The Best Sites For Renting World Cinema on DVD

World Cinema DVD Rental Best Buys Overall World Cinema Selection: LoveFilm Ease of Browsing and Searching Lovefilm The Best DVD Rental Site for Indian Cinema Lovefilm The Best DVD Rental Site for European Cinema Cinema Paradiso The Best DVD Rental Site for Asian Horror Lovefilm

WHETHER you're a slave to the latest Kareena Kapoor flick or the thought of getting your hands on the latest Korean gore-fest sets you slavering, you'll get your films faster and more easily when you rent online.

World Cinema is a burgeoning genre that online DVD rental retailers ignore at their peril.

In our survey of the top online DVD rental sites for World Cinema, though, we found some sites were feeling a little perilous.

We've compared online DVD rental sites based on the how easy it is to search or browse and the range of films available. Now don't say we never do anything for you.

Overall World Cinema Selection
And the Winner is... LoveFilm

The biggest online DVD rental company in the UK LoveFilm has 3,824 titles in its World Cinema collection.

LoveFilm had the most Indian cinema titles as well as Asian horror flicks, and scored the highest in our 'ease of browsing and searching' test - making it easy for customers to find the more obscure title.

LoveFilm only came second for European Cinema to Cinema Paradiso, who have amassed a catalogue of 38,500 titles from over 60 countries. Their unrivalled selection and friendly site makes them a Mecca for fans of World Cinema.

Coming in last of the big three is high-street giant Blockbuster. Not renowned for its World Cinema collection, it offers a third of the titles of Lovefilm at 1,300 titles.

Ease of Browsing and Searching
And the winner is... Lovefilm

The Lovefilm.com site is easy to browse by country or by language. Another nice touch is the ability to cross reference actors from movie to movie.

If ease of use is your top priority, though, you might be better off one of the powered-by Lovefilm sites: Sofa Cinema and WHSmiths DVD rental fall into this category which means that you'll be able to access exactly the same films as a Lovefilm customer.

The Guardian's Sofa Cinema is easy to use but only allows browsing by language. On the plus side, the site's design is uncluttered and you can search by film specifics.

Also powered by Lovefilm is Easy Cinema but this only allows browsing by language so has little to recommend it - unless you really like orange.

Blockbuster's site is user-friendly providing you think of films in terms of comedy/thriller etc.

Otherwise, the inability to browse by language or country is infuriating. For example, Christophe Gans' French-language Brotherhood of the Wolf can only be found hidden in the horror/occult section.

The Best Sites for Indian Cinema
And the best site is... Lovefilm

Lovefilm has the most Indian cinema DVDs to rent: 1,900. Cinema Paradiso comes a close second with just over 1500 Indian DVD titles. Blockbuster's Indian Cinema section comes trailing in at 700 titles.

We found that the vast majority of those titles were Hindi Bollywood productions, with some English or US crossovers (like Meera Syaal's 'Mimi and Me') thrown in for good measure.

That meant that it was quite difficult to track down DVDs from the Kerala film industry or from elsewhere in Southern Indian. However, we did find some Tamil-language films in Cinema Paradiso's selection.

One final note is that Indian Cinema can be hard to find on the Lovefilm and Blockbuster sites.

If you want to browse through the titles on Lovefilm search for the genre 'Indian Cinema' rather than looking up World Cinema and then clicking Indian/Pakistani (which only turns up about 30 titles). On the Blockbuster site try their list of 100 Essential Bollywood Classics for a quick fix.

The Best Sites for European Cinema
And the best site is... Cinema Paradiso

While Europe seems so close as to hardly qualify as 'World Cinema' that's ignoring the fact that European Arthouse has a reputation as 'world cinema' in its most pejorative sense, conjuring up images of smugly pretentious cinema-goers.

Lovefilm does well here too and since they give a breakdown of their catalogue it's easy to see that they stock 36 Danish films, 835 from France and 246 from Spain, as well as many more from other European countries.

But although we haven't got any exact figures for Cinema Paradiso on this one we're guessing that they're not too shabby and certainly not far off Lovefilm's numbers. They also get two thumbs up from us for stocking films from countries that Lovefilm doesn't seem to reach such as Bosnia and the Czech Republic.

Blockbuster does well too, with 154 French titles available from what we could see and a host of the other mainstream European titles.

The Best Sites for Asian Horror
And the best site is...Lovefilm

As horror aficionados will know the genre comes into its own in Japan and Korea.

Lovefilm scores highly here because the user generated lists often pay homage to the genre which is a great way to find new and more bile-inducing DVDs to rent.

Cinema Paradiso also had a good selection, though there wasn't a specific section for the films so searching took a little longer. We also found previews of some films such as Takeshi Miike's Ichi the Killer which is always a nice bonus.

Blockbuster also seemed to have a good selection of gore but with their habit of ordering by genre it was difficult to tell for certain. However, a search for Japanese director Takeshi Miike bought up a lot of titles, including his most famous films, while the same search for Korean director Kim Ji-woon turned up almost all of his films (although, oddly, not A Tale of Two Sisters).

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