Amid the mass of mid-year progress reports on the films of 2014, critics were largely united on two points: that distributors were, as usual, saving their A-game for the later months, and that The Grand Budapest Hotel (Fox, 15) was a delicious exception. Five months (and an amazing £11m in box-office takings) after debuting in chilly Berlin, Wes Anderson's ornate Russian-doll comedy arrives on DVD tomorrow, its nested narratives of bygone European bohemia no less beguiling for having already been unpacked.
I've never been an Anderson acolyte: there can be something glassy about his films' hyper-designed revelry. Here, he finds a milieu – and, in Ralph Fiennes's impeccably played concierge Monsieur Gustave, a human subject – suited to his own affectations. The film may be a frisky, fizzy caper incorporating murder, art theft and prison escape, but the greater story here is one of a ruling class clinging to elegance in the face of war and more inevitable generational transition. The eponymous hotel, as eye-popping a feat of production design as we'll see this year, decays through the film's chronological shifts, an object of beauty once excessive, then squandered. Decorated like a patisserie and kissed by the spirit of Lubitsch, this is Anderson's lightest, loveliest film; less expectedly, it's also his most moving.
If Anderson's film feels like it was only in cinemas yesterday, you'd be forgiven for forgetting The Book Thief (Fox, 12) was ever there at all. Adapted from Markus Zusak's bestseller, Brian Percival's turgid Holocaust drama shuffles along with the apologetic countenance of a failed Oscar hopeful. Seemingly made for no other purpose than to win prizes, it now looks as forlorn as its protagonist, Liesel (the promising Sophie Nélisse), a young Bavarian orphan escaping the horrors of the Third Reich via the joys of literature. We escape those horrors too: a veteran of Downton Abbey, Percival covers all tracks of genuine pain or suffering in aerosol-can snow. It may be the cosiest film ever to feature narration from Death himself.
Things get even more morbid – if, thankfully, a lot less chintzy – in The Sacrament (House, 18), a curious but engrossing entry into the found-footage genre from neo-horror prodigy Ti West. Effectively fictionalising and updating the story of the Jonestown massacre, it has been taken to task by many critics on the grounds of bad taste, but West can plant a scare with the best of them. It makes the leap to DVD swiftly after entering cinemas last month, as does Miss Violence (Metrodome, 18), Greek new wave director Alexandros Avranas's cold jolt of an unhappy families drama.
On the TV side, Netflix has recently added a host of recent British TV successes, including both series of Charlie Brooker's uneven but intermittently remarkable Black Mirror – a Twilight Zone-style compendium with a streak of bitter irony. The first two series of Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain's marvellously cockeyed, ever-improving university comedy Fresh Meat also hit the streaming service, as does the more conventional but gamely performed family sitcom Friday Night Dinner – oddly, preceding its DVD release this week.
Other small-screen treats hitting DVD shelves include, belatedly, the BBC's old-fashioned, absorbing adaptation of William Boyd's Restless, and less respectably, the second series of Nashville (Lionsgate, 12), a country-dynasty soap made irresistible by zesty music and the ever terrific Connie Britton. Give it a whirl if Dolly Parton's Glastonbury triumph gave you a taste for the twang.
