An immaculate, determinedly unsentimental Marc Forster film, with breathtakingly honest performances from Halle Berry and, especially, Billy Bob Thornton. Death Row prison guard Thornton's family are traditionally racist; Berry's husband (Sean "Puffy" Combs) is executed. In a pit of despair, an unlikely, colour-blind love blooms between the two. One of 2002's best. DVD EXTRAS: Extra footage, cast and film-makers commentaries, isolated soundtrack.

In his final starring role, Richard Harris glowers impressively as the Irish underworld patriarch in Don Boyd's inspired relocation of Shakespeare's King Lear to contemporary Liverpool, Sadly Boyd directs with a low-voltage energy which flattens out intense emotion and visceral violence into brightly lit, blandly shot TV cop drama.

Jane Campion's second film (1990) tells the life story of Janet Frame, a New Zealand author who overcame poverty, chronic shyness and (misdiagnosed) schizophrenia to achieve international acclaim. Kerry Fox stars, while Campion hones her own stylistic match of trippy fantasy and gauche intimacy. Earnest, with detours into the ethereal. DVD EXTRAS: Three interviews with Campion, filmographies, trailer, biography of Janet Frame.

The ultimate journeyman, Kevin Reynolds is back with his explosively soulless adaptation of Dumas' classic. Formerly solid character stars Guy Pearce and Jim Caviezel don Hobbit haircuts and bored expressions as the socially mismatched childhood friends torn apart by jealousy and betrayal. It's clunky and mechanical, and lacking in even the faintest directorial fingerprint, yet it bounces you safely to the finish. DVD EXTRAS: Making Of..., audio commentary, deleted scenes, sword-fight choreography documentary and sound design featurette.

Oliver Stone's typically overwrought biopic of Jim Morrison has been much-mocked down the years, perhaps unfairly. It's full of Stone's signature bombast and is characteristically laden with all manner of wild and windy symbolism, but it has rather more going for it than popular reputation usually allows—not least, a surprisingly good performance from Val Kilmer as The Lizard King himself, fantastic duplication of vintage concert footage, especially the re-staging of the infamous Miami bust, and the patently deranged Crispin Glover as Andy Warhol to fucking boot!

Savage Hollywood satire from 1950 retains its bleak, sardonic edge

A highly entertaining non-making of Terry Gilliam's Don Quixote

Madchester: The Movie, in which Michael Winterbottom proves his versatility knows no bounds. In lesser hands, the juiced-up story of Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays and self-styled pratgenius Tony Wilson could've been scrawny sit-com, but the pace (and the music) makes it zing. Steve Coogan's hilarious as the north-west's answer to Warhol, and it's the first film to feature a joke about the drug dealers of Rhyl.

Jean Renoir's 1932 blueprint for Paul Mazursky's heavy-handed 1986 remake Down And Out In Beverly Hills stars Michel Simon as a Parisian tramp rescued from suicidal despair by kindly bookseller Charles Granval. Simon's ungrateful Boudu takes over Granval's house, wife and life, exposing his bourgeois complacency. Enduring, Chaplin-esque social satire. DVD EXTRAS: Introduction by Renoir, essay on the film, trailer for the Mazursky remake.

Patchy South African drama from 2000 in which an actor, landing a role as a Soweto gangster, asks an authentic underworld figure and old school friend to show him the ropes of crime and carjacking. Lines get blurred. Director Oliver Schmitz makes some still-valid points about race and class issues, but it's no Bullets Over Broadway.