Artery

• Larry D. Horricks/ The Weinstein Company

In the rather startling CORIOLANUS, new to DVD, Blu-ray and standard digital platforms this week, actor-turned-director Ralph Fiennes smuggles an obscure Shakespeare tragedy into the contemporary war movie genre.

Epic and bloody, Coriolanus tells the tale of Caius Martius (Fiennes), a fierce military general in “a place calling itself Rome.” In the Bard's original play, Rome is actually Rome (and Martius a historical Roman general). In Fiennes' update, though, Rome is a depressingly modern and familiar sight: a city in the midst of war, coming apart at the seams. Time and place are deliberately indeterminate. This Rome could be Beirut in the '80s, or Belgrade in the '90s, or Damascus today. In the DVD extras, Fiennes says he threw in bits of Brooklyn and Shanghai, too.

After Martius conquers the rival city of Corioles—swords and shields replaced with guns and tanks—he is given the title Coriolanus, and eventually appointed Consul of Rome. What happens from here falls squarely in the realm of Shakespearean epic tragedy.

If you don't know the story of Coriolanus already, you're better off going in without too much advance information. As his name suggests, Martius is a creature of war and has little time for notions of popular rule. Pride is his tragic flaw, and the film connects some dots between military culture and tyranny; ancient Rome and tomorrow's headlines.

The script by John Logan (Gladiator, the upcoming Skyfall) retains Shakespeare's original dialogue, of course, and it's a joy to watch the veteran cast deploy such musical language. Shakespearean dialogue can be hard to follow, even for us recovering English majors, but Fiennes gives each scene such a sturdy structure and arc that the narrative thrust is never lost. The language comes in from unexpected vectors, too—exposition is sometimes provided by the anchorman on the TV in the background.

Gerard Butler stars as Martius' rival warlord Aufidius, Brian Cox is the general's right-hand man and Jessica Chastain plays noble Virgiilia, the lovely Missus Martius. But Vanessa Redgrave steals the show, absolutely chewing it up as Martius' mother, the ambitious Volumnia.

Coriolanus features convincing and quite violent battle scenes, with plenty of bullets and blood. Some sequences are a little too stagey, though, and the film's modest budget shows in generic art design and underpopulated crowd shots.

But overall, Coriolanus is a remarkable achievement, a classic epic tragedy that looks for all the world like a gritty, contemporary war thriller.

Formats: DVD, Blu-ray and standard digital platforms.

Extras: A short, underwhelming behind-the-scenes featurette and a director's commentary track from Fiennes.

Also New This Week:

TRUE BLOOD: THE COMPLETE FOURTH SEASON (DVD/Blu-ray/digital) comes to home video with the usual excellent array of extras, including cast and writer interviews, production mini-docs and audio commentaries. Perfect for a binge-watching weekend of vampires, were-panthers and necromantic witches.

Director Daniel Stamm, who made a pretty good faux-doc horror film with 2010's The Last Exorcism, returns with an even darker concept in A NECESSARY DEATH (DVD and digital), concerning cinema verite and suicide.

The heist thriller MAN ON A LEDGE (DVD/Blu-ray/digital) wins this week's Truth in Labeling award, thanks to Sam Worthington's performance as a man on a ledge.

Plus: Sex, drugs and 1970s fashion in ULTRASUEDE: IN SEARCH OF HALSTON; James Cromwell in the soldiering drama MEMORIAL DAY; and Amanda Seyfried's gigantic eyeballs in the abduction thriller GONE.

• Photo by Neil Davidson/ IFC Films

So when you find a new science fiction movie with a relatively fresh concept, it becomes a kind of commodity in and of itself. Such is the case with the apocalyptic romance PERFECT SENSE, new to DVD and various digital platforms this week. Starring Ewan McGregor and Eva Green, the film was a minor hit on the festival circuit but only opened on a handful of screens in the U.S. last fall.

The hook: A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the planet, gradually causing the population to lose sensory perception. Taste is the first to go, then smell. As a side effect, each wave of the epidemic is preceded by an intense emotional hysteria—grief, or joy, or rage.

Green plays a Glaswegian epidemiologist (almost poetic, that) tracking the phenomenon as she unexpectedly falls in love with her neighbor, a raffish gourmet chef played by McGregor. The film narrows its focus to their love story, letting the end-of-the-world details play out teasingly in the corners.

