When it was released in his native Hong Kong in August 1990, John Woo's brutal Vietnam-era epic Bullet In The Head was a box office disaster. Speaking to Uncut in April 2003, Woo remembered: "When we did the premiere, people just walked out...I felt totally exiled." Coming just over a year after the brutal massacre of students in Tiananmen Square, it's perhaps no surprise that the movie?called Die xue jie tou in Woo's native Cantonese, aka Bloodshed In The Streets?was too complicated, too downbeat, too pessimistic. And it is. But it also marks the point where Woo's influences?Peckinpah, Scorsese and Melville?boiled away to reveal the style that would become the default setting for 1990s action cinema. And if those post-Woo flicks could be formulaic?cult movie references, Mexican standoffs, men in blood-soaked suits and flashy set-pieces?you can't blame Bullet In The Head. This is not ironic, not a pose, not pastiche. Cheesy as hell in parts, it's one from the heart. The movie was originally intended as a prequel to 1986's gun-opera A Better Tomorrow, but following the end of his partnership with producer Tsui Hark, who elected to direct what became A Better Tomorrow III himself, and angered by the events in Tiananmen Square, Woo gutted and rewrote his script. Opening in 1967, with Hong Kong rocked by Maoist rioting, we're introduced to Elvis-obsessive Ben (Tony Leung) and his Brylcreemed friends Frank (Jacky Cheung) and Paul (Waise Lee), who effortlessly knife-fight local hoods in the sunshine in time to Monkees songs. Woo drew from his own experiences as a teenager growing up in Hong Kong, conveying a greater sense of time, place and personality in these early scenes than he'd managed in previous films. Woo grew up idolising Alain Delon and Clint Eastwood and dodging gangs with his friends?which brings credibility to the trio's friendship and pathos to the inevitable Mean Streets moment when their horseplay turns bad. The three friends are forced to leave the increasingly turbulent Hong Kong when they accidentally kill the leader of a rival gang (Leung's new wife waves him off as a bomb disposal man gets his arms blown off in the background). They plan to make a fortune smuggling medicine in and out of Saigon, but inevitably things don't go according to plan. In their first, horrific exposure to the brutalities of war, a terrorist destroys their cargo, and they witness a street execution modelled on Eddie Adams' famous photo of General Loan shooting a Viet Cong spy in the head. Entire scenes are appropriated from news photos like this, plus sequences from Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter. At first sight, these seem like breathtaking acts of plagiarism, but remember that Woo and scriptwriter Patrick Leung had no other source material to draw on?Hong Kong hadn't participated in armed conflict since 1945. With no possessions left, Ben, Frank and Paul are forced to work for local crime boss Mr Leung. Through him they also meet Luke (Simon Yam), a CIA assassin, who we first see striding into a men's room, performing a hit as "I'm A Believer" plays in the background. As a classic Woo contract killer, Yam brings lounge suits, knives, bombs disguised as cigars and machine-gun mayhem to the already demented proceedings. The three friends plan to steal a crate of Leung's gold, but are captured by the Viet Cong and incarcerated in a POW camp where, in the film's most harrowing scenes, their captors try and force them to execute US GIs. They escape, but Paul betrays them for the gold, shoots the wounded Frank in the head and destroys an entire village to make his escape. It's an astonishing sequence?intense and visceral?and after that, the third act seems like an anti-climax, as, a year on, Ben finds Frank, still alive, working as a hitman to support the heroin addiction he's developed to numb the pain of the bullet lodged in his skull. Ben then returns to HK, and confronts Paul in an incongruous ending worthy of a Schwarzenegger movie. The original, included in this package, was considered too low-key and reshot. Woo only made two more HK movies before making his Hollywood debut with 1993's Hard Target. Bullet... is now seen as his masterpiece. It's certainly his most personal, full of passion and anger for the tragedy of Tiananmen Square, and arguably the film that set the pace of action cinema for the next 10 years. A bullet in the industry, then.

