DVD Reviews:CODumentary; The Midwife; Here's Harry

If you think at first glance that this is yet another documentary about the North Sea fishing industry then you've obviously never heard of gazillion-selling “first person shooter” computer game Call Of Duty. Launched in 2003 and set in the second world war, it has since worked its way through a great many hyphen-heavy iterations – most notably Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare, which brought it into the modern day, and Call Of Duty: Black Ops, set during the Cold War – and is now the undisputed heavyweight of the genre across all platforms, with 250 million copies sold and over $15 billion banked for publishers Activision. The game is known by the acronym COD, hence the curious title of Jonathan Beales's documentary.

The film makes great play of its unauthorised nature and its independence from Activision. But from start to finish it's essentially a fanboy production, so when we're treated (if that's the right word) to images of Labour MP Keith Vaz attacking Call Of Duty over its violence, he is presented as something of an oddity and his complaints essentially dismissed. Everyone else featured is predictably gung-ho about the adrenaline-fuelled thrills of “juicing” enemy fighters, the core activity in Call Of Duty.

The documentary itself isn't great. There are spelling mistakes in the inter-titles and the American narrator's stentorian voiceover soon becomes grating. That said, the subject matter is fascinating and even the film's lack of polish can't affect that. Especially interesting is the observation from Canadian-Iranian actor Cas Anvar (who voices characters in Call Of Duty, Halo and Assassin's Creed) that all Hollywood A-listers are now desperate to move into gaming, and the section covering the growing area of e-sports, where teams of players come together to play games like Call Of Duty. These teams even have managers – one such is Oliver Sellors, whose grandfather Ron Atkinson used to do a similar job for Manchester United. Pleasingly, the film also tackles the issue of gender balance in e-sports: pretty much the only women we see are either cheerleaders adding razzmatazz to yet another midnight launch or actresses presenting Call Of Duty with yet another BAFTA, so it's good to hear from vlogger and gaming commentator Justine Ezarik, who appears as a talking head from time to time, and from members of UK-based all-female team Riot Gaming, who reveal that the world of e-sports is as depressingly sexist as the real one.

The Midwife (12)

Curzon Artificial Eye, £15.99

One multiple Cesar Award nominee and one bona fide screen legend come together in French director Martin Provost's tale about the unlikely friendship between two women – uptight midwife Claire (Catherine Frot), who lives alone and is on the verge of losing her job, and fun-loving, fag-smoking, poker-playing Beatrice (Catherine Deneuve), who was mistress to Claire's father Antoine and a surrogate mother of sorts to Claire until she walked out on the pair of them 30 years earlier. What has brought Beatrice back to Paris to find Claire and reconnect with her is the knowledge that she is dying from a brain tumour. In her way, she wants to make amends. What she doesn't know is that Antoine killed himself after Beatrice left, which has left Claire feeling resentment towards the older woman.

But Beatrice is indefatigable. “I believe in the power of pleasure,” she tells the disapproving Claire over a typically rich and boozy lunch. The trouble is, Claire doesn't. Hers is a life of brown rice, tap water and steamed vegetables, though as the story unspools an inevitable transference occurs, with Claire beginning a hesitant affair with truck driver Paul (Olivier Gourmet) and joining Beatrice in her various escapades. It's all a little too predictable, but cinematographer Yves Cape injects a huge amount of visual pizzazz – not for nothing has he worked with exacting French auteurs Leos Carax, Bruno Dumont and Claire Denis – and both Frot and Deneuve are excellent.

Here's Harry (PG)

Simply Media, £12.99

If Harry Worth is known at all these days, it's for a cute visual gag from the opening sequence of his eponymous, late 1960s comedy show in which he uses the reflections from a right-angled shop window to appear to levitate. That series aired between 1966 and 1970, but longer running was the show which preceded it, Here's Harry. Although 60 episodes were made, only 11 survive, which goes part of the way to explaining Worth's relative lack of influence among today's comedians. But in this his centenary year, Simply Media have brought them together for a collection which is as definitive as you're ever going to get.

Recorded in front of a live audience, written by the Love Thy Neighbour and Bless This House pairing of Vince Powell and Harry Driver, and featuring guest roles from (among others) Deryck Guyler and Jack Woolgar, it presents Worth as a bumbling English Everyman who seems to exist to infuriate and exasperate petty officials everywhere. He's more genial than Victor Meldrew and less accident prone than Frank Spencer, but in terms of tone both characters have inherited some of his comic DNA. And though nowhere near as silly or surreal as Harry Hill, the physical resemblance is hard to shake. That said, much of the writing seems pretty dated today, though Worth himself is watchable enough.