A roundup of the current best and rest on DVD. In this installment: Brokeback Mountain, Broken Flowers, Banana in a Nutshell, River Queen.

Brokeback Mountain (Roadshow, $34.95)
Before Little Britain’s Daffyd would have time to say “I’m the only gay in the village” Brokeback Mountain is engaging. It’s the tragic story of two gay cowboys who intermittently return to a romance from back in the winter of ’63. Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger, superb) formed an unbreakable bond while working on Wyoming’s magisterial Brokeback Mountain. As the Matthew Shepard case illustrated, this is a difficult part of the world to be gay. Jack and Ennis end up stuck in loveless heterosexual relationships. Based on Annie Proulx’s short story, Brokeback Mountain is spare and muscular. Beautifully crafted and beautifully filmed, this is one of Ang Lee’s best films. New to DVD. (optional English subtitles; featurettes; interviews; theatrical trailer).—AB

Broken Flowers (Roadshow, $34.95)
Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes was too patchy, albeit one couldn’t complain about Murray swigging from a pot while RZA and GZA rapped. Broken Flowers is mixed coast; I look forward to the next Down By Law, Dead Man or Ghost Dog. In The General (magnificently restored and scored by Joe H), Buster Keaton’s railway man is rejected by his Southern belle and sits on the side of a train. He’s so depressed he doesn’t notice as the train cogs whir into motion and it chugs off into a tunnel. It’s this sort of sublime dejection that Jarmusch is after. The great Bill Murray plays Don Johnston, a retired IT mogul and retiring lothario. He receives an anonymous letter from one of his many ex-flames informing him he’s a dad with a 19-year-old son trying to find him. His best friend Winston (Jeffrey Wright) persuades him to go on a road trip to suss it all out. He visits ex-girlfriends. Jarmusch and Murray continue to (sometimes) make the simplest things – like a depressed, lethargic man staring at the wall – pretty damn funny. New to DVD. (optional English subtitles; featurette; outtakes; extended scenes).—AB

Banana in a Nutshell ($29.95 @ arovideo.co.nz)
Banana in a Nutshell is the classic story of a wayward child struggling against her conservative migrant parents. Filmmaker Roseanne Liang, already frowned upon by her parents for her unconventional choice of occupation, is truly in the dogbox for having a white boyfriend. How will she reconcile her heart and her hearth, her choices and her culture? It's a tale of forbidden love, threats of disownment, of living at home until marriage, all building up to a showdown between the two men she loves most in the world... a story so classic that a non-Chinese viewer could be misled into thinking that it is a ubiquitous one in our 'community', even in this time and place. Not so. The parental Liangs are a throwback to the previous generation, and their attitudes will probably be seen as extreme and retrograde by the Chinese people who see this film, both here and abroad. Roseanne in fact seems to be living my mother's life. But instead of secretly getting married and emigrating to more liberal climes like my mother did, she has instead made a charming guerrilla documentary. This documentary doesn't just charm, it uses charm. It brandishes charm like a weapon, though its grip and the set of its jaw, is shaky. It seems like nerves. Perhaps the documentary is hoping to work as well on the documentary-maker's parents as it does on the audience. What will come of it? The drama, again, will all happen offscreen. Will the Liangs remain silent? Will they make a counterdocumentary? Whether they speak on the matter or not, they will surely, with the rest of the audience, understand that this is not just an artefact of self-obsession, but a monument to love. New to DVD. (audio commentary; interviews; trailer; exclusive 30-minute follow-up epilogue).—TM [Full Review]

River Queen (Fox/RS, $34.95)
A mist shrouds Vincent Ward’s River Queen – an Aotearoa for the ages, its blanket of fog teleports us back in time to nineteenth century New Zealand. Not unlike The Navigator, this is a film that wants to tunnel beneath pictorial New Zealand, deep through time, and out the other side with a story to tell. Sure, the choric la-la’s, bulbous orchestral score, and incessant message-in-a-bottle voiceover all point towards some sort of woozy, epochal fairytale. But as battle rages between Maori and Pakeha in the background, Ward declares war on another front. Against all predictions, fantasy – it seems – is for once on the retreat. Gone are the painterly landscapes of Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth, replaced firmly by the grime and muck of colonisation: Man has begun to rape and pillage the land, his structures already jut and intrude from nature’s unbridled overgrowth, his trail of devastation stains the river blood red. This isn’t the untarnished, impressionist fantasia we’re used to digesting – the snow dome wonderland of Narnia, or the illuminated bush canopies of Rings rendered mere souvenirs. And have we not unconsciously yearned for a film of River Queen’s authenticity after years of textbook primer, from James Belich to most recently Frontier of Dreams? Ward’s film may be touch-and-go, but it works. Samantha Morton spends most of the film in a hypothermic state, lending a real (although perhaps unintended) acuteness to her maternal flight of desperation. The film’s battle scenes garner a maddening, guerrilla claustrophobia buried in the depths of the Whanganui bush. Alun Bollinger’s photography penetrates beneath the gleam, interrogating the landscape’s brittle threshold for the destructive and uninvited. New Zealand as a fantasy – lost in time, dreamt of, beamed in from another dimension – might just be the only kind of nationalism this country responds too. But River Queen, a culturally articulate, intensely ambitious historical epic – and at last a story about us – deserves better. New to DVD. (optional English subtitles; theatrical trailer).—TW

» Text by Alexander Bisley, Tze Ming Mok and Tim Wong.