The venerable British Film Institute is bringing out some of the more interesting Region Two DVDs nowadays, and Madman is to be congratulated in picking up some of their prime releases.

High on the list is Mon Oncle, the third feature film by French cinematic master Jacques Tati, and perhaps his finest work.

Well, we could debate all day which is his finest work. Madman has simulataneously released four of his five feature movies -- Jour de Fete, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Monsieur Hulot's Holiday), Mon Oncle and Playtime. As for his best? Most fans would admit it's a neck-and-neck race between Vacances and Mon Oncle. I could not be without either.

You should see Mon Oncle in the context of Tati's work. Tati started his professional career as a vaudeville and cabaret comedian and mime. His films have traced the disappearance of old France, under the onslaught of modernity.

His first feature-length film, Jour de fete of 1949, stars Tati as Francois, a village postman who is subjected to American-style time-and-motion studies as he peddles furiously through the rural countryside to reach the mail-aeroplane. The village and its surrounds are untouched by time. But the people are slowly changing .....

Then, four years later, came the classic Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, in which Tati for the first time adopted the persona of Monsier Hulot, the lovable and eccentric being who wanders through life with his head somewhere near the moon. His is one of the great comic creations of cinema, right up there with Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy and the Little Tramp. For M. Hulot, society is foreign and strange. He moves through it, but is not of it. He is an alien, forever teetering on an invisible tightrope. He simply does not exist in our time.

His dislocation becomes even more evident in the third feature, Mon Oncle, in which Monsieur Hulot arrives to live in Paris, and befriends his nephew, the son of his sister. His father-in-law has promised to find him a job in his plastics factory. Meanwhile, he is spending the days taking his small nephew away from the modern antiseptic home he lives in, and introduces him to the real Paris which still exists in small pockets between the modern homes, factories and apartment-blocks.

In this movie, the New is at war with the Old. The architecture of Paris, old and new, is a star of the movie -- which is why I list only two actors for this film -- Tati, and Paris itself. You'll remember no others.

This movie is a tour de force. In the same way that Hulot is in the world but not of it, Jacques Tati was in the French film industry, but not of it. His films were made during the years of the French New Wave cinema. They are not part of that great tradition of Truffaut, Godard and their peers. These films, and Tati himself, stand alone.

Tati was a true creative genius, and his work serves both as great comedies, and as virtual documentaries of the nature of France in the latter half of last Century -- the clash between tradition and radical change. I'd suggest buying all four of Madman releases. As a minimum, seek out this one, and its natural companion, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday. No true film-lover could be without these releases.

This transfer seems to be exactly the same as the version issued on French Region Two DVD about four years ago, with the handy addition of some English subtitles -- I say 'some' because in almost all Tati movies, language is an unecessary option. There's very little spoken dialogue at all; these are virtually silent movies with added sound.

Colour is vibrant and very beautiful, and the print quality is crisp and free of annoying artefacts. The full-screen image is the correct screen ratio; this movie fills that high-and-wide screen with grace and charm.

There are preview trailers for the other Tati movies being released by Madman. The main extra-feature is the 1947 short film L'ecole des Facteurs (The School for Postmen, a wonderful short showing our postman Francois being trained in maximum efficiency -- a film which contains many of the sight-gags used to such great effect two years later in his first feature, Jour de fete