"I'm not sure if it's a comedy or a tragedy," shrugs actor Jean-Claude Brialy in Une Femme Est Une Femme, "but it's a masterpiece." Not wrong there. This hyperactive 1961 ground-breaker, even more than the mesmerising Alphaville, is everything that's wonderful about early Godard. Later, he became obsessed with semiotics, deconstructing to the point where only the fanatical could go with him. But here, in the post-Breathless era, high on success and confidence, he's brushing excess flecks of genius off his coat. Watch these and you'll be amazed at the playful energy, wit, flair and intelligence. You'll also wonder when it was that cinema elected to tread water. With '59's Breathless (not included here), Godard became the most acclaimed, controversial Nouvelle Vague director. Hundreds of imitators sprang up, only a handful survived. Reinventing the language, the look and the licenses, he used jump-cuts and hand-helds to reinvigorate and readdress the "illusion of reality". Let's not, though, lurch into the academy-speak often dumped on funky, youthful Jean-Luc. He's fun! That said, Le Petit Soldat may not be the friskiest example?made in '60, it was banned for years for referring to the use of torture by both sides during the French-Algerian war. A deserter's ordered to kill; Camus-like, he does. In a relatively sombre piece, there's already a fascination with the way we see, exemplified by scenes in which our reluctant soldier begs the debuting Anna Karina to let him photograph her. Karina, a Danish model, came to France and was nurtured and married by Godard. Detractors reckon Une Femme Est Une Femme is 'just' a documentary on her visual magnetism. Certainly, few performers can lay claim to a movie which so electrically captures and delights in their essence. You absolutely cannot take your eyes off her. "I don't know whether to laugh or cry." she says, doing both with balletic skill. It's a homage/parody of musicals, a Jules Et Jim-style love triangle, and a series of surreal epigrams and quickfire jokes. Karina: "Been here long?" Belmondo: "No. Twenty-seven years." Elsewhere, Belmondo growls: "Hurry up, I want to watch Breathless on TV." It was Godard's first colour film. For '65's Alphaville he returns to a supremely grainy monochrome, rendering a future dystopia (Paris, unrecognisable), where technology has wiped out human individuality and love. (And hasn't that premise been recycled a few times since?) Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) investigates; Karina, in a frostier but equally iconic role, struggles to help. Nostalgic, ultra-modern, literary but vibrant, these 'old' films are the youngest you'll ever see.

Following last year's release of his earlier work, this is an artfully presented set of Polanski's commercial breakthrough movies?Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown and The Tenant. Given a ready-made yarn with a thread, he could concentrate on brewing his own unique, dislocating atmospheres and obsessions, and did so brilliantly. He wasn't content in this role for long, but Robert Evans forcing him to play (relatively) straight strengthened the reputations of both men. In Rosemary's Baby (1968) he adapts Ira Levin's novel (one shudders, in a positive way, to think what he'd have made of The Stepford Wives) of a young woman (Mia Farrow) who's impregnated by the Devil. What's suggested is as scary as what's seen. The domestic Manhattan setting makes it all the creepier, and the film paved the way for The Exorcist and inferior imitations. Chuck Palahniuk wrote recently that: "We're so wrapped up in this story, we get a cathartic experience, a horrible adventure by proxy." Chinatown ('74) is, for all the acclaim, Polanski's least Polanski film. His most restrained. He doesn't overpush the kinky quirks of his subjective world view, allowing Robert Towne's script and the fine acting of Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway to carry their own water. Yet the director's dark wit questions the conventions of noir, and exhales stylish seediness; '30s LA is sun-baked yet subterranean, in a miasma of political-personal scandal. The Tenant (1976) is a ghastly (if very unsettling) self-parody, with Polanski as a paranoid male version of Deneuve in Repulsion, clothed in drag and dementia in Paris. Evict it; house the other two.

It's 1967 and Terry meets Julie under a Wessex downpour as opposed to a Waterloo sunset. John Schlesinger addresses Thomas Hardy's torrid melodrama of love, betrayal and sheep farming with the epic cinematographic sweep it deserves, while the tension between Christie and her three suitors-the doomed Peter Finch, the stoical Alan Bates and, of course, the dastardly Terence Stamp is spellbinding.

Sam Fuller's explosive pulp classic, a red-menace thriller, pitched near hysteria from start to finish. Richard Widmark's lone-wolf pickpocket winds up caught between the Feds and the Reds when he unwittingly lifts stolen microfilm from Jean Peters, a hooker being used as a courier by a Soviet spy ring. Thelma Ritter's loveable stool-pigeon suffers one of the great movie deaths. Definitive Fuller, definitive noir.

The ingredients are there: Nicolas Winding Refn (Pusher) directs John Turturro and James Remar in a (minimal) script by the late Hubert Selby Jr, with Eno scoring. Yet somehow this just doesn't gel as it wades through its slow pretensions. Turturro's a recently widowed security guard, obsessive over photos and CCTV as he seeks his wife's killer. Intelligent, but rather drab.

"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. So the first thing to be said about it is that it's not first-chop Marx, those being the seven near-perfect comedies the brothers made for Paramount between 1929 and 1933, which included immortals like Animal Crackers and Duck Soup. They lost some of their anarchic panache on their move to MGM and thereafter tended to overdose on romantic subplots and lavish musical set-pieces. They never stopped being funny, though. And the main selling point of this new collection is that these movies lack the familiarity of their most celebrated work and can therefore be relied upon to take the viewer by ambush. Opera's the prize jewel here, complete with the Groucho-Chico contract squabble that you'd defy anyone not to burst a blood vessel to. Though Harpo attempting to turn a piano into a harp in Races runs it pretty close. All in all, if you're the sort of person who fills his/her trousers with mirth at the very thought of the Marx Brothers, then this set should send you giddy. On with the funny moustache and away you go.