Robert Tanitch takes a look at the latest releases on DVD including Polanski's 'The Ghost' starring Ewan McGregor adn Pierce Brosnan.

Wolf Hall, the bestselling Booker Prize winner of all time, has now been shortlisted for the Best Audiobooks of the Year 2010, along with 2010 longlist The Long Song by Andrea Levy.

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Dogpound is French Director Kim Chapiron’s recreation of British director Alan Clarke’s 1979 film, Scum, transferred from Britain to the Enola Vale Facility for Juvenile Offenders in western USA.  Scum, originally made for television, but banned for its violence, was then turned into a powerful feature film that set the bar high for prisons dramas.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a feature adaptation of Jeff Kinney’s illustrated novels about the adventures of a maladjusted young prankster that have sold 28 million books.  Greg Heffley (Zachary Gordon) is a middle child, who is all but invisible between his much older brother in a rock band (Devon Bostick) and his brother still in diapers.  He’s puny for his age and dreads starting middle school where he’ll be both ignored and bullied, just as he is at home.

The number of puppies being abandoned over the past 12-months has doubled according to worrying statistics revealed by the UK's largest dog rehoming website, DogsBlog.com.
 
The recession and general belt tightening has been cited as a major cause for the upward trend, however the rapid rise in the number of dogs between the ages of 7 weeks and 12-months of age suggests more dog owners are taking on pets when they are ill equipped to fulfill the lifelong commitment to the animal.

Part II of the late Stieg Larsson’s posthumously published Millennium Trilogy, The Girl Who Played with Fire, presents the same problem as Part I, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, released last year.  Best sellers like Harry Potter and Larsson’s Trilogy, demand a faithful adaptation in which film, as an art form, is at the service of the novel and its fans.