Moulin Rouge Rental, retail (£16.99) and DVD (£22.99) Fox Cert 12 **
Neatly timed to coincide with the Baftas, where it won three awards, this is very much a love it or hate it kind of movie. After Romeo + Juliet, you'll probably be familiar with the Baz Luhrmann method: Moulin Rouge is as hyperactive as a six-year-old let out of school, and as overblown as Pavarotti's trousers, but with far less substance.
Luhrmann is aiming to reinvent the musical, a phrase to chill the bones of anyone who remembers Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark. Luhrmann takes the opposite approach to the Dogme boys, with gaudy costume design and even gaudier decor that overwhelms its cast. Then a load of familiar old songs - everything from The Sound of Music to Nirvana - are chucked into a thin tale about a consumptive showgirl/ hooker (Nicole Kidman) pursued by Ewan McGregor's naive young writer and a rich duke in 1900 Paris.
Only David Bowie's top-and-tail version of Nature Boy really registers musically. McGregor and Kidman are very capable actors made to do all their own vocalising. It's not their fault that the result is passable but uninteresting: since there's only the most basic, coarse acting on show in this operatic tale, the film is crying out for singers, not actors. This is neatly proved by Luhrmann's video of the recent hit, Lady Marmalade - one of the DVD extras you could spend most of a day getting through - which has all the musical sass and spark the score lacks. Much of the dialogue is also lifted from old songs - at times, the script is like one of those games where you have to think of as many songs with the word "love" in as you can, ad infinitum.
After a stunning opening shot, swooping over an imaginary Paris and in through McGregor's garret window, it's all downhill in a whirling two-hour farrago that amounts to a very expensive karaoke night gussied up with swooping cameras and a bit of cod Busby Berkeley. In a DVD interview, Luhrmann describes his film, entirely shot in Sydney, as "audience participation cinema". This audience sample felt a bit sick, as if I'd just eaten a dozen Walnut Whips while trapped in a revolving red velvet lift with loud muzak.
A Map of the World Rental and DVD rental High Fliers Cert 15 ***
It's rare enough these days to find an intelligent actress over 40 in a lead role, but this absorbing film by debut director Scott Elliott gives us two of the best, Sigourney Weaver and Julianne Moore, in a fiercely independent movie that surprisingly went straight to video. Its subject matter - child abuse and infant death - is the sort that usually finds pat solutions from unadventurous afternoon TV movies starring somebody from Dallas or Charlie's Angels. But Weaver, as a busy mother and school nurse in America's midwest, is allowed to be a real person here, enigmatic to the last in a film that prefers questions to answers. There is no hint of sentimentality and the film throws up memorably subtle moments like the excruciatingly awkward kiss Moore shares with David Strathairn, playing Weaver's husband with his usual calm conviction.
It's a film that constantly makes you think and one that Weaver especially liked: "American audiences are used to women breaking down at the appropriate moments. Even if they know that in real life, it is very different, they are conditioned to seeing predictable emotionalism in films and A Map of the World didn't do that."
Ring 0 Retail (£15.99)and DVD (£19.99) Tartan Cert 15 ***
Rather disappointing prequel and final part to what Tartan likes to call the "Ring cycle". The original Ring was a quiet and subtle horror tale that built nicely and had enjoyably spine-chilling moments. Ring 0 carries on the tradition of quiet and subtle but never manages to terrify in its tale about Sadako, an aspiring actress in this film and how the fatal curse was begun. The oddity about the Ring films is that it's technology that is so scary - this from that most tech-friendly of nations, Japan.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail Retail (£9.99) and DVD (£19.99) Columbia Tristar Cert 15 ****
A bit overlooked since the lads unleashed their masterwork, The Life of Brian, Monty Python's first proper film ran out of ideas (and money) but still has cherishable moments. The black knight scene remains one of their finest pieces of applied stupidity and violence and the songs take on a new aspect when you can sing along with the lyrics onscreen (that's "We sing from the diaphragm a lot" and "We hum and jam and strum a lot" if you don't have a DVD player).
Other additions for the dedicated Pythonophile include a 46-minute film of Michael Palin and Terry Jones revisiting the often spectacular locations in Glencoe and Perthshire, though the castles had to be in England as the relevant Scottish authority decided at the last moment that the team might do "something inconsistent with the dignity of the monuments" - a rare example of bureaucratic prescience. Palin and Jones also visit a gift shop with coconut halves, enabling tourists to ride horses Holy Grail-style.
Extras also include a dubbed Japanese version of the knights who say "Ni" and a remarkably camp 1974 BBC location report. ("How many pooftahs are there in the unit?" Graham Chapman is asked.) In high definition widescreen with pink frilly edges, the sleeve claims.
