Blu-ray

Following the box office success of both Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Maleficent (2014), Disney recently embarked on producing live-action remakes of some of its most beloved animated classics. While the idea of one day having to endure Tim Burton's Dumbo (yes, really) fills us with an unspeakable dread, the series has got off to a surprisingly strong start with this live-action retelling of Cinderella, directed by Kenneth Branagh.

Six stories. Three directors. One unfilmable novel. Cloud Atlas should be an absolute mess. Only, it's not. Instead, Cloud Atlas is an ambitious $100million mix of blockbuster spectacle and art house ambition – the likes of which we'll probably never see again.

When the boyfriend of unemployed writer Gloria (Anne Hathaway) finally gets tired of her feckless lifestyle and kicks her out of his Manhattan pad, she finds herself with nowhere left to go apart from back to her small hometown. There she reconnects with childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) and starts working in the bar that he owns, which only serves to exacerbate her drinking problem.

As much as I enjoy Arnie’s 1982 take on Conan, I’d be hard pushed to describe it as anything like a faithful screen adaptation of Robert E Howard’s pulp icon. Which is why I was quite excited by the idea of somebody trying to reboot the franchise.

Released into cinemas back in 2009, Coraline is the latest stop-motion animated feature from director Henry Selick, the man behind A Nightmare Before Christmas. This time around he turned to a novel by noted fantasy author Neil Gaiman for his source material, and the result is a dark, disturbing and marvellously grotesque modern fairytale. Bored and neglected by her workaholic parents, Coraline stumbles into an alternate world where the button-eyed 'Other Mother' and 'Other Father' give her the love and attention she always craved. But as you might expect, it all comes at a terrible price...

Equal parts hypnotic, claustrophobic and didactic, Cronenberg's latest film sees the 69-year old filmmaker at his most experimental. While unlikely to find favour with fans hoping for a return to his g(l)ory days as a purveyor of body horror, it's still an oddly irresistible piece of cinema, and the Blu-ray it arrives on is equally impressive. Admittedly, the DTS-HD MA 5.1 mix isn't given too much to work with in terms of dynamics, but the AVC 1.85:1 1080p encode revels in the original digital photography. Best of all though is the fascinating 110-minute Making of… doc.

This steamy 1984 thriller stars Kathleen Turner as Joanna Crane, a fashion designer who moonlights as a prostitute called China Blue. But Joanna's double-life is soon complicated by the arrival of two new men in her life. The first is Bobby (John Laughlin), an unhappily married electronics expert hired to spy on Joanna, who ends up falling in love with her instead. Much more troubling is the obsessive 'Reverend' Peter Shayne (Anthony Perkins), whose idea of 'saving' Joanna/China isn't likely to win him the Samaritan of the Year award...