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Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
 When thinking of the great actor/director combinations in film history, a handful of astonishing duos come to mind: Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, François Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Léaud, Martin Scorsese and Robert de Niro... And with Edward Scissohands, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride and now Sweeney Todd making up an increasingly impressive record, it is beginning to look ever more likely that history will also look kindly at the partnership formed by Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. Burton's directing career may be somewhat erratic, nor is their collaboration a surefire recipe for cinematic genius. But Depp has functioned as Burton's protagonist-cum-alter ego in his finest moments of the past, and with last year's adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's grisly musical, the pair manage to scale new heights.
Burton's films, though consistently celebrated for their visual flair, have always been criticized for their lack of narrative coherence, so the rigorous structure of this musical, pared down to its dramatic essence, comes as a welcome relief. His staging of the musical numbers reveals once again that Burton is at his best when visualizing tightly orchestrated scenes of movement and lyricism. His cast, meanwhile, is superb across, the board, with Helena Bonham Carter the ideal romantic foil to Depp's obsessive killer, and Alan Rickman lending a note of pathos to the true heavy of the piece. Add to this heady mix a gleeful penchant for giallo-inspired geysers of blood and a hilarious guest appearance by Sacha Baron Cohen, and the end result is the best Burton/Depp picture so far, and easily one of last year's finest films.
Released in other areas as a two-disc DVD with a second platter full of documentaries and featurettes, the Dutch standard-definition disc is limited to a single DVD housed in a 'collectable' steelbook case, its sole extra the 26-minute featurette "Burton + Depp + Carter = Todd", which does a decent job of giving a background overview for the film. The other extras absent from this release have of course been included on the Blu-Ray edition in what seems like an obvious move to promote the purchase of hi-def releases.
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There is probably no film genre that has been deconstructed, revised and revisited more often in American history than that of the Western. The way it has always straddled that central American paradox of mythologizing bandits and outlaws while reaffirming law and order makes it especially potent in times of national identity crisis: the recent high-profile appearances of the genre (There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, 3:10 to Yuma) are similar in more ways than one to the revisionist Westerns that emerged post-Vietnam in the 1970s, such as Little Big Man and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson). Fitting in seamlessly with the aforementioned recent Westerns, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford functions as a fractured mirror that reflects our contemporary concerns, ranging from the ways in which the popular media frame and distort both contemporary and historical events to the eerie feeling that our heroes are little more than psychopaths glorified by those who seek to emulate their image more than their actions.
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