Mark Kermode's DVD round-up

Black Swan; Biutiful; The Next Three Days; Benda Bilili!; The Ward; Gulliver's Travels
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Oscar-winning Natalie Portman in Black Swan, 'a splendidly outré melodrama'. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

It's hard to keep up with the genetic origins and influences of Darren Aronofsky's Oscar-winning Black Swan (2010, Fox, 15), a full-blooded psychodrama in which Natalie Portman's uptight "sweet girl" must embrace her dark side to play the dual lead in Swan Lake. Early scenes owe a debt to the choreographed ordeals of A Chorus Line, giving way gradually to the ghosts of Powell and Pressburger's dance of death The Red Shoes. Barbara Hershey seems to be channelling the spirit of Joan Crawford as the ballerina's suffocating mother, while Cronenberg's The Fly looms large as Portman's nails crumble and her shoulders sprout feathers, hotly pursued by the fractured personality riffs from Lynch's Mulholland Drive.

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But by far the strongest DNA strain comes from Italian giallo maestro Dario Argento, specifically Suspiria and Terror at the Opera, which appear to have provided both an unacknowledged thematic and stylistic template for Aronofsky's splendidly outré melodrama. Shot like a whirling dervish by DP Matthew Libatique, this fabulously overcooked romp turns everything up to 11, producing a swooning operatic orgy of hysterical emotions and A-list exploitation aesthetics. It's a winningly heady cocktail that still retains its breathless qualities on subsequent viewings. Extensive extras dig into the behind-the-scenes magic and demonstrate that, despite the comparatively fleeting presence of a dancing body double, Portman really did throw herself into the role: heart, body and soul.

After garnering global acclaim and attention with his visceral feature debut Amores Perros, Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu drifted increasingly into hokey "we are the world" platitudes with the overwrought 21 Grams and the frankly flatulent Babel. Excellent, therefore, to find him returning to form with Biutiful (2010, Optimum, 15), in which Javier Bardem plays a divided soul caught between the light and the dark in Barcelona's twilight underworld. A loving father and sometime medium who delivers healing messages from the newly dead, Bardem's Uxbal is also a low-rent criminal, fencing the services of illegal immigrants who suffer in appalling squalor. Facing his own mortality, Uxbal becomes trapped in a purgatorial dilemma, brilliantly captured on Bardem's increasingly anguished face, which remains at once reserved yet painfully expressive. It's a masterful central performance from a charismatic screen presence at the top of his game in a role that was notable for being the only non-English language contender for this year's Best Actor Oscar.

In the gripping French movie Pour Elle (Anything for Her), an ordinary man is driven to take extraordinary action when his wife is jailed for murder. The achievement of the original was that it maintained a balance between the familiar conventions of the cinematic thriller and the realism of a down-to-earth domestic drama. Sadly Paul Haggis's American remake The Next Three Days (2010, Lionsgate, 12) has little of the latter, thanks in part to the casting in the lead of Russell Crowe, who never seems anything other than potentially heroic. Despite following the blueprint of its Gallic predecessor fairly closely, Haggis's film seems far closer to a conventional prison break-out flick, turning our attention toward a narrative that now seems riddled with disappointing credibility gaps.

Many movies stake a claim to be uplifting fare, but Renaud Barret and Florent de La Tullaye's musical documentary Benda Bilili! (2010, Trinity, 12) is a rare exception that really delivers on that promise. The film follows a group of Congolese musicians living on the streets of Kinshasa's ghetto and practising in the grounds of the local zoo as they attempt to record an album. The music is electrifying, a distant relative of American jug-band blues and British skiffle that uses homemade instruments to conjure a melodic cacophony of Congolese rumba and Afrobeat funk. Having realised that their sound can only be recorded in situ, rather than in a studio, the band finally commit their unique sound to CD, opening the door to a world tour.

Battling poverty and physical disability with resilience and fortitude (their album is called Très Très Fort), Staff Benda Bilili really are quite extraordinary, and this wonderfully intimate document of their rise to fame is both a tribute to the strength of the human spirit and a celebration of their life-affirming sound.

After a period in the wilderness it's good to see John Carpenter finding his low-budget-genre feet once again with the stripped-down, throwback, bughouse shrieker The Ward (2010, Warner, 18). Rising star Amber Heard takes centrestage as the volatile inmate of a sinister asylum who refuses to play ball with the men in white coats. It's all fairly familiar stuff, but compare this (artistically, creatively and morally) with the dubious balderdash of Zack Snyder's comparably themed Sucker Punch and it starts to look like a little masterpiece. The overall air is televisual (it plays like an extended episode of The Twilight Zone) and it's clear that the film's target audience was always intended to be DVD rather than theatrical, where it garnered perhaps unsurprisingly scant attention.

One of the big-screen 3D clunkers of the Christmas period, Jack Black's latter-day rehashing of Gulliver's Travels (2010, Fox, PG) is no less disappointing on DVD. Black plays the marooned mail-room nerd who learns the kind of cheese-on-toast self-realisation lessons that would have Jonathan Swift spinning in his grave; from satire to saccharine schmaltz. The set design and special effects are adequate, which is more than can be said for the lazy script and coasting performances, Emily Blunt notwithstanding.

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