On one otherwise lovely morning, every child on the face of the Earth points to the sky and chants in unison “We are coming.” It’s a creepy close encounter with Children of the Damned flair, one of the most insidious alien invasions chronicled on sci-fi TV. You might think is a job for Torchwood, Britain’s answer to The X-Files, until the government sends a hit squad to kill the team and reveals a conspiracy that haunts its leader, the eternal Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman). Peter Capaldi (late of the political satire In the Loop) is the impassively ruthless civil servant willing to kill anyone and everyone who can spill the secret of the British governments previous encounter with this mysterious visitor, and the deal with the devil they made to keep them away from Earth last time. And when it comes to killing an unkillable man, they can get quite creative.

Torchwood: Cardiff's Scooby Gang

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4 by Agnes VardaAgnes Varda, a key director of the French Wave, never belonged to the group proper. By her own admission she had seen less than two dozen films before she embarked on her own first feature, La Pointe Courte (1954), a study of a marriage on the rocks starring Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret. Instead she remained – and remains – happily on the fringe following her own muse and defying expectations with glee. Her debut feature debuts on DVD in new Criterion box set 4 by Agnes Varda, along with three of her best and most well known features. From the easy rhythms and delicate naturalism of Cleo From 5 to 7 (1961), her first critical success, to the rosy romanticism of the controversial Le Bonheur (1965) to the harsh beauty and alienation of Vagabond (1985), Varda shows herself a hard director to peg. Where Cleo, the story of a ninety minutes in the life of a flighty pop singer (Corinne Marchand) as she awaits the results of a cancer test, gives us rounded, vivid characters in the bustling real world of Paris, Le Bonheur, a lovely tale of a tragic love triangle, offers archetypes in a sun-drenched Eden, an impossibly idyllic world where even tragedy is transformed into a happy ending. The immediacy of Cleo becomes distanced in Le Bonheur and reaches its apex in Vagabond, where Varda’s removed observations chart (in flashback) the lives touched on by Sandrine Bonnaire’s drifter, who seems incapable of actually connecting with anything around her. Where Cleo suddenly clings to the life she sees with different eyes while awaiting news of her cancer test results, Bonnaire’s vagabond seems to skip along the surface, alienated from everything and everyone around her. Even the playful techniques so effective in Cleo (intertitles marking off and punctuating the scenes) and Le Bonheur (flashcuts, out of focus portraits, visual wordplays) are stripped away for the sobering drama of Vagabond. What ties these films together is a richness of detail and a consistency of style – a compelling form created for each individual film.

It’s featured on my MSN DVD column, along with other highlights this week. The John Frankenheimer Collection offer the DVD debuts of The Young Savages and The Train along with previously released discs The Manchurian Candidate and Ronin.

“The Young Savages” (1961), his sophomore theatrical feature, is a social drama produced by and starring Burt Lancaster as a passionate district attorney who investigates the racially charged murder of a blind Puerto Rican gang member by three Italian teens. Lancaster also produces and stars in the World War II resistance drama “The Train” (1965), a gritty, vividly directed thriller about a resistance leader (Lancaster) who reluctantly risks his agents and civilian hostages to stop a Nazi officer (Paul Scofield) from looting French art treasures during the German retreat from France.

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