"Actor: Kubiak"

• Witnesses Season 2 | DVD | (15/01/2018) from £11.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Desecrated graves, dead bodies dug up and left arranged in show-homes... Every time, the same ritual: a woman, a man, a teenager, who weren't related but who form a macabre family. Amid the bodies a photo of Paul Maisonneuve is placed, a Crime Squad legend in the North of France, now retired but forced to return to duty. Who is digging up the bodies? Who is leaving them in these show-homes and why? Young female detective Sandra Winckler, in charge of the case, must work with Paul to find out who is behind these disturbing human tableaus. During her investigation, she will have to delve into Paul's past, always sensing that he is hiding something. Because that's where the truth must lie: somewhere in Paul's past. For the detective and the ex-cop, life will never be the same... For in the shadows is a man who will stop at nothing to satisfy his thirst for a long and drawn-out revenge...

• Witnesses Season 1 & 2 | DVD | (15/01/2018) from £38.08   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  All the episodes from the first and second seasons of the French crime drama. In the first season, young detective Sandra Winckler (Marie Dompnier) takes charge of a case involving unrelated dead bodies being left inside model homes. When a photo of retired detective Paul Maisonneuve (Thierry Lhermitte) is found at the crime scene, he is forced to return to duty and help Winckler conduct her investigation. But does Maisonneuve know more about the crimes than he is willing to reveal? In the second season, when 15 frozen dead bodies are found at a bus stop Sandra is assigned to lead the investigation. With the victims all linked to the mysterious Catherine Keemer (Audrey Fleurot), Sandra does all she can to track her down, only to find that Catherine has lost her memory and has no recollection of anything that has happened. Can Sandra piece together the clues and solve the case?

• Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin -- film version/Solti | DVD | (03/06/2002) from £17.11   |  Saving you £-0.12 (N/A%)   |  RRP £16.99

  It's a common complaint that opera singers can't act, and actors can't sing opera. In this handsome 1988 film of Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin, director Petr Weigl attempts to solve the problem by letting each group of performers do what they do best. Thus the music is a studio recording with some great voices in the principal roles, and the film is a lip-synched performance shot in stunning locations by a good-looking cast of players. On the positive side this means that the whole thing looks gorgeous, and sun-drenched dachas, glittering ballrooms and snowy steppes are all captured with painterly verve. The musical performances are also splendid, with Bernd Weikl making a passionate, tortured Onegin, Teresa Kubiak a honeyed, fresh-sounding Tatyana, and Solti conducting with driven intensity. But realism and opera rarely make happy bed-fellows, and the down-side of this film is that the naturalistic "speaking-style" lip-synching and understated acting are entirely at odds with the grand musical gestures, and occasionally give rise to a somewhat absurd alienation effect. Thus while Kubiak's voice is at full blast, Magdalena Vasaryova looks like she's making polite chit-chat at a cocktail party. But the project feels like a brave experiment, nonetheless, and if the whole isn't quite the sum of its different elements, those elements are still jolly good. On the DVD: Eugene Onegin on disc has excellent picture quality (which is fortunate in such a visually exquisite film), though the sound is a little distant and muffled. The film starts with the entry of the peasants in Act 1, but the DVD includes the Prologue and music before this point as an audio bonus. There are subtitles in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Chinese, and a series of trailers for other Decca DVDs. --Warwick Thompson

• Witnesses Season 2 | Blu Ray | (15/01/2018) from £14.55   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Desecrated graves, dead bodies dug up and left arranged in show-homes... Every time, the same ritual: a woman, a man, a teenager, who weren't related but who form a macabre family. Amid the bodies a photo of Paul Maisonneuve is placed, a Crime Squad legend in the North of France, now retired but forced to return to duty. Who is digging up the bodies? Who is leaving them in these show-homes and why? Young female detective Sandra Winckler, in charge of the case, must work with Paul to find out who is behind these disturbing human tableaus. During her investigation, she will have to delve into Paul's past, always sensing that he is hiding something. Because that's where the truth must lie: somewhere in Paul's past. For the detective and the ex-cop, life will never be the same... For in the shadows is a man who will stop at nothing to satisfy his thirst for a long and drawn-out revenge...