Robert Mitchum never directed a movie, but he came damn close with 1958’s Thunder Road. Mitchum wrote the story, produced, cast the actors (including his son, Jim, playing his sleepy-eyed kid brother) and composed the soundtrack. He’d later record the title song, "The Ballad Of Thunder Road", himself for a single, sounding like Gene Vincent relaxing with a jug of whiskey. To direct, he brought in another maverick—63-year-old Arthur Ripley, a former gag-man for Mack Sennett and WC Fields who’d been in movies since 1908; but, in his own phrase, Mitchum "designed the shots". It’s the nearest he got to self-portrait. Far from being some glossy Hollywood vanity project, however, Mitchum’s film is an exemplar of fast, dirt-cheap, disreputable B-movie-making. Thunder Road is raw and strange, from the gutter. It looks like it cost about a buck-fifty to make. In an article for The Hollywood Reporter, Mitchum described the film’s genesis in inimitably languid manner: "Home crouched on the couch one night, it occurred to me that we might get a motion picture out of moonshiners and Government tax men trying to outwit each other in the southeastern area of these United States..." That’s the surface. Filmed around the Blue Ridge Mountain town of Asheville—where locals still recall the shoot’s epic carousing in whispered tones—Mitchum plays Luke Doolin, quiffed-up moonshine transporter from a tiny community in the hills. A local legend, he drives by night, fast and furious, running his daddy’s booze from the backwoods to the bright lights of Memphis. He’s so successful that Treasury agents are staking out the area, looking to end his illicit trade. Simultaneously, a powerful crime syndicate from the city seeking to muscle in on the local bootlegging is killing off Luke’s fellow moonrunners on the road. He finds himself in the middle, trying to evade both the law and the mob, as nets close around him. With its deep understanding of impoverished hillbilly communities and the sweet, gut-burning moonshine trade (handmade stills hidden in the trees had never been filmed with such documentary authenticity) and, most of all, with its outlaw hero outwitting the law in his roaring, hopped-up Ford Coupé, trashing cars left, right and centre while alleycat rockabilly and fast-picked banjo twang on the soundtrack, Thunder Road became an instant legend on the South’s flea-pit cinema circuit. Twenty years later, it was still playing to whooping drive-in audiences. Its success led single-handedly to that rash of good ol’ boy car-crash antics which peaked with the Smokey And The Bandit movies and the Dukes Of Hazzard TV show. Scratch the film’s surface, however, and you find philosophy: deep, dark, delinquent existentialism. Mitchum had made his name playing calm, doomed, outcast anti-heroes over and over in noirs like Out Of The Past and Angel Face, and shadowy westerns like Pursued, a cycle of movies that explored the concept of The Outsider. This, his most personal movie, confirms that all that was no coincidence. Luke Doolin’s barely-mentioned back story is that he was ripped from the bosom of his closed backhills community, sent away to fight in the Korean war. Since he’s returned, one of the local old-timers comments, "He’s got a machine-gunner’s outlook. Death doesn’t phase him..." Back from the other side of the world with a head full of slaughter, he’s unable to fit in anywhere, in the city or in his home town. He’s just looking to get killed, biding time by driving an endless, lawless circular run along unlit highways, with increasing recklessness. Mitchum’s movie is about fatal loneliness, boredom, about roads at night, about running forever, to nowhere, about always crashing in the same car, and it ends in a flaming, twisted auto-apocalypse. As such, Thunder Road stands as spiritual granddaddy to all those ‘60s and ‘70s road movies that take the endless American highway as existential parable, the tough, nihilistic root from which the anti-establishment likes of Two Lane Blacktop and Vanishing Point sprang. But none of them ever made death-tripping this much fun.

