At this time of year, I usually try to post a review somehow related to Easter, and in 2013 I’m pulling out an old classic from the archive. I’ve written about Who Framed Roger Rabbit before, but today’s review is a translated, improved and enhanced version of the German article I had last posted four years ago. The movie is not exactly Easter material, but at least it has a kind of bunny as the title character – and it’s also very far away from the usual Disney cartoon fare. The DVD is actually ten years old this year, but it holds up very well and could have been released yesterday. This spring the movie has also been released on Blu-Ray and most of this review also corresponds to the HD version.

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It had been Johnny Depp’s childhood dream to one day play Barnabas Collins, a vampire character from a popular daytime soap opera, but it took him and his old friend Tim Burton half a lifetime to make a movie version of Dark Shadows. The result is a delightful mix of horror and drama carefully sprinkled with bits of Burton’s particular brand of macabre and sarcastic humour, making it one of the most enjoyable recent movies of the director even if the script is slightly overloaded with plots and characters. Because the movie had not been a particular financial or critical success, Warner did not make much of an effort for the home video releases. The DVD is especially disappointing, containing only one short featurette as bonus material, but this does not make Dark Shadows less amazing.

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I don’t have anything new this week to post, but I’ve finally made a decision: DVDLog is going to make a switch from German to English this year. It’s going to be a very gradual process, but I am going to write all new reviews in English now and there will be translations of my favourite older articles to fill some gaps when I haven’t got new material to write about. There are two reasons for the change: I want to expand my readership with the help of Google+, which has already begun to work, and writing in English has proved to be much more fun than in German. I hope that the regular readers won’t mind, probably most of you understand enough English to follow my articles.

Apart from some slight language changes in the blog template, nothing else is going to change. I still try to do a weekly update and I’m actually working on something new right now which should be ready next Monday. I’m slowly beginning to get my groove back after the winter and in April and May a few fresh DVDs should be coming in, so maybe it’s going to be a busy spring here on the website.

When I had posted my collection of english-language reviews in February,I completely forgot about one very special article: the review of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, one of the most amazing British television series of the late 1960s. I had already reviewed a German boxset of the series back in 2006, but in 2010 I finally bought the wonderful UK boxset from Network which had been released two years previously and not only came with brilliantly restored transfers, but also an exhausting collection of bonus materials and even a whole accompanying book. This week’s article is a repost of my review from nearly three years ago – but thoroughly updated, corrected and improved. Be seeing you!

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In the last few years, Brian Cox has become somewhat omnipresent on british television. The rockstar-come-physicist-come-television star had first presented six Horizon documentaries between 2005 and 2009 for the BBC with his own two full-length series Wonders of the Solar System and Wonders of the Universe following in 2010 and 2011. Together with comedian Dara O Briain, he was also the co-host of three Stargazing Live events and gave a televised physics lecture at the end of 2011. David Attenborough has said that if he would need to choose a successor, it would be Brian Cox. But is the popularity of the good-looking scientist just a hype? His new five-part series Wonders of Life shows that this is most definitely not the case. Mixing physics and biology for the first time, Brian Cox once again succeeds brilliantly in bringing a sense of wonder to the television screens.