DVD & BluRay

HERSELF Picturehouse, cert 15; Bluray £12.99 & on Digital

Home is where the hurt is for mum-of-two Sandra, played by Clare Dunne who wrote this searing story about domestic abuse. Sandra’s married to thuggish Gary (Ian Lloyd Anderson) and early on we see him perpetrating yet another act of violence on his wife. It’s the final straw for a woman who’s been desperate to hold her marriage together for the sake of their daughters (Molly McCann and Ruby Rose O’Hara) and she runs, taking the girls with her. It’s a tough subject for writer/star Clare and director Phyllida Lloyd, but they pull it off, contrasting flashbacks of the terror Sandra went through with her determination to build a new life - which has a magical quality reminiscent in its optimism of Field of Dreams (without the baseball!) Sandra’s working two jobs in Dublin but has little hope of getting enough money for a deposit on a house. Unless she can build one for herself. That’s where kindly Peggy (Harriet Walters) whose

13 MINUTES Signature, cert 12; DVD £7.99 & on Digital

Disaster movies have a job to eclipse horrific real life events these days what with climate change fires, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis.

Here, a thunderous tornado threatens a small Oklahoma town, but the looming disaster gives the film time to agonise on a myriad of social issues like (yawn!) sexuality, health care inequality, illegal immigration, abortion, and religion, naturally. I just wanted the wind to arrive and blow things down. To be fair the effects team behind Deepwater Horizon and Everest created a pretty good storm on a tight budget, but there’s little reason to worry about who lives or dies in a cast of fairly well-known actors. house Sandra cleans saves the day by giving her a plot of land. And so, with the help of a group of locals who wish her well, Sandra sets to with hammer, nails, cement and surging dreams of a better life building her future joint by joint. The soundtrack musical choices are metaphors for washing that man right out of her hair, but her anxiety returns every time Sandra drops her daughters off to stay with Gary, who’s pleading for her to come back. Sometimes she’s almost torn. Herself is a perfect antidote - a proper human story - to all those superhero spin-offs.

JAKOB’S WIFE Acorn/Shudder, cert 15; Blu-ray £15.99 & on Digital

Here’s a darkly comic new take on the vampire movie to get your fangs into. Scream Queen Barbara Crampton, of You’re Next fame, plays Anne, the wife of boring small town pastor Jakob (Larry Fessenden) who’s worn her down over the years. Then Anne’s old flame arrives in town and they nip off to an abandoned mill for a little hanky panky, but Tom gets eaten by a swarm of rats bursting out of an old coffin as an ancient vampire swoops on Anne. Now she turns the tables on Jakob, threatening to bite him if he doesn’t help her procure fresh blood supplies from unsuspecting friends and neighbours. A hoot!