I am writing this week's column from a temporary perch in the Hollywood Hills, so you could be forgiven for thinking that Tinseltown – and, indeed, America in general – has got to me when I say that the best DVD out this week is White House Down (Sony, 12). But I've been championing Roland Emmerich's splendidly daft president-in-peril thriller since its cinema release last year – one that was greeted with disappointing indifference from mainstream audiences already full from the gung-ho pleasures of the identically premised Olympus Has Fallen.

That's a shame, since White House Down is, in every sense, the superior meathead movie. The narrative – a paramilitary terrorist group seizes the White House, and it's up to One Good Man, sturdily named Capitol cop John Cale (Channing Tatum), to save the day – is a scrawled-on-the-back-of-a-matchbook pretext for the kind of complicated, escalatingly destructive action set pieces in which Emmerich (Independence Day, Godzilla) specialises. So far, so Die Hard, but what makes this shoot-'em-up special is the level of inspired environmental detail with which it flashes its elaborate weaponry. Scarcely a corner of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is left unexploited: a bonkers car chase on the White House lawn is sheer, stupid joy. Buoyed by the unexpected chemistry between Tatum (the most lovable Hollywood lunk in an age, his Easter Island profile masking zippy comic flair) and Jamie Foxx's improbably sassy Potus, it's Emmerich's best film by several yards.

You could hardly ask for a geekier counterpoint to White House Down's jockish extravaganza than Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess (Eureka, 15). A wall-eyed study of a weekend convention for fiercely competitive chess programmers in the early 1980s, it's shot on archaic black-and-white video stock – intended, along with its eerily undetectable storytelling perspective – to give it the impression of something found festering in an archive. To call it "niche" is an understatement, even by Bujalski's mumbliest-of-mumblecore standards, but its man-versus-machine concerns do take root.

Only marginally less scrappy in appearance than Computer Chess – it has the look of something shot rather dimly on an iPhone, so its murk is more modern – Lake Bell's quasi-feminist comedy In a World… (Sony, 15) examines another decidedly specialised line of work for wry chuckles: the world of film trailer voiceover artists, an inexplicably male-dominated sphere in which gifted striver Carol (played with utterly comic dexterity by Bell herself) sets about busting the glass ceiling. It's not quite the bared-teeth industry satire you might hope for, and Bell currently knows herself better as a performer than as a film-maker, but the film represents a significant victory of charm over form.

This week's online pick is from newish streaming outlet Wuaki.tv – a mainstream rental hub in the vein of Blinkbox or LoveFilm, though one distinguished by its larger-than-most collection of admittedly loosely qualified "classics". A couple are even free to view, the best of the lot being William A Wellman's under-exposed 1937 version of that old chestnut A Star is Born: with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March both wonderful as the movie-star lovers who meet halfway up and down their respective career ladders, it's still a robust Hollywood melodrama.