DVD reviews

Charlie Chaplin made his first film as writer, director and star in 1914. By 1918 he was also producing and composing his own soundtracks. Through nearly four decades, this became the general working pattern. The last film he made in which he took all those roles, and the penultimate film of his long career, was this 1957 curio about a small-time European monarch, King Shahdov, who's forced to flee his country and seek refuge in the United States. “One of the minor annoyance in modern life is a revolution” the title sequence tells us over images of crowds storming King Shahdov's (empty) palace.

It's notionally a comedy and certainly it features enough in the way of slick verbal gags and nimble slapstick to qualify. But more than that it's a film in which its writer and star uses sharp satire to attack the country that made him. Five years earlier, Chaplin's US visa had been revoked following completion of his last Hollywood film, the heavily autobiographical Limelight. This was the era of McCarthy and Chaplin was suspect due to his Leftist sympathies. In A King In New York, he bites back, attacking both the Communist witch-hunts – there's a glorious closing scene in which King Shahdov unleashes a fire hose during a court hearing – and the fripperies of modern America. Equally brilliant are scenes in which the King encounters rock-and-rolling teenagers in a dancehall, watches trailers in a cinema and adverts on a TV screen in his bathroom, and is duped into attending a dinner party which is being filmed and broadcast live on TV. Throw in a couple of lengthy set-piece scenes in which young schoolboy Rupert Macabee lectures King Shahdov about socialism - “A Scot!” says the King when he hears the surname. “No wonder you're a nonconformist” - and suddenly there's an almost Loachian element creeping in. Elsewhere it's easy to see A King In New York anticipating the barbed commentaries on modern American life that Woody Allen would make in films like Sleeper.

A King In New York is the final release in a package of 11 mostly feature-length Chaplin films which Artificial Eye have released over the summer. Extras here include a talking-heads analysis of the film featuring none other than New York's laureate of cool, Jim Jarmusch.

P'tit Quinquin (15)

New Wave Films, £15.99

Although made for French TV station Arte as a four-part drama, P'tit Quinquin premiered at Cannes in 2014 and as a result wound up on many critics' end-of-year Best Of lists. Both the Cannes slot and the accolades have a great deal to do with its director: Bruno Dumont, one of French cinema's more iconoclastic talents and author of provocative, harrowing dramas such as 2011's Hors Satan, another Cannes favourite. This year's Glasgow Film Festival did well to bag a screening of P'tit Quinquin (then called Li'l Quinquin) though its length (a little under three and a half hours) and its structure (four chapters with titles like The Human Beast and The Devil Incarnate) make it better suited to DVD.

Dumont has called his film a parody of the French version of CSI because it centres on the attempts of two bungling cops to solve a series of gruesome murders in the same northern French stomping ground the director calls home. The Quinquin of the title is the young boy who continually gets under his feet, often with his soulmate Eve riding pillion on his bike. Dumont is noted for working with non-actors who have disabilities and P'tit Quinquin is no different: Bernard Pruvost, who plays lead cop Van der Weyden, suffers from jerks and tics which make him a mesmerising screen presence, and in several scenes the actors in walk-on parts can be seen corpsing. Dumont's camera doesn't flinch from any of this. Alongside Pruvost, the star of the piece is young Alan Delhaye as Quinquin, a pugnacious and oddly-likeable presence despite the racism he shows towards two young immigrants. As engrossing as it's disturbing, P'tit Quinquin is one of the oddest films you'll see this year.

Witnesses (15)

Arrow Films style themselves as the home of Nordic Noir on DVD and so keen has been the appetite for classy, subtitled crime dramas that Nordic Noir And Beyond is now the banner headline they use. This French drama, which screened recently on Channel 4, is one of the “and beyond” bits though from the female detective with the thing about cleanliness to the moody theme tune and enigmatic credits there are enough Nordic tropes in there to please everyone. The plot's a load of hokum – dead bodies are dug up and placed in show homes, apparently implicating a former police chief – but the northern French setting is beautifully shot. If you're squirrelling away box sets for the long winter nights, you could do worse than this.