Before proceeding with this six-movie set, you have to acknowledge that anything which calls itself John Wayne: The John Ford Collection yet fails to feature The Searchers or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is riding into trouble. Still, it’s a fine place to start exploring Hollywood’s most legendary actor-director partnership. Vitally, it sees the first UK DVD release for Stagecoach (1939) [5], his first with Wayne, who sauntered into stardom after a decade in movies as the Ringo Kid, a charming outlaw bent on revenge. Ford presents society as bickering strangers on a coach trundling through a hostile wilderness, loosely slamming dimebook thrills against the anti-bourgeois bite of his source story, Guy de Maupassant’s caustic Boule De Suif, Orson Welles watched it 40 times. Drawn from Eugene O’Neill, The Long Voyage Home (1940) [5], also making its DVD debut, was actually shot by Citizen Kane cinematographer Gregg Toland, whose stunning high-contrast etches bawdy and maudlin (Ford’s favourite poles) vignettes of sailors far from home during WWII. It’s more Ford than Wayne, with the actor cast as an innocent Swedish farm-boy. The heart of the set, though, lies in their monumental "Cavalry Trilogy". The bitter complexities of The Searchers aside, these films display Wayne’s finest performances for Ford. For anyone who buys into the old canard that he couldn’t act, they’re the movies to be enlightened by: as the captain at desolate Fort Apache (1948) [5], trying subtly to prevent commander Henry Fonda from bringing down massacre; as the ageing, aching widower reluctantly eying retirement in the peerless She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949) [5]; as the sensitive Colonel Yorke bitterly estranged from wife Maureen O’Hara during the divisive Civil War, now signing off on an illegal sortie into Mexico, to rescue children in the reflective and leisurely Rio Grande (1950) [5]. O’Hara returns as the flame-haired colleen who captures Wayne’s heart in The Quiet Man (1952) [3]. He’s the boxer who, having killed an opponent in the ring, has fled to his homeland and vowed never to fight again. Chipped straight from the Blarney Stone, it’s Ford’s dream of Oirland, pure fantasy, and a film to cherish if you have any Irish in you, without having a stick up your ass about it. Universal is also releasing boxes entitled Wayne Out West, Wayne At War and Wayne In Action, and a 33-film John Wayne Collection. Hell, pilgrim-imagine what they’re going to do in 2007, when Wayne’s centenary rolls around!

Rising Japanese horror star Takashi Shimizu's original...Grudge, pre-Sarah Michelle Gellar redux is a wealth of eerie detail, carefully composed shocks, cadaverous children, vengeful spirits and classic"she's behind you!"moments all crammed into a fairly hoary'haunted house'narrative. Still, the shower scene, complete with wandering ghostly hand, is hard to top.

Worth owning for the way she peels off her opera gloves as the nightclub singer caught in the snake's nest noir Gilda (1946) alone. It also features Rita chased by Fred Astaire in You Were Never Lovelier (1942); shaking her stuff with Gene Kelly and a pre-Bilko Phil Silvers in Cover Girl (1944); and being a magnificent bitch to nightclub heel Sinatra in Pal Joey (1957). Lady is a vamp.

Engrossing, gritty, Shane Meadows-style debut from Chris Cooke, wherein three boozehounds on a rehab course scheme to scam portly tycoon Hywel Bennett. The lo-fi camerawork's iffy, but after starting slowly it tightens like a vice as cocktails, weed and violence kick in. Well written and acted, and surely the only film to argue that Jean-Michel Jarre's comeback gig was better than Glastonbury.

SPIDER-MAN 2 IS THE best movie adaptation of a superhero comic since Superman 2—one each to Marvel and DC, then. Like that 1980 Christopher Reeve (R.I.P.) super-vehicle, here the eponymous character, played by Tobey Maguire with muscular sensitivity, is torn between saving the world and giving it all up for The Girl (Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane). This sets things up quite nicely for Peter Parker's biblical abdication of responsibility when the prospect of losing MJ becomes too great and inevitable return when he realises his true calling. Cue crowds of awestruck peons staring up as the messianic blue-and-red arachnid mega-webs back into view. Director Sam Raimi gets the balance just right between fidelity to the 2D original and cinematic invention. The fight scenes between our hero and physicist Otto Octavius turned mechanically tentacled insaniac Doctor Octopus are as startling as any you will have seen, but it's not all whomp-that-sucker. Alfred Molina affords his super-villain tragic qualities, and there's real heat to the Maguire-Dunst passion play. The final scene is an even more breathtaking reprise of Spidey's aerial ballet from the coda to Spider-Man. An action movie with awesome power and real pathos. Bring on Spider-Man 3.

You'd have to be Scrooge (or rather Mr Potter) not to recognise Capra as a film-maker whose delight in the human spirit produced some of the finest, sharpest comedies of vintage Hollywood. Here's four of'em-Jimmy Stewart in You Can't Take it With You, Mr Smith Goes To Washington and everyone's festive favourite, It's A Wonderful Life, plus 1934's It Happened One Night. Heart-melting brilliance.

Not quite Fellini at his most brilliantly enigmatic, but the movie that made his name. Christ is helicoptered out of Rome while the city decays into a listless Sodom for the international jet set; Marcello Mastroianni plays the louche hack carrying too much ennui to write a novel, documenting the party people's jaded adventures for local scandal sheets, worried his soul is dying. The decadence looks tame today, but it still has Anita Ekberg in the fountain.

A hit in Spain, this only goes to show what Almodóvar is up against. Friends sleep with each other but not with their partners, whom they speculate may be gay. Intermittently they break into dire Euro-pop songs. You keep waiting for taboos to be challenged, stereotypes to be skewed?and you keep waiting. Paz Vega fans would be better off with almost anything else she's done.