"Actor: Sion Griffiths"

• Gormenghast | DVD | (05/06/2000) from £7.59   |  Saving you £-1.59 (N/A%)   |  RRP £6.00

  The BBC's lavish, glowingly designed adapation of Mervyn Peake's eccentrically brilliant novels Titus Groan and Gormenghast is a triumph of casting. Ian Richardson's Lear-like depiction of the mad earl of a remote, vast, ritual-obsessed building is matched by the brutal pragmatism of Celia Imrie as his wife, the synchronised madness of Zoe Wanamaker and Lynsey Baxter as his twin sisters and the duplicitous charm of Jonathan Rhys-Meyer as Steerpike, the kitchen-boy determined to take over no matter how many deaths it costs. John Sessions is surprisingly touching as Prunesquallor, the family doctor who realises almost too late what Steerpike intends. It is always tricky to film a book dear to the hearts of its admirers: Wilson and his design team achieve a look rather more pre-Raphaelite than Peake's own illustrations, shabby velvets, garish sunlight and dank stone passages. The score by Richard Rodney Bennett is full of attractive surprises--fanfares and waltzes and apotheoses--and John Tavener's choral additions are plausibly parts of the immemorial ritual of Gormenghast. On the DVD: The double DVD comes with scene selection, an informative half-hour documentary on the making of the serial and a slide gallery of costume designs, characters and their dooms. --Roz Kaveney

• Detonator Orgun | DVD | (02/06/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £22.99

  Originally released in 1991, the three-part Denotator Orgun plays like a mixture of several popular sci-fi films. Tomoru, a teenage boy in the 24th century, is haunted by weird dreams partially based on the computer games he plays with his friends. He soon discovers he's telepathically linked to the mysterious alien robot, Orgun. Meanwhile, at the Earth Defense Force Intelligence He adquarters, Dr Michi Kanzaki and supercomputer I-Zak decrypt a message from deep space that turns out to be the blueprints for Orgun's physical makeup. As they make these discoveries, an advanced race of aliens nears the Earth with plans to destroy it. Naturally only the combination of Tomoru, Kanzaki and Orgun can defeat them. Director Masami Obari (Fatal Fury) handles the action sequences, space battles, and fist fights between giant robots with his usual skill. He's less successful at presenting Hideki Kakinuma's convoluted story, a needlessly complicate d mixture of flashbacks, fantasies, quasi-religious mysticism and warnings about the dangers of tampering with human evolution that is simultaneously too complicated and too simple for its two-and-a-half-hour length. --Charles Solomon, Amazon.com