Magical Maestro

Beth wakes up after a night she can't remember to discover her guitar missing. She'll go through hell to get it back. But, like, after some aspirin.

Diana Damrau’s reputation as the world’s leading coloratura soprano has been built on her extraordinary technical virtuosity, her sensitive musicianship and her acute psychological insight. In this DVD of Katie Mitchell’s sometimes radical production of Lucia di Lammermoor from London’s Royal Opera House, she is, as the Financial Times wrote, “brilliantly convincing”. The British award winning director Katie Mitchell – took a revisionist approach to the drama, updating the action to the mid-19th century and applying a feminist slant as she added new and unexpected elements. The Financial Times wrote: “Mitchell shows us on stage personal traumas that a self-respecting woman in the early 19th century was meant to keep to herself. It is a messy, bloody list — nocturnal sex trysts, a knife murder, a miscarriage, a suicide in the bath … In all this Damrau is brilliantly convincing. Her rebellious Lucia is a woman of modern attitudes stuck in a still feudal Victorian world.”

Shannon Amen unearths the passionate and pained expressions of a young woman overwhelmed by guilt and anxiety as she struggles to reconcile her sexual identity with her religious faith. A loving elegy to a friend lost to suicide.

A parable about the nature of good and evil, in which a prince goes on a quest to learn true wisdom before he claims the throne.

The gang, while playing firemen, come upon a real fire.

Moo mourns her deceased friend, so Yuu decides to create a new companion for her. Their adventure fails, but they discover they have built a new friendship during the journey.

After losing control of his engines, bumbling spaceman Fripp finds himself at the mercy of his spaceship. A thrilling descent through an asteroid belt ensues, after which he finds himself marooned on a post-apocalyptic Earth. Without a working spacecraft, the interstellar time-traveler must dip into the dead planet’s history in order to find a way home.

Heart set on becoming a princess, Lisa Simpson is surprised to learn being bad might be more fun.

This set has Edita Gruberova singing in top form, all her scooping cast aside, which one finds in abundance in her Lucia under Richard Bonynge. Here, however, she makes ravishing use of those bits of tone that only she can produce: those instances of coloratura and dramatic legato with little asides and small florishes of style that suggest her intelligent approach and her high degree of musical involvement in this role. She does this in her I Puritani and her Anna Bolena, less so in Roberto Deveraux and Maria Stuarda(both sets). Listen to Addio del passato and the Sempre Libra...ravishing, yes, but there are again those nuances learned from Callas that she makes her own. A very singualr perform,ance, and extremely moving with its detail and cry for pity throughout..from the start even. Neil Schicoff is excellent, not an unworthy Alfredo at all! His is a great lyric tenor voice that should have been in the top line.

When a stubborn old man and a fretful teenaged girl are forced to share a hospital room, an unexpected friendship forms over their hatred of fake cheerfulness and bad hospital food.

The hero Siegfried reforges his father’s shattered sword, embarking on a quest for the greatest prize of all – the love of the valkyrie Brünnhilde, who lies trapped in a ring of fire. Siegfried is the third opera in Richard Wagner’s four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. Wagner broke off composition at the end of Act II of Siegfried to write Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, returning to Siegfried seven years later. Longborough Festival Opera, known as the British Bayreuth, calls on renowned Wagnerian Anthony Negus to conduct and Amy Lane to stage this new production of Siegfried in the bucolic English Cotswolds.

Newlyweds Warren and Helen have an unplanned honeymoon in Death Valley.

When the legendary interviewer Aaron Chen was 9, he stole a microphone and conducted his first on the street vox-pop. 2000 chinwags and 3000 chats later, the Wisdom School adult learning platform.

A nine-year-old boy is obsessed with the sizable penis of his older friend.

Almost a romantic comedy…

Night. A man drowns in a rough sea. A lighthouse guard risks his life to save a drowned man. He gives him food, gives him his bed. When the lighthouse guard falls asleep, the rescued man steals his boat. As the next lighthouse approaches, he submerges the boat and starts shouting for help.

In 1970s Belfast two young boys discover the facts of life, aided by the help of their pet chickens.

'You want to put her in a home; you tell her; tell her now!' hisses one brother to the other. But Mother won't go, and their own lives quickly unravel as she clings to life. Director Daisy Jacobs uses two-metre-high painted characters in full-size sets to tell the stark and darkly humorous tale of caring for an elderly relative. The Bigger Picture is quite simply the most innovative animated short you will see this year.

A lost soul stumbles drunken through the city. In a park, Death finds him and shows him many things.

Somewhere between a music-video, a documentary and a fantasy - created with and around a Toronto-based acting-collective called LUSTR.