"Actor: Julien Guiomar"

• Bizet: Carmen -- film version | DVD | (13/03/2000) from £17.89   |  Saving you £2.10 (11.74%)   |  RRP £19.99

  This movie version of Bizet's popular opera Carmen was filmed on location, conveying a kind of atmosphere, a sense of space, movement, and presence that's hard to achieve in a staged performance. It takes the action out of doors for many scenes, with the opening titles superimposed on the bloody conclusion of a bullfight. Elsewhere the changing of the guard, the crowd scenes, the dance number that opens Act 2, and the panoramic scenery of the smugglers' mountain hideout all benefit from the freedom granted by movie cameras. It's an exciting Carmen, too, with a young-looking Placido Domingo in top form for a role he has sung hundreds of times. For Julia Migenes, though, it was her first performance in a role she would have trouble performing in an opera house. Her voice does not fit easily into Carmen's range, and she spent months training it, very successfully, before singing the role in a recording studio where the soundtrack was taped before the film was shot. Casting her in the role was a gamble, but it worked; she is a convincing actress. Unlike most opera-house performances this movie version uses the opera's original opera comique form with some spoken dialogue rather than recitatives.--Joe McLellan, Amazon.com

• The Wing and the Thigh | DVD | (16/08/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.62

  In this comedy Louis de Funes is a top restaurant critic the head of an important French culinary guide. At the beginning of the film he and his son (Coluche) are at odds as the son prefers working as a circus clown to studying the fine arts of gastronomy. The two join forces however to thwart the greedy owner of a chain of inferior restaurants who plans to take over the finest restaurants in France and substitute his formulaic fodder for real cooking. Another lure bringing the son into the picture is a lovely secretary working for the guide.

• Property is No Longer a Theft | Blu Ray | (20/03/2017) from £16.39   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Having tackled the corrupting nature of power with Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion and taken an angry, impassioned look at labour relations with The Working Class Goes to Heaven, Italian master Elio Petri next turned his attentions to capitalism for the darkly comic Property is No Longer a Theft. A young bank clerk (Flavio Bucci, the blind pianist in Dario Argento's Suspiria), denied a loan by his employer, decides to exact his revenge the local butcher (Ugo Tognazzi, La Grande bouffe) who is not only a nasty, violent, greedy piece of work but also one of the bank's star customers. Quitting his job, the clerk devotes all of his time tormenting the butcher, stealing his possessions one-by-one, including his mistress (Daria Nicolodi, Deep Red). Told in an off-kilter fashion by Petri, abetted by the woozy sound design and another outstanding score by Ennio Morricone, Property is No Longer a Theft presents a caustic, blackly comic look at a corrupt society.

• La Zizanie | DVD | (16/08/2005) from £11.39   |  Saving you £-0.17 (N/A%)   |  RRP £11.22

  An inventor and a small-time industrialist Guillaume (Louis De Funes) has come up with something which will take advantage of air pollution and manages to confuse a delegation of Japanese into placing an order for 3 000 of the things. Just a few obstacles stand in the way of his delivering on the order. For one thing he has no factory in which to make them. He decides to dedicate all the extra space in his house to building them though perhaps he should have told his wife (Annie Girardot) first because she seems to have been made unhappy by these developments.