Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany
Tartan, 15, 924 mins; £99.99 (DVD)
From the moment the heartbeat of Nikos Mamangakis’s haunting theme music strikes up, Edgar Reitz’s masterly television series will grip you all over again. Unbelievably, it’s 20 years old, but its freshness is undimmed and its vision unrivalled. If you didn’t watch the last time BBC2 screened it, splurge on this set (which comes in a special “book” case, with a booklet of background facts and essays). This is what television can do best: impeccably crafted drama, given hour after hour to grow and resonate. Reitz builds up his epic in a seemingly leisurely way; it’s unsentimental, often laconic in tone. We join the Simon family in their southwest German village in 1919; the first phone arrives, a road is built, a new national leader is elected in a faraway city, son Paul builds a radio while his elders sing traditional songs in the parlour downstairs. Each domestic detail and character arc registers the shocks and tremors of national tragedy and global upheaval. By the last episode, set in 1982, the piece is as rich in motifs as a Wagner opera, but doubly moving. Yet Reitz’s often naive, insular Hunsrückers, luminously portrayed by a cast of virtual unknowns, still pose big questions: tradition or “progress”? What is “living well ”? How does evil grow? And, above all, where and what is “home” in our rootless, restless global village? Shot in monochrome, but with sudden bursts of colour, this is a feast for the eyes as well as food for mind and soul. A humanising experience. Five stars

Helen Hawkins

Troy
Warner, 15, 163 mins; £22.99 (DVD), £16.99 (VHS), rental
Like the Trojan horse, this is a rather hollow spectacle. The strength of Wolfgang Petersen’s handsome epic is its combat scenes; the weaknesses are its clunking script, its cutout characterisation and the bizarre decision to truncate Homer’s 10-year siege to a matter of days and to omit almost entirely the deus ex machina device so integral to the original. Eric Bana makes a convincing stab at Hector, but the leonine Brad Pitt is the casting Achilles heel as the petulant — though not remotely gay here — Greek warrior hero. The extras will disappoint all but techies: no commentaries, no cast interviews, a silly “Easter egg”, but some good special-effects stuff. Two stars

Patricia Nicol

The Ladykillers
Buena Vista, 15, 104 mins; £19.99 (DVD), £14.99 (VHS), rental
Where the 1955 original was restrained and claustrophobically contained, the Coen brothers’ 2004 remake is crude and ludicrously over the top. The story of a gang who use the house of an old lady as cover for a daring heist is removed from King’s Cross to Mississippi and repackaged with explosions, swearing and fart jokes. Yet at its centre is a good performance from Tom Hanks as a garrulous Southern professor and would-be criminal mastermind. It’s a showy, attention-seeking turn, but Hanks proves Alec Guinness is not the only one who could work with big teeth. The extras are bizarre: two welcome gospel songs, but we could live without the 10-minute documentary on the musical-instrument maker and the compilation of takes of Marlon Wayans being slapped. The original, with its air of faded grandeur and genteel desperation while everything slides away, has been seen as an allegory for post-war Britain; what that might imply for this bloated, ill-disciplined American version doesn’t bear thinking about. Two stars

David Mills