This week's new DVD & Blu-ray

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale As the entire advertising industry is telling us, Christmas is coming. However, contrary to Band Aid's message, there is a need to be afraid: Santa Claus has come far from his original roots. Today's Coca-Cola can-coloured, jovial, bearded fat man, who dispenses gifts to nice kids, is a far cry from the original, meaner folkloric characters who have been compiled over the years to create him. The Santa in this great, alternative Christmas movie from Finland redresses this imbalance somewhat. Here, he is a horned beast who steals children and kills adults for bad behaviour. He's such a badass that, centuries ago, the Finnish people froze him and built an entire mountain to contain his evil. A team of archaeologists decide to dig up Santa's colossal burial mound, just over the Russian border from a village of Finnish reindeer herders. Then suddenly, on Christmas morning, the local children start to go missing, and some prematurely aged men with white beards, violent tendencies and a taste for gingerbread appear (these are Santa's helpers, played like festive super-zombies). Only a young Finn has any idea what's going on, and what's great about this film, other than the highly original premise, is that it plays it all seriously. As silly as it may sound, Santa and his helpers are a fearsome lot. DVD & Blu-ray, Icon The Conversation/The Outsiders Two Coppola classics: the first, a paranoid (or is it?) thriller; the second, a great SE Hinton adaptation stuffed with such future stars as Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon and Patrick Swayze. DVD & Blu-ray, Studiocanal Tour Of Duty: Complete Season 1 Hugely enjoyable, mainstream TV ripoff of Oliver Stone's Platoon. DVD, Fremantle It's A Wonderful Life 65th-anniversary special edition for the Jimmy Stewart emotive classic. The most Capra-esque of all Frank Capra's movies. DVD & Blu-ray, Universal The Long Good Friday One of the outright classics of Brit gangster cinema. Bob 'Oskins's performance puts him up there with such movie gangster greats as Cagney and De Niro. DVD & Blu-ray, Studiocanal