DVD, Blu-ray and TV

It's very long and extremely po-faced, and most of the performances are pretty wooden, Yul Brynner's imperious pharaoh aside. Even so, Cecil B DeMille's 1956 account of the life of Moses (Charlton Heston) still has some impressive sequences-notably the Exodus from Egypt, with 60,000 extras—and remains the definitive Biblical epic.

"O JOY!"IS NOT THE UNIVERSAL response to the idea of a sofa, a bag of toffees, a long weekend and six Marx Brothers movies to sit through. Inexplicably, there are those whose funny bones are immune to the work of Groucho, Harpo and the rest of the crew. When it comes to the Marx brand of sideways lunacy, seems you either get it or you don't. This latest DVD set gathers up A Day At The Races, A Night At The Opera, At The Circus, Go West, The Big Store and A Night In Casablanca.

Arthur Penn's smouldering anti-western tells the story of Nicholson's Montana horse-rustlers and the pursuit of them by Brando's regulator Lee Clayton. The action is rationed into short, ferocious bursts and used as a counterpoint to the director's paced dissection of power and politics on the anarchic frontier. Brando's whispering Irish accent flirts with parody, but ultimately helps to lend Clayton a compelling air of psychotic menace.

Along with Boyz N The Hood, this marks the film world's awakening to a dark period of gang violence in early-'90s LA. The story of Caine Lawson (Tyrin Turner), a young black man looking to escape the daily treadmill of bloodshed, isn't particularly original, but the Hughes brothers pull few punches. It's not a pretty sight, but the film now stands as a curious period piece.

Errol Morris' latest Oscar-winning documentary is no Moore-style polemic but an artful interrogation of infamous US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, who gave Morris 23 hours of filmed interviews in 2001, before 9/11 and the Iraq war, though unspoken parallels are hard to ignore. A formidable intellectual bruiser at 87, the old Cold Warrior seizes what may prove to be his last chance to make peace with history. Riveting.

Broad comic remake of feminist chiller

Left limbless, deaf, dumb and blind by a WWI landmine, US GI Timothy Bottoms is locked away in a hospital. Considered beyond medical help, he drifts in memories and fantasies, until, years later, he finally finds a way to communicate—to little avail. Based on his 1939 novel, this 1971 anti-war parable was the only film directed by blacklisted scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo. At times awkward, it's nonetheless driven by an acute, angry intelligence. Hard to forget.

Denys Arcand reunites the Quebecois characters who made '86's The Decline Of The American Empire so witty and engaging, and despite their age, disillusion and failing health, they're as intellectually provocative as before. Yes, it's talky, but as one lies dying, his friends reminisce about days of drugs and libido, and his son finds a backbone. A moving, note-perfect Oscar-winner.

After pushing Emily Watson and Björk through relentless pain and suffering in previous films, Lars Von Trier mercilessly harasses glutton-for-punishment Nicole Kidman in another sprawling, love-it-or-hate-it lo-fi epic. She's a mystery woman on the run who shelters with a curious community, only for the comfort to sour. Paul Bettany, Lauren Bacall and Chloë Sevigny look puzzled

In October 1992, Brazil's notorious São Paulo Detention Centre—aka Carandiru—erupted in a full-scale riot which left 111 inmates brutally slaughtered by trigger-happy military police. Director Hector Babenco's movie charts the events that led to the uprising, using the arrival, some 12 years earlier, of Drauzio Varella, a doctor employed by the authorities to quell the rapidly rising AIDS epidemic in the facility, as our entry point into the story of this hellish, overcrowded facility.