The jump to DVD can be unforgiving for films of great sensory allure: minus the cinema's scale of sound and image, couch viewing can highlight weaknesses in even the most radiant visions. Not so with Jonathan Glazer's continually astounding Under the Skin (Studiocanal, 15), which lands on the small screen with beauty and curiosity to burn – the rare extraterrestrial-invasion film that itself seems an alien object. The black-opal shimmer of cinematographer Daniel Landin's compositions fascinates anew; ditto the sharp primal shriek of Mica Levi's score.
If the sheer shock of the film's surface is inevitably tempered on a revisit, that allows for greater consideration of what this independent-minded adaptation of Michel Faber's very different marvel of a sci-fi novel is actually about – beyond the luridly strange spectacle of Scarlett Johansson (always otherworldly to some degree, never more so than here) driving around Scotland's least salubrious stretches, drawing men into a house of terminal temptation. She's not human; that much we know, and little more. Her natural makeup doesn't appear to preclude gender or perhaps that's a human affectation she's adopted as seamlessly as her cut-glass accent.
Either way, Glazer's film conducts a searching examination of the ways womanhood is identified and treated in a society often oblivious to internal identity. Like its literary source, Under the Skin supports and rewards multiple readings; elegant and agitated in equal measure, it's the first British film in some while to feel genuinely unprecedented.
Nothing this week matches Under the Skin for daring or impact, but if it's comfort food you're after, The Lunchbox (Artificial Eye, PG) is worth opening. The packaging of Ritesh Batra's appealing epistolary romance suggests glossy gastroporn in the vein of Like Water for Chocolate, yet while devotees of Indian cuisine will pick up flavourful culinary details, this is no exercise in vapid exoticism. The story of the unlikely bond that forms, via misdirected lunch deliveries, between a lonely widower (the excellent Irrfan Khan) and an unhappy young housewife (Nimrat Kaur), it's short on surprises, except in its pleasing avoidance of sticky feelgood tactics.
Danis Tanovic's An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker (New Wave, 12), meanwhile, works overtime for its feel-bad credentials; even that commercial death wish of a title feels calculatedly austere. There's commendably unforged social detail in this dramatised documentary about a Roma family living on the Bosnian breadline, but it illuminates only the bleakly obvious. I learned similarly little, albeit on a more exposed subject, from pedestrian couturier biopic Yves Saint Laurent (Entertainment One, 15), with its less than stunning revelations about the destructive hedonism of high fashion; if you're intrigued, at least wait for Bertrand Bonello's more garishly engaging Saint Laurent later this year.
Two worthwhile music docs hit shelves still warm from the cinemas. Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets (Soda Pictures, 12) is a chipper concert film centred on the indie-disco squires' 2012 Sheffield homecoming gig. There's little in it for non-acolytes, which I wouldn't say about the delightful Mistaken for Strangers (Dogwoof, 15), a goofy-sad portrait of life on the road with glum-rock favourites the National, seen through the eyes of frontman Matt Berninger's self-confessed loser of a younger brother, Tom. It's a pointed story of fraternal friction in behind-the-music disguise.
Returning to the realm of offbeat sci-fi, Ecuadorian director Sebastián Cordero's solemn, stimulating Europa Report arrives in the UK on Netflix after bypassing cinemas and DVD: it deserves greater fanfare, even if its ideas sometimes outpace its execution. Meshing speculative fiction with the ubiquitous found-footage trend, this examination of an ill-starred mission to Jupiter's moon Europa generates a measure of white-knuckle suspense without neglecting the science part of the equation.
