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With grim, grubby retro-future styling, Michael Radford's movie, originally released in the eponymous year, is the best adaptation of George Orwell's feel-bad totalitarian parable. As reluctant rebel Winston Smith, John Hurt is perfect—looks like he's spent his life in misery. The revelation is Richard Burton, weighed down with strange love, melancholy and menace in his final role as O'Brien, the investigator who takes Hurt under his wing to crush him.

Takeshi "Beat" Kitano goes blond as well as blind to resurrect the long-running samurai avenger, and has more fun with it than original star Shintarö Katsu ever imagined. Outrageously bloody, it's a kind of syncopated slice-'n'-dice. Sure, Takeshi could have done it with his eyes closed—and does-but it's his most satisfying effort since Hana-bi.

Since 24, the world's somehow overlooked Steven Bochco's ice-breaking 23-part epic series (here on six discs), which traced the ricocheting ramifications of a Hollywood murder trial in obsessive detail, locking us into addictive characters with exquisite week-on-week suspense. Daniel Benzali is the snidey-but-good lawyer, Stanley Tucci the reptilian suspect millionaire. It still ensnares you. Good as it gets.

Jean Cocteau's 1949 reworking of the myth of Orpheus (Jean Marais) portrays him as a beat poet torn between his art, his wife (Marie Déa) and the love of Death (Maria Casares) herself. The effects are a miracle of low-budget ingenuity, the dream-like imagery unforgettable: mysterious motorcycling assassins, poetry from beyond the grave on the radio, and all mirrors lead to the Underworld. A masterpiece.

"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.