"Actor: Gigio Alberti"

• Mediterraneo | DVD | (14/06/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Mediterraneo, the 1991 comedy by Gabriele Salvatores, was knocked for not being deep enough but it is what it is; and it is actually an easygoing, sunny movie about eight Italian soldiers who manage to strand themselves on a tiny Greek island paradise during World War II. The sort of mutts who would shoot a donkey for not knowing the proper password, these clumsy warriors become a comic variation on the Lotus Eaters of myth, their fighting spirit evaporated in the midst of so much beauty and sexual availability among the local women. There are also sundry opportunities for the men to find another purpose for their lives (one particularly artistic fellow works on the restoration of a church, for example). Amid the sometimes coarse jokes and gratuitous nudity, there are subtle themes about the contrast between what men are truly like in their natural state versus what they are like as killers. (The Thin Red Line this isn't but Salvatores does, in his own way, touch on some of the same themes.) Watch this one on a cold winter's day and vicariously enjoy the tans as well as the antiwar sentiment. --Tom Keogh

• Quo Vardis, Baby | DVD | (21/08/2006) from £8.75   |  Saving you £11.24 (128.46%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Giorgia a short-tempered but quick-witted investigator works in her father's private detective agency in Bologna. She spends most of her time trailing cheating spouses with a telephoto camera. One day she receives a box of video cassettes - taped diaries of her younger sister Ada sixteen years after her mysterious death. The tapes show a happy extroverted girl fully involved in her future - struggling to start an acting career and keeping an affair secret from her boyfriend. As she negotiates the twists and turns of the mystery and her own complex love life Giorgia finds herself descending deeper and deeper into her sister's past...and ultimately her own. Soon Giorgia begins to suspect that Ada's death was something far more sinister... Making atmospheric use of its Bologna locations and effective and subtle use of music Quo Vadis Baby? is one of the most distinctive European thrillers of recent years.