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It might be lower key and less overtly comedic than you may be expecting from Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, but there are plenty of reasons nonetheless to commend their nostalgic 70s drama Cemetery Junction. Leaving behind the style of comedy the pair fine-tuned to perfection with The Office, Cemetery Junction instead concerns itself with telling the story of three young men.

These men all live in their home town of Cemetery Junction, each working for an insurance company. Joining them there is their boss, played by Ralph Fiennes, with the cast also fleshed out by the likes of Emily Watson, Gervais himself and the terrific Matthew Goode.

But it’s Christian Cooke who catches the eye in what turns out to be the lead role of Freddie. It’s Freddie’s evolving professional and personal life that forms the core of the narrative, and laced with some fine comedic moments, he anchors the film well. It helps that Gervais and Merchant are so focused on how to put across the story, with the dingy style of 70s Britain captured terrifically well.

It’s quite a low key project, perhaps, and it doesn’t tread too much in the way of new ground. But Cemetery Junction is nonetheless fine work, and a quality British movie. It’s well worth seeking out. –Jon Foster

Stills from Cemetery Junction (click for larger image)

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Michael McIntyre has become Britain’s biggest comedy star. This title reveals his showbiz roots, his appalling attempts to attract the opposite sex, his fish-out-of-water move from public to state school and his astonishing journey from selling just one ticket at the Edinburgh Festival to selling half a million tickets on his last tour.

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Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is, perhaps unsurprisingly given the game’s title, the setting for this point-and-click romp which combines the best elements of Bogart-esque private eye movies with the best-known fantasy environment in the world.

The game follows the trials and tribulations of the Discworld’s first PI as he takes on his first case–a missing persons job on behalf of a darkly mysterious female client who’s husband has gone walkies.

It’s pretty standard adventure fare with pointing and clicking aplenty as the case unravels, villains are revealed and outrageously long FMV sequences disturb the flow of the plot.

OK, so far it doesn’t sound that good, right? But perseverance is the name of the game and you won’t be able to help getting drawn further into the plot to the point where it is impossible to leave it alone. The major draw in this title is the obvious input from Pratchett himself. The characters really bring this game to life, mixing the new, such as Lewton the private eye and main character, with the old, Nobby Nobbs of the City Guard, Death and the Grim Squeaker–a hilarious character who is actually the Death of Rats.

Comedy abounds here, from the obvious to the incredibly subtle, and there is plenty going on to keep you playing for quite a while.

At the end of the day, this is more suited to the Discworld fan then to someone looking idly around for an adventure game to fill in a couple of hours, but with its budget price thanks to an Infogrames re-release, Discworld Noir is a good purchase. –James Gordon

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Netherlands released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: LANGUAGES: English ( Dolby Digital Stereo ), Dutch ( Subtitles ), SPECIAL FEATURES: Interactive Menu, Scene Access, SYNOPSIS: 15 Storeys High is the cult tv comedy series written by and starring stand-up comedian Sean Lock. This comedy series follows the lives of two very different blokes who find themselves sharing a flat in a towerblock on a South London council estate. The flat’s owner Vince (Sean Lock) takes in a new lodger – Errol (Benedict Wong) and it is not long before he realises he has made a dreadful mistake. 15 Storeys High also introduces us to some of the other towerblock occupants – wife-swappers, bible bashers, lap dancers, men who shout at the television and even a bloke who keeps a horse in his spare room. This DVD features all six episodes from the first series – The Sofa, Pool Kids, Blue Rat, The Model, Ice Queen and Dead Swan. SCREENED/AWARDED AT: BAFTA Awards,

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Focused on the madcap lives of flatmates Vince (Sean Lock) and Errol (Benedict Wong), the first series of the critically acclaimed BBC comedy Fifteen Stories High craftily points out the eccentricities of the modern world. Vince is an oddball with the habits of a man who has spent too much time in his own company. A lifeguard at the local swimming pool, he takes great pride in being able to tell swimmers off for no reason, and obtains his home decorating ideas from photos in Readers’ Wives. His lodger, Errol is the opposite of Vince, naively stupid and always taken advantage of by others. But he has his own unusual habits, too, such as tearing at wallpaper whenever he sees an unstuck corner. Vince has the weirdest encounters, though: such as being locked in the stocks for six hours when wrongly accused of killing a swan; or taken hostage by a neighbour when he spies a moon-boot wearing Shetland pony in the man’s spare bedroom.

