Sycophantic tongue-waggers marching to the "less is more" sound of Kyoshi Kurosawa's success have seen to an influx of quotidian, breath-on-a-windowpane horror that, well, isn't actually scary. If it's dread you're after, as opposed to dimestore nerve-wrangling, then subtraction alone won't do; the director has to work towards equating the physical with the meta-physical, so that seemingly arbitrary acts of violence start to be persist according to their own logic.

Frank Darabont/USA/1995; R4 (2-disc SE)
Warner Bros, NZ$29.95 | Reviewed by John Spry

WHAT HAPPENS when one of the most popular authors of all time meets a writer/director willing to take a chance on a story and transform it from one medium to another? The answer can be found in the 1995 film The Shawshank Redemption, a film that initially, commercially failed but now lives and thrives in the secondary markets of firstly video, and now thanks to Warner Bros., on DVD.

To say nothing of passive-aggressive, knee-jerkisms, those of us who weren't weaned on the idea that the box has a uh wonderful kind of negative capacity (to quote a non-existent Breillat-Allen coupling), would do well to check out the latest John Irving adaptation, Door in the Floor. Sure, there's the overly-literary bend of the title metaphor – referring to anything from latent hysteria to the dimensions of Kim Basinger's womb – but that's sort of forgiven by a final shot which compounds the abstract and real in a way that's pretty fucking unnerving.

Aleksandr Sokurov/Russia/Germany/2003; R4
Warner Bros/Rialto, NZ$24.95 | Reviewed by Mubarak Ali

LIKE Sokurov's earlier abstracted parent-and-child film, Mother and Son, a troubling dream opens Father and Son, the second in a planned trilogy on family relationships that allude to the grander scheme of things: through Sokurov's distorting lens, we can make out the sculpted figure of the Father, consoling his disturbed Son in a highly intimate embrace. The scene is one which immediately throws viewers in the film's deliberately blurred state-of-mind, and one that establishes the omnipresence of sensuality in the film.

Samuel Fuller/USA/1980; R4 (2-disc SE)
Warner Bros, NZ$29.95 | Reviewed by John Spry

SAM FULLER began his career with a Western and ended it with a War film, two genre films that form much of the basis of his oeuvre as well as the American staples of the film business. The Big Red One (1980) was Fuller's last major film before his death in 1997 at the age of 85, a vital director who had lost none of his enthusiasm for film, especially this kind of film.

Reviewed by David Levinson

THEY SAY THAT imitation is the lowest form of flattery. Apply that model to the Woody Allen-French axis and what you have is a relationship that's been thrown into reverse lopsidedness. Allen, it would seem (hardly [if any?] of his millenium work has actually received theatrical distribution here), is on the decline, taking graceless backward-leaps into the primordial ooze of his own desperate, narcissistic sense of criticism (self- and otherwise).