What We Become (15)

Soda Pictures, £17.99

A family in peril, a house besieged, a cute teen couple armed with a knife and a baseball bat and an unknown virus which is turning blameless suburbanites into shuffling, flesh-eating monsters: yes, it's the zombie apocalypse, and a list of ingredients which will be familiar to anyone who has watched TV series like The Walking Dead or George Romero films such as The Crazies or Night Of The Living Dead.

What's different here is that we're in Sorgenfri, a safe, middle class suburb to the north of Copenhagen, making this (I'm fairly certain) the first Danish zombie film you've ever seen and, by dint of that, the best.

In fact by any measure director Bo Mikkelsen makes a decent fist of the material, ploughing straight into the story - What We Become has a running time of only 77 minutes - while also letting it unspool in a stately fashion as skateboarding teen Gustav (Benjamin Engell) welcomes attractive new neighbour Sonja (Marie Hammer Boda) to the neighbourhood and then has his and his family's lives turned upside down. Soon all the houses in their street have been draped with black polythene by soldiers in gas masks and, on an illicit nocturnal tour of the nearby park, Gustav discovers why: infected people are being rounded up and shot. When he takes matters into his own hands, he make things much worse.

As ever with zombie films you can map any of several political paradigms onto the story - or you can just enjoy a taut, well-plotted slice of Danish horror which throws one or two twists into the mix and, in its most bewitching scene and its bleak ending, gives a knowing nod to Monsters, the exceptional 2010 debut feature from Gareth Edwards. The British director went on to bigger things, notably Star Wars: Rogue One. There's nothing here to suggest Mikkelsen won't.

Cover Girl (U)

Eureka!, £17.99

Hollywood musical dream teams don't come much better than the one assembled in this 1944 Technicolor gem, released here in a digitally restored 4K version. Alongside leads Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly you'll find a pre-Bilko Phil Silvers, songs and music by Ira Gershwin and Jerome Kern (working together for the first time), and the footwork of choreographer Stanley Donen, who would go on co-direct Singin' In The Rain and On The Town with Kelly.

Hayworth plays two characters - aspiring magazine model Rusty Parker, currently working as a chorus girl in the low-rent Brooklyn nightclub run by boyfriend Danny McGuire (Kelly), and her own grandmother, viewed in flashback and the woman who spurned magazine publisher John Coudair (Otto Kruger) 40 years earlier. In the present day Coudair has big plans for Rusty, but will she throw over Danny for a life on Broadway? Of course she won't. But for the sake of the drama, it goes down to the wire.

Plot aside, it's the dance sequences which are breathtaking, particularly the famous “alter ego” scene in which Kelly dances with his own reflection as it appears in a darkened shop window and then, when it jumps out into the shadowy street, across the cobbles of night time New York. Even at a distance of 70 odd years, it's fresh and exuberant. There's also a wonderful scene with Hayworth, Silvers and Kelly palling around in a Brooklyn oyster bar: if Jean-Luc Godard ever watched Cover Girl, it's hard to believe he didn't have it in mind when creating the famous “Madison dance” sequence in Bande A Part. Adding even more gloss, Cover Girl fan Baz Luhrmann contributes his thoughts on the film in the extras package.

Phantom Boy (PG)

Soda Pictures, £19.99

This 2015 animation from French writer-directors Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli, Oscar nominated for 2010's A Cat In Paris, turns on the friendship that develops between Leo, a sick 11-year-old suffering from some form of cancer, and Alex, an injured policeman he meets in hospital. Also relevant is the fact that Leo can leave his body and float through his home town of New York, a trick which comes in very useful when Alex's sort-of-girlfriend Mary, an investigative reporter, sets off to capture evil super-criminal The Face. He's blackmailing the city with the threat of a computer virus and, like all cartoon super-criminals, occupies a deserted dockside lair and has a gang made up of inept henchmen. Gagnol and Felicioli also add a canine member to the familiar mix in the shape of a vicious little dog.

The adventuring is great fun, a mix of every Gotham-based cartoon crime caper you've ever seen with a cute Sopranos reference thrown in for good measure. But the story of Leo's illness and the effect it has on his stressed-out family carries real weight too. Emotional heft and a snappy policier, what more could you want?

In the English version, Alex is voiced by Jared Padalecki, Mary by Melissa Disney (and yes, she is a distant relation), and The Face by Vincent D'Onofrio. But it's worth sticking with subtitles to hear Phantom Boy in its original French - that way you enjoy Audrey Tautou as Mary and get to hear Leo voiced by Alain Gagnol's 13-year-old son Gaspard, who was so good in the test versions that his dad kept him in.