Keane - Live - By James Ellaby

Keane proved that they were well and truly over the turmoil of the last couple of years (Tom Chaplin's drug problems and the strained relations between the band during the making of second album Under The Iron Sea) with their arena shows earlier this year, including a storming performance at a rapturous MEN Arena. Recorded on the same tour, Keane Live showcases them at the O2 Arena, which seems to be the new place to get your live DVDs recorded, coming just after one from Scissor Sisters. The setlist is no surprise, packed with hits from Hopes And Fears and most of UTIS, but the amount of noise that Keane make with just keyboards and drums certainly is, as you might not expect them to be able to blast it out at such a large venue, but at times their lack of instrumentation helps the atmosphere because you can hear the crowd singing along much more than you probably could if there were loud guitars drowning them out. Chaplin looks fit and healthy and about half the size he was at his bloated worst before rehab, and spends the entire gig prowling the various areas of a complex stage set to engage with fans on both sides and even down at the back. The pace of the show sags a bit towards the middle when the band shift to a mini-stage for some acoustic tracks, and this works less well on DVD than it seemed to at the gig itself in Manchester, but there's an awesome run of great anthemic songs building up to the climax of Bedshaped. One special part of this gig comes before A Bad Dream, when they get Neil Hannon from The Divine Comedy to read out the WB Yeats poem that inspired it, but frankly his reading isn't great and the large shades he is wearing don't really fit the austere mood that he should be trying to set. It worked much better with a voiceover at the other gigs, but the song itself is fantastic, made all the better by the atmospheric clips of wartime life shown on the screens, and these are well used throughout the show. There's all the usual bonus features too, like alternate angles (oooh), behind the scenes stuff and footage of the soundcheck. It's a great show by a great live band and a perfect way to send off one of the best British albums of the last couple of years...

Nelly Furtado - Loose Live - By James Ellaby

Loose has certainly given Nelly Furtado's career a real shot in the arm just as she was started to drift into the land of the one-hit wonder (admittedly she'd had more than one hit, but her second album never hit the heights commercially). It's been so successful that she is still releasing singles from it over a year and a half after it came out, and this DVD of a live show from Toronto is here too, and who can blame her. Whoa Nelly! sold 4.9 million copies, Folklore sold 1.8m and Loose has already sold well over 6m, so you can't really blame her for wanting to cement that success with this release. She still occupies quite a bizarre place in modern pop music, clearly having more talent than most of her contemporaries could ever hope to possess, and her reinvention as a sexy edgy star after the world-folk-pop of Folklore raised a few eyebrows at first. The closest person to her in terms of style of music is probably Gwen Stefani, but this show pales in comparison with the ones Stefani put on a couple of months ago, which were full of energy, fun and imagination. Loose - Live perhaps reflects Furtado's own slight unease in this new role (after all, for Stefani it was only ever an amusing diversion, whereas this is what Furtado doesn't have a band to fall back on) so it comes across as neither a fully-fledged pop concert nor the kind of gig she put on to tour her last album. The band are more prominently displayed than you'd normally get at this kind of show, but there are also backing dancers for almost all the songs, and yet there doesn't seem to be any real point to them, other than they are there because someone thought they probably should be. A fairly dull stage set doesn't help either and the only real injection of colour comes with Forca (the theme tune to Euro 2004, with inflatable footballs thrown into a slightly bemused Canadian audience) and perhaps that too reflects that Furtado would feel more comfortable playing music like that. This gives the show a slightly lifeless feeling for most of it, only really coming to life on Promiscuous and Maneater towards the end, and it's even more noticeable on DVD, where you are detached from events and don't feel as much a part of it. That makes Loose - Live a rather disappointing live DVD that will still probably appeal to die-hard fans, but has little in it for the rest of us.

Moliere - By Paul Bullock

Quick history lesson. Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, or Moliere (Roman Duris) as he is better known, was a French writer and actor who penned a collection of celebrated plays between his birth in 1622 and death in 1673. However, while much is known of his life and work, there is a grey area in his early biography that remains a mystery to even the most well-read of scholars, and this whimsical French fancy creates a fictional account of what may have happened during that lost period. Moliere, writer/director Laurent Tirard speculates, spent his time playing out a sort of Cyrano de Bergerac story with Monsieur Jourdain (Fabrice Luchini), a rich but foolish nobleman who enlists Moliere's writing skills to help him woo beautiful marquise Célimène (Ludivine Sainger). But the path to true love never runs smooth and while Jourdain is attempting to win over Célimène, Moliere, now undercover as respectable priest Tartuffe, falls for his employer’s neglected wife Elmire (Laura Morante). From that description it’ll be no surprise to learn that Moliere owes a debt of gratitude to the witty romantic entanglements of Shakespeare in Love, with lines and situations taken from Moliere's later works, just as Romeo and Juliet was heavily relied upon and referenced in John Madden's film. The duality of comedy and tragedy constitutes the picture's meaty subtext, making it's a little more heavyweight than the rather slight 1998 Oscar winner. However, this is still very much frothy Sunday evening fare that is unlikely to win over those averse to period films or unaware of Moliere's works. Those who do buy the DVD will find only a short behind the scenes featurette to sate their Moliere appetite, but the lush colours and sterling cinematography of the film itself are beautifully presented on a crisp transfer.