"Actor: Irene Grazioli"

• The Red Violin | DVD | (12/05/2008) from £9.98   |  Saving you £8.00 (100.13%)   |  RRP £15.99

  A skilled craftsman makes a violin for his unborn child. When tragedy strikes and his wife and child are killed he decides to finish the violin. The story follows the instrument as it travels across the centuries and changes hands many times.

• 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

• The Red Violin | DVD | (03/02/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  François Girard's The Red Violin (1998) is a good-looking but ultimately insubstantial piece from a director who seems more concerned with tone, colour and style than narrative coherence. The film traces the story of a violin originally made in 17th-century Italy, which is taken to an 18th-century monastery to be played by a child prodigy. The violin later comes into the hand of a virtuoso in 19th-century Oxford, from there to China in the Cultural Revolution and on to Montreal, where--before it can be auctioned--it is "acquired"' by Samuel L Jackson. Unfortunately, none of these stories make much of an impression: the episode in Oxford is particularly weak, with Greta Scacchi wasted, and the film is even less than the sum of its parts. Jackson is completely miscast as an expert on musical instruments, even if a criminal one. To be frank, this is a poor effort, though well photographed and with a pleasing score by composer John Corigliano performed by violinist Joshua Bell. On the DVD:The disc contains a theatrical trailer but no other features. The soundtrack is excellent, in Dolby Surround. The image is equally good, in a 1.78:1 anamorphic print. --Ed Buscombe