Scottish director David Mackenzie gets good mileage out of his small budget, deploying scenes of local chaos to suggest worldwide devastation as the planet slowly freaks out. This frees up the film to work on the level of parable, as screenwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson muses upon what is truly abiding in this vale of tears.

I appreciate this kind of imaginative moxie in my sci-fi movies, and Perfect Sense is careful to keep the nature of the dilemma ambiguous. The epidemic might be a virus, or bio-terrorism, or the wrath of God. No one knows, and in the end it doesn't matter. The cataclysmic details are designed to resonate emotionally with the characters, and their ideas and feelings at the end of the world.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that McGregor and Green—who share several delightful sex scenes—are two of the more impressive physical specimens on the planet. They're also both strong, charismatic performers. McGregor seems endlessly versatile in his roles, and Green brings a damaged vulnerability to the standard chilly scientist role.

Perfect Sense shares some cinematic DNA with Alfonso Cuaron's 2006 dystopian thriller Children of Men, which deals with a near-future infertility epidemic. Mackenzie's movie doesn't have the visceral power of that great film, but it traffics in similar circles of thinky science fiction.

Formats: DVD, Blu-ray and various digital platforms.

Extras: DVD and Blu-ray feature a single meager behind-the-scenes “featurette,” plus the film's theatrical trailer.

• Soda Pictures

As his fellow students protest and march—Tokyo had its '60s radicals, too—brooding college student Toru Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama) falls into a romantic affair with the delicate, damaged Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi). The two come together in unspoken grief after the suicide of their mutual friend, Kizuki, who was also Naoko's first love.

The young couple's first sexual encounter leads to a emotional breakdown for Naoko, who retreats to a countryside sanitarium. Watanabe, meanwhile, executes a retreat of his own—into books and ideas and the new vistas of college life. He soon encounters the beautiful, free-spirited Midori (Kiko Mizuhara), whose sunniness seems a light at the end of his tunnel. Then things get complicated.

Norwegian Wood is a beautiful and melancholy film that moves to its own unhurried rhythms. Not much happens, but when it does, it's tidal in force. Young love, the film suggests, is the same in any era or place—baffling, euphoric and occasionally scary as hell.

One fascinating aspect of the film's love stories is that, for the central characters, the sex is anything but casual. The young adults in Norwegian Wood are suspended between Japanese cultural tradition and the glad tidings of the sexual revolution drifting in from the West. For them, sex is decidedly liberating—but also inseparable from honesty, responsibility and loyalty.

Director Tran Anh Hung (The Scent of Green Papaya) uses music to underline themes of past versus future; yesterday versus tomorrow. The traditional orchestral score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood is punctuated by snippets from the Doors and the Beatles. Keep in mind this is 1960s Tokyo, back when Japanese hipsters shopped for American vinyl records, and not the other way around.

Norwegian Wood is one of those great little films you can usually find migrating to home video in any given week. The film had a limited release in a few North American cities earlier this year, but otherwise you'd need to have attended a festival in Toronto or Venice to catch this one.

The Extras: English subtitles, an hour-long making-of doc and a featurette on the film's premiere at the 2010 Venice Film Festival, where it was nominated for a Golden Lion award.

Formats: DVD and various digital platforms.

Also New This Week:

- Liam Neeson continues his oddly convincing makeover into hard-guy action hero with THE GREY (DVD/Blu-ray/digital) concerning planes crashes, wolves and Dermot Mulroney.

- The acclaimed indie doc WE WERE HERE (DVD/digital) documents the AIDS crisis in 1980s San Francisco through archival footage and eyewitness accounts.

- The sci-fi drama CHRONICLE (DVD/Blu-ray/digital) was a surprise critical and commercial success earlier this year, and suggests that the found-footage gimmick isn't totally played out yet.

Plus: Glenn Close and Janet McTeer in their Oscar-nominated roles in the historical drama ALBERT NOBBS, Woody Harrelson in the cop drama RAMPART, Old Scratch in the exorcism thriller THE DEVIL INSIDE and the Criterion Collection's reissue of BEING JOHN MALKOVICH on Blu-ray and DVD.