DVD & Blu-ray releases

The Hurt Locker
The Hurt Locker Public Domain

The Hurt Locker
DVD & Blu-ray, Lionsgate

While it's sure to feature highly in the "Best Of" movie lists for 2009, as it has done in the recently published US critics roundups, The Hurt Locker wasn't initially seen as an easy sell: an unconventional war movie for an unconventional war. Set in Baghdad in 2004, the film joins a three-man EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) unit whose previous, more straightforward leader, is killed in the line of duty. Enter Sergeant James (Jeremy Renner), who appears to be an adrenaline junkie and far from the team player the men are used to. There are no large-scale encounters, just a relentless tide of ambushes, booby traps and explosions, as they come across an endless series of explosive devices, hidden in bags, cars, dirt and even cadavers, all the while in the sights of hidden snipers. Their life expectancy is a coin toss, and James's behaviour does nothing to improve the odds. Unlike every other movie dealing with the Iraq war, there is no political agenda, even anything remotely gung-ho here. It's far more complex than that. Kathryn Bigelow's direction keeps things unbearably close-quarters and tense, and she never even attempts to make anything look even slightly cool, something her ex-husband James Cameron will never learn. The bare prefab army huts and wartorn streets look both hellish and incredibly mundane, and this film puts you in "the shit" like no other. Also out

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Gripping doc on a dolphin-slaughtering Japanese village and the effort to expose it.

An Englishman In New York, DVD, Momentum

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The Gold Diggers, DVD, BFI

Sally Potter's experimental, all-female debut, plus five early short films.

The Final Destination, DVD & Blu-ray, EV

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The first season of the teenage mutant asbo saga.