DVD, Blu-ray and TV

Mike Figgis' one-take, four-camera, split-screen Hollywood satire is avant-garde without being pretentious, innovative without being wearisome. Here, like a Dogme remix of The Player, Figgis and his nimble cast ridicule the aching venality of the movie industry over one long and ultimately homicidal November afternoon.

Ken Loach at his best. First-time actor Martin Compston is outstanding in the role of Liam, a teenager growing up with a mother in jail, a drug-dealing stepfather and no future to speak of. But Liam is a bright kid who dreams of a normal family life. He's determined to make enough money to rent a home for his mother for when she gets out of jail. It's heartbreaking stuff that combines a political message with real humanity and a rich strand of black comedy. Highly recommended.

South African director Oliver Schmitz revisits the same territory as his angry anti-apartheid classic from 1988, Mapantsula, delivering a wry but equally scathing account of his post-Mandela homeland. Researching a role as a street hoodlum, a middle-class black actor (Tony Kgoroge) returns to his childhood township near Johannesburg to learn street cred from his former friend, a car-jacking gangster (Rapulana Seiphemo). A gripping, funny, darkly satirical thriller.

Disturbing documentary rips open America's dark heart

Eminem's big-screen rags-to-riches story fails to impress

John Andrew Gallagher's shambling 1997 comedy about an Italian-American storekeeper (Mike Starr) with gambling problems, unwanted mob buddies and endless eccentric customers is a fun idea which never quite takes off. There's shades of Blue In The Face, while various future Sopranos regulars—notably Michael Imperioli—cameo.

The 1985 film that launched the careers of the Brat Packers. This finds Emilio Estevez drooling over Andie MacDowell, Demi Moore coked out of her box and Rob Lowe being annoying and fratboyish—like much of the script. A must for those who thrill to the antics of self-absorbed young Americans.

A terrific Japanese rites-of-passage drama shot Dogme-style on digital cameras, this puts a fresh twist on the timeless themes of alienation, dislocation and teenage angst. Shunji Iwai's impressionistic, cutting-edge ensemble drama weaves together the lives of several emotionally wounded Tokyo teens united by their blank worship of a distant pop idol, Lily Chou-Chou. Pretentious, but still a punky new voice in Japanese cinema.

When compared to Baz Luhrmann's hysterical synapse-splitting kitsch, there's something strangely reassuring about Franco Zeffirelli's stodgy '68 classicist version of Romeo And Juliet. Here, the many pleasures include Michael York's fantastic cheekbones as Tybalt, a cherubic Bruce Robinson as Benvolio, and a plethora of badly choreographed sword-fights. Even the infamous shots of Olivia Hussey's 17-year-old breasts seem quaint rather than smutty.

Arguably the two most powerful kitchen-sink dramas of the early '60s were both adapted from the works of author Alan Sillitoe. Saturday Night And Sunday Morning (1960), directed by Karel Reisz, provided British cinema with an equivalent to Brando thanks to Albert Finney's electrifying performance as marriage-wrecking factory-hand Arthur Seaton ("I'm a fighting pit-prop of a man who wants a pint of beer, that's me!"). But Finney perhaps lacked the surly sophistication of borstal boy Tom Courtenay in Tony Richardson's later The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner (1962).