Offbeat Elmore Leonard yarn brought to the big screen by Paul Schrader. Juvenal (Skeet Ulrich) is a stigmatic ex-monk with miraculous healing powers, Tom Arnold is the religious fanatic obsessed with him, Bridget Fonda the nice girl who loves him, Christopher Walken the hustler who wants to exploit him. Nicely satirical about the modern media circus.

Writer Jean Genet’s sole completed film (albeit only 25 minutes long), despite his lifelong fascination with cinema. Once outlawed due to the presence of an erection, this erotic fever-dream of prison-cell sexual tension represents a remarkable distillation of Genet’s poetic themes and preoccupations. The transfer of this 1950 classic is pristine.

After the ponderous Al and the not-as-clever-as-it-thought-it-was Minority Report, Spielberg delivers a sleek, slick 1960s-set caper movie based on a true story, with Leonardo DiCaprio as the teen con artist attempting to stay one step ahead of Tom Hanks’ FBI agent. Leo’s smug, Hanks is nerdish, but Spielberg carries off the action with flair.

Nouvelle Vague-inspired camerawork plus a searing central turn from Carol White remain supremely effective in Ken Loach’s 1965 teleplay about na

Colin (son of Tom) Hanks proves his worth as a responsible wannabe writer constantly thwarted by his manic stoner brother (Jack Black), drunken mum (Catherine O’Hara) and surfer dude buddies. Many most excellent jokes and comic cameos from John Lithgow and Jane Adams make this a fine Friday-nighter.

Ben Affleck plays Marvel’s blind superhero, with Jennifer Garner as his love interest (the ninja assassin Elektra), Colin Farrell as hitman Bullseye and a suitably imposing Michael Clarke Duncan as the crime lord Kingpin. The fight sequences are impressively executed, and it’s a solid stab at the source material; sadly, some substandard CGI lets it down.

Banned in 1939 by a pre-War French government, for being ‘demoralising’, Jean Renoir’s transparently allegorical film is set in a decadent chateau during a hunting weekend when pointed badinage, back-stabbing and partner-swapping suddenly erupt in an act of murder. Watch out for the ominous ‘shooting party’ scene, with heavily armed toffs turning a rabbit-hunt into a bloody massacre/metaphor.

Kathleen Turner stars as peachy suburban housewife Beverly Sutphin, who merrily murders most of her annoying neighbours (and anyone else foolish enough to offend her). Turner’s fabulous, and John Waters’ black comedy is like a blend of Disney and David Lynch. An utter delight.

Gabriel Byrne and Julianna Margulies head up a nautical salvage crew who discover a derelict ocean liner that’s been missing since 1962. On board is a fortune in gold bullion?and several hundred ghosts. Pure formula?occasionally bizarre and gory, but in the main outrageously schlocky, with Margulies in plucky heroine mode?and comfortingly reliable.

Asked what makes a good band great, Liam Gallagher characteristically cuts through the crap in one of his regrettably scarce contributions to this record of Britpop in the ’90s?”Just ‘avin’ it,” he grins. Liam’s pithy views on politics, his brother’s visit to Downing St, Oasis’ albums and his alleged androgyny come as highlights in this, one of the essential documentaries of recent years, which charts the rise of young, homegrown music against a background of political dissatisfaction and deep-hewn social division.

With clips and interviews from many of the major players, Live Forever also puts Britpop into a wider cultural context which includes supermodels, Loaded, cocaine, Trainspotting, Damien Hirst’s art and the Diana phenomenon. Jarvis Cocker looks back with mixed feelings, while Noel Gallagher is more hilariously forthright than ever as he discusses one of Britpop’s key moments?the 1995 Oasis/Blur chart (and class) battle?and wins this latest round hands down, since Damon Albarn refuses to discuss it.

Damon, however, comes into his own, backed by Jarvis and Louise Wener, when he lifts the lid on Cool Britannia, Blair’s electoral triumph and the New Labour “con” which found the Party anxious to manipulate the musicians who’d helped it to power. Extraordinarily, the film wanders beyond its territory to an unconvincing conclusion, linking the death of Britpop to the surge of pre-pubescent hero-worship and playing out to the unlikely strains of S Club 7.

The Nanny and The Blue Lamp? Just what these two anomalies are doing sandwiched together on DVD is anyone’s guess. The former is a campy 1965 Hammer chiller about a bonkers nanny, played by Bette Davis in familiar kabuki make-up. The latter is a breathtakingly obsequious 1950 Ealing Studios tribute to the Metropolitan Police Force, which introduced the world to Dixon Of Dock Green.

Reworked by Claude Chabrol after the death of screenwriter Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages Of Fear, Diabolique), L’Enfer sees poor Fran

The L-Shaped Room is a stagy 1962 adaptation of a Lynne Reid Banks novel about pregnant French socialite Leslie Caron in a London bedsit, and is famous only to Smiths obsessives due to it being the source of the opening sample from The Queen Is Dead. John Schlesinger’s 1965 Darling is a key text from the Swinging London canon, breezily and brilliantly skewering vacuous underwear model Diana Scott (Julie Christie) as she seduces her way into wealthy despair.

Belated DVD release for Stephen (Blade) Norrington’s flaccid 2001 meditation on the nature of, wince, ‘celebrity culture’. Max Beesley, ineffably irritating in Alfie mode, is Billy Byrne, a talentless wannabe whose driving desire for fame sends him on a Hellish Journey? through London’s criminal drug-dealing S&M underworld. Hateful characters, no discernible narrative voice, and hackneyed visuals. A mistake.

One of the best swashbucklers ever made. Tyrone Power is Don Diego de Vega?the son of a nobleman out to save the peasants of Olde Californy (and Linda Darnell) from the villainous Basil Rathbone. Fantastic swordfights (Rathbone was an Olympic duellist), and Power shows exactly how derring-do should be done.

The Family Way sees squeaky-clean Hayley Mills as the perfect daughter to real-life dad John in this cautionary 1966 tale of a young married couple struggling with financial hardships and the apparently grim realities of married life. Accident, on the other hand, is a brooding psychodrama, written by Harold Pinter, directed by Joseph Losey and starring Dirk Bogarde as a tragic philosophy professor obsessed by Jacqueline Sassard’s voluptuous student.