Equally as funny are the short stories of the other residents living in the tower block that are interspersed between the antics of Vince and Errol. Enclosed within the four walls of different flats on the estate, these claustrophobic locations provide the ideal settings for the extreme behaviours depicted. There’s the hygiene obsessive who forces a visiting double-glazing salesman to take a bath and wear a protective suit before being able to look round his flat; the old man who spends all night in front of a mirror in a pair of underpants pretending he’s James Bond; and a New Age enthusiast who’s always getting disturbed when recording relaxation tapes. The general weirdness of the series takes some getting used to, but once you decipher the crazy world of Vince and Errol this is five-star comedy with a dark tinge. –John Galilee

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Focused on the madcap lives of flatmates Vince (Sean Lock) and Errol (Benedict Wong), the first series of the critically acclaimed BBC comedy Fifteen Stories High craftily points out the eccentricities of the modern world. Vince is an oddball with the habits of a man who has spent too much time in his own company. A lifeguard at the local swimming pool, he takes great pride in being able to tell swimmers off for no reason, and obtains his home decorating ideas from photos in Readers’ Wives. His lodger, Errol is the opposite of Vince, naively stupid and always taken advantage of by others. But he has his own unusual habits, too, such as tearing at wallpaper whenever he sees an unstuck corner. Vince has the weirdest encounters, though: such as being locked in the stocks for six hours when wrongly accused of killing a swan; or taken hostage by a neighbour when he spies a moon-boot wearing Shetland pony in the man’s spare bedroom.

Equally as funny are the short stories of the other residents living in the tower block that are interspersed between the antics of Vince and Errol. Enclosed within the four walls of different flats on the estate, these claustrophobic locations provide the ideal settings for the extreme behaviours depicted. There’s the hygiene obsessive who forces a visiting double-glazing salesman to take a bath and wear a protective suit before being able to look round his flat; the old man who spends all night in front of a mirror in a pair of underpants pretending he’s James Bond; and a New Age enthusiast who’s always getting disturbed when recording relaxation tapes. The general weirdness of the series takes some getting used to, but once you decipher the crazy world of Vince and Errol this is five-star comedy with a dark tinge. –John Galilee

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The Heathers are a clique of bitchy classmates in this dark comedy from 1989. The film itself was a good showcase for Winona Ryder, the Queen of Teen in the late 1980s, playing a high-school girl forced into the social world of “the Heathers”, and Christian Slater, doing his early Jack Nicholson thing. While Ryder’s character muddles over the consequences of giving up one set of friends for another, her association with the new boy in school (Slater) turns out to have deadly consequences. Director Michael Lehmann turned this unusual film into something more than another teen-death flick. There is real wit and sharp satire afoot, and the fusion of horror and comedy is provocative in itself. Heathers remains a kind of benchmark in contemporary cinema for bringing surreal intelligence into Hollywood films. –Tom Keogh, Amazon.com

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Black comedies don’t come much blacker than cult favourite, Harold and Maude (1972), and they don’t come much funnier either. It seems that director Hal Ashby was the perfect choice to mine a load of eccentricity from the original Colin Higgins script, about the unlikely romance between a death-obsessed 19-year-old named Harold (Bud Cort) and a life-loving 79-year-old widow named Maude (Ruth Gordon). They meet at a funeral, and Maude finds something oddly appealing about Harold, urging him to “reach out” and grab life by the lapels as opposed to dwelling morbidly on mortality. Harold grows fond of the old gal–she’s a lot more fun than the girls his mother desperately tries to match him up with- -and together they make Harold and Maude one of the sweetest and most unconventional love stories ever made. Much of the early humour arises from Harold’ s outrageous suicide fantasies, played out as a kind of twisted parlour game to mortify his mother, who has grown immune to her strange son’s antics. Gradually, however, the film’s clever humour shifts to a brighter outlook and finally arrives at a point where Harold is truly happy to be alive. Featuring soundtrack songs by Cat Stevens, this comedy certainly won’t appeal to all tastes (it was a box-office flop when first released), but if you’re on its quirky wavelength, it might just strike you as one of the funniest films you’ve ever seen. –Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

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This unclassifiable but stunningly original film obliterates the walls between teen comedy, science fiction, family drama, horror, and cultural satire–and remains wildly entertaining throughout. Jake Gyllenhaal (October Sky) stars as Donnie, a borderline-schizophrenic adolescent for whom there is no difference between the signs and wonders of reality (a plane crash that decimates his house) and hallucination (a man-sized, reptilian rabbit who talks to him). Obsessed with the science of time travel and acutely aware of the world around him, Donnie is isolated by his powers of analysis and the apocalyptic visions that no one else seems to share. The debut feature of writer-director Richard Kelly, Donnie Darko is a shattering, hypnotic work that sets its own terms and gambles–rightfully so, as it turns out–that a viewer will stay aboard for the full ride. –Tom Keogh

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