best of all, the imperious Katherine Hepburn, who picked up the third of four Academy Awards for her role as the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Newly available in a restored edition through StudioCanal’s Vintage Classics, in Blu-ray, DVD and the usual multi formats, it’s a thing of wonder, especially with an array of extras that include an interview with Sir Anthony Hopkins…

The 1961 film The Rebel was an attempt to transfer Tony Hancock’s lugubrious television character to the big screen, with the comedian’s regular writers, Galton and Simpson, expanding on the themes of the Hancock’s Half Hour episode The Poetry Society to create a brilliant satire on bourgoise bohemian pretension, in particular fashionable Angry Young Men existentialism and modern art.

Hancock is an office clerk and would-be artist who throws in his job and heads for Paris where he falls in with a pretentious crowd and finds himself, thanks to a mix-up, being feted for his artwork. Galton and Simpson said the greatest compliment paid to them about the film was that the artist Lucian Freud described it as the best film ever made about modern art. It’s certainly worth rediscovering this little gem and the new DVD and Blu-ray release from StudioCanal features incisive features on Hancock from comedians Paul Merton and Diane Horgan, as well as a commentary by Galton and Simpson.

Also newly available with equally fascinating bonus features, is Hancock’s 1963 film The Punch and Judy Man, which also skewers social pretensions, as a puppeteer in a faded seaside town is invited to perform at an anniversary gala, much to the delight of his social-climbing wife, brilliantly played by Sylvia Sims.…

New to BBC Blu-ray is the seventh series of classic Doctor Who, the first to feature Jon Pertwee as the time-travelling Time Lord. Having come close to cancellation at the end of Patrick Troughton’s tenure as the Doctor, the show now hit a golden seam, with excellent writing and characterisation overcoming the sometimes threadbare production values.

The four stories that made up this series, first aired in 1970, were Spearhead from Space, The Silurians, The Ambassadors of Death and Inferno, all of which had a strong flavour of Quatermass about them, as the newly earthbound Doctor and his friends in UNIT faced a variety of menaces at home rather than in outer space. As Pertwee so eloquently put it, “there’s nothing quite so terrifying as a yeti sitting on the loo in Tooting Bec”.

The problem was that, for all the strength of the plotting, the stories all tended, inevitably, to conform to a ‘base under threat’ formula, and so for the next series the Doctor was given more scope to travel beyond earth every now and again. It was an interesting experiment, though, and one that probably saved the show, that and Pertwee’s surprisingly, given his comic background, decision to play the character absolutely straight – most of the time. Excellent extras include an affectionate portrait of the Brigadier actor Nicholas Courtney, a feature on Who writer Malcolm Hulke and a documentary Terror In The Suburbs, that focusses on the Time Lord’s one-off down to earth season.

In Small Things Like These (Lionsgate, DVD and Blu-ray) Cillian Murphy is outstanding as a devoted father struggling to support his family, who discovers disturbing secrets kept by the local convent — and uncovers truths of his own — forcing him to confront his past and the complicit silence of a small Irish town controlled by the Catholic Church, and The Last Voyage of the Demeter (Dazzler, DVD and Blu-ray), is an interesting twist on the Dracula myth, chronicling the doomed journey of a merchant ship ferrying 50 mysterious wooden crates from Carpathia to London…

Inspired by true events from the Eighties and Nineties, Irish thriller The Vanishing Triangle (Acorn Media International, DVD) stars India Mullen as an investigative journalist, Lisa Wallace, who finds herself drawn into the hunt for a serial killer after she publishes an article about her mother’s murder. Downton Abbey’s Allen Leech plays the detective who teams up with Lisa as they become drawn into a deadly game of cat and mouse…

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Latest book reviews
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April's DVD reviews
April's book reviews
April's CD reviews
March's DVD review
March book reviews
March's CD reviews
February's DVDs
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Winter books
January's DVD releases
Christmas book reviews
November DVD reviews
November's Music Reviews
November book reviews
October's DVD reviews
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October's book reviews
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Pick of the paperbacks June 2023
June DVDs
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Simon Evans CD Reviews for June 2023
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Book reviews
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