In The Loop

This is an exemplary package, with many of the extras as funny as the feature that they complement.

The audio commentary and some reasonably lengthy interviews feature the same core personnel - director/co-writer Armando Iannucci, actors Peter Capaldi (Malcolm Tucker), Tom Hollander (Simon Foster), Chris Addison (Toby) and Gina McKee (Judy) – who comment on, inter alia, the cameo from Hollander's favourite underpants, the non-unionised status of Addison's stubble, the deleted 'helicopter chase sequence' and the film's supposed echoes of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, while also occasionally being serious about how liberating it can be to improvise in and around two roving hi-def cameras.

Where Capaldi focuses on the air of sadness and melancholia that elevates the comedy, Iannucci discusses his love of comedies like The Great Dictator, Dr Strangelove, M.A.S.H. and Brazil that can laugh at the grimmest of circumstances, and declares his 'mixed feelings' about now watching a film that he spent four long months editing down from an original four-and-a-half-hour cut. Everyone emphasises the way that the film's story emerged from the editing.

Consequently, the 27 minutes of deleted scenes are lost gold, and every bit as funny as what made the final cut, with the aggressively sexualised confrontation between Jamie ('the crossest man in Scotland') and Director of Communications Judy proving to be a particularly electrifying clash of personal styles. The 12 brief 'webisodes' repeat some of this material, but are no less hilarious for that. Even the stylised menus, which present some of the film's best lines (playing on the soundtrack) in speech-bubble text form, serve to accentuate the surreal elegance of the writing/improvisations, and will have you chuckling all over again.