Uncut

Ridiculously entertaining car chase and all, William Friedkin's brutal, dumb 1985 crime flick resembles his French Connection resprayed for the West Coast. The movie benefits from LA shimmer and deployment of under-used actors: Willem Dafoe plays a ruthless, faintly perverse counterfeiter and William Petersen is the lawman in tight jeans crossing the line in pursuit of him. Listen for the Wang Chung soundtrack! Maybe not.

Luchino Visconti's three-hour epic is a complex family saga, with Burt Lancaster as an Italian nobleman in the Garibaldi era. The colour and detail is so rich it's almost fattening. Visconti, calling in favours back in '63, wanted Lancaster (who's great), but outside Italy no one knew how to sell it, so it was hacked and dubbed. Now its sumptuous again, with a Nino Rota score and both Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon in their prime.

Occasionally worthy slice of war-is-hell hand-wringing from pre-Hollywood Peter Weir circa 1981 is elevated by eye-popping 'scope photography from Russell Boyd and two credible central turns from Mel Gibson and Mark Lee as the Yin and Yang of Australian machismo. On the other hand, the repeated sampling of Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygen was possibly a mistake.

UNBROKEN CHAIN

PERFORMANCE

Barely six months after the demise of Theatre Of Hate, Kirk Brandon was braving it on stage in Manchester in March 1983 with a new band, name and repertoire. That his audience look mighty perplexed by SOD's brassier tribal goth-dub makes his fearless performance, caught here, even more compelling.

The duo's 1994 take on Unplugged, which involved recording new material in Morocco and rearranging old Zep songs with Middle Eastern flavours and musicians, was a brave but preposterous conceit. Filmed in a Welsh valley, in a slate quarry and cross-legged with locals in Marrakesh, they're only really credible and incredible in their natural environment—a stage.

THE VIDEO COLLECTION

THE MAKING OF GRACE

THE RESIDENTS' COMMERCIAL ALBUM ON DVD