DVD Reviews: The Music Room; Valkyrien; Oliver Twist

Although best known for his depictions of hardscrabble village life – most famously in his so-called Apu trilogy, which began with 1955's Pather Panchali – the lens of the great Indian director Satyajit Ray occasionally strayed into the lives of the country's upper classes. This 1958 film, an adaptation of a 1938 story by prolific Bengali author Tarashankar Bandopadhyay, is a perfect example and it's presented here in a new digital restoration as part of Sony's Criterion Collection with an uncompressed (i.e. better-sounding) monaural soundtrack – a welcome technological tweak given the importance that music plays in it.

Chhabi Biswas plays down-at-heel aristocrat Biswambhar Roy, whose devotion to music and musical performances have nearly bankrupted him. And so he sits in his crumbling pile on the banks of the Ganges, an eccentric figure smoking a hookah pipe and hosting lavish evenings of song and dance which drain the coffers but delight him and bolster his prestige as a patron of the arts. The modern world intrudes in the form of self-made man Mahim Ganguly (Gangapada Bose), the son of a money lender, who tries to compete with Roy and has the funds to do so. When Roy's wife and son are drowned, he closes the music room and, Miss Haversham-like, becomes a recluse, though unlike Dickens's memorable character he takes to the roof of his palace where he sits looking into the distance, resplendent in a patterned silk dressing gown.

It doesn't sound much, but the combination of Biswas's mesmerising performance, Ray's image-making and the decadent splendour of the surroundings make it a gripping watch – and that's before you factor in the regular interludes for Indian classical music and the epic, 10 minute dance sequence which leads to the film's tragic finale. Not typical of Ray's work, perhaps, but a wonderful entry point for anyone who has never experienced the work of the Indian master.

Valkyrien (15)

RLJ Entertainment, £24.99

This inventive, high-concept Norwegian series promises a lot and almost delivers it, though even its shortcomings haven't stopped it scooping awards in its homeland, getting picked up by Channel 4 for its ongoing Walter Presents strand and being lined up for the re-make treatment – Mark Strong is to star in an English language version set in London.

It's the set-up that's most intriguing – the series turns on a secret laboratory-cum-medical clinic which has created in an abandoned subway station in Oslo by renegade trauma surgeon Ravn (Sven Nordin). He's trying to find a cure for the virus which is killing his wife Vilma (Pia Halvorsen), herself a top medical scientist, and has been forced underground – literally – by the refusal of the authorities to countenance a new, radical, untested treatment.

As episode one opens, he's dressing for a memorial service for Vilma. Terminally ill and in despair, she has apparently taken her own life by sailing far out to sea in her boat. But when you learn that her body was never recovered, it doesn't take much nous to figure out what's going on. Besides, if Vilma was really dead, what's Ravn doing in his subterranean laboratory? A flashback structure drip-feeds information about the couple, as well as the crucial third member of the series: paranoid oddball Leif, who thinks the end of the world is nigh and wants to be as prepared as he can be when it happens. He and his ilk are known colloquially as “Doomsday Preppers”.

Leif's unconventional skills are just what Ravn needs, though his help comes at a price: a steady stream of “patients” who, for one reason or another, are reluctant to attend A&E. First up, an armed robber of Leif's acquaintance who accidentally double-crosses his accomplices and arrives with a bullet in his kidney and sixty million euros in a holdall. The title, by the way, comes from the name of a real place: Valkyrie Plass, a neoclassical 1920s metro station which closed in 1985.

Oliver Twist (PG)

Simply Media, £19.99

Given the profusion of early big-screen Dickens adaptations – Hard Times was filmed in 1915, Bleak House in 1920 and by 1934 there had been three Little Dorrits – it's hard to believe that it took television so long to get to the most famous Dickens novel of them all, Oliver Twist. It's less surprising, however, that it was Constance Cox who did it: a serial adapter of classic literature, the British playwright and scriptwriter had already brought Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, Little Women and Bleak House to the small screen by the time she turned her attention to the story of Fagin, Nancy and the Artful Dodger for this 1962 adaptation, now available for the first time on DVD. It's well worth a look, both for the gritty treatment and for the cast: Dodger is played by Melvyn Hayes, who would later find fame (of a sort) as Gloria in BBC sitcom It Ain't Half Hot Mum, while the role of Bill Sikes goes to Peter Vaughan, who died last year aged 93 and is better known (to some readers, anyway) as Maester Aemon in Game Of Thrones.