DVD, Blu-ray and TV

This six-DVD set's total running time of 24 hours is enough in itself to set alarm bells ringing. Footage of northern soul in its '70s prime is almost non-existent. Cameras only ever went inside the legendary Wigan Casino once for a documentary (1977's This England), which isn't included. What does that leave us with? Talking heads padded out with the shittest home-made videos you've ever seen. And over a hundred northern soul artistes as they are now, miming to re-recordings of their hits. One star for unintentional comedy value.

Directed by Roland Jofféand elegantly scripted by Robert Bolt, with a landmark score by Ennio Morricone, this follows Robert De Niro's ex-mercenary and Jeremy Irons' Jesuit priest during violent 18th-century South American land-grabbing. And still, there's always been something disturbing about the way the movie so eagerly endorses the underlying missionary project.

Collecting all four Python movies. And Now For Something Completely Different was a 'greatest hits' retread of sketches from the early TV shows, Holy Grail is worth seeing for Cleese's French knight alone, the wry and occasionally profound Life Of Brian was the best of the bunch, and The Meaning Of Life had some truly wonderful tunes. Did I say "indispensable". yet?

The year's most controversial release, Gaspar Noe's French frenzy (which unfolds backwards, like Memento) has been hammered for its scenes of rape and violence. His argument's that if you don't show them as ugly, you don't show the truth. However you react, there's no denying his visceral energy.

Cult Britpunk director's brief Hollywood foray in full

Richard Linklater's emotionally ambivalent high school homage is a cutting riposte to the rosy teen nostalgia of both American Graffiti and the entire John Hughes canon. Set in Nowhere, Middle America, 1976, during the first day of summer break, it lazily and amiably follows Hollywood freshmen, including Ben Affleck and Matthew McConaughey, as they drink beer, smoke grass, and cultivate the slacker apathy of future generations.

A subversive pleasure from the pen of Nicholas Kazan (son of Elia Kazan), Enough is an ostensibly ridiculous yarn about battered wife Jennifer Lopez who learns Jujitsu and exacts revenge on millionaire husband Billy Campbell. Yet it's also an extremely un-Hollywood evisceration of white America, the family unit, and capitalism itself. Clever, stupid film-making at its best.

Anthony Hopkins completes his Hannibal Lecter set with this remake of Michael Mann's Manhunter (1986). It's more faithful to Thomas Harris' novel, but a lot less stylish, and the performances are uniformly worse: Ed Norton is merely adequate as the empathic FBI detective, while Ralph Fiennes is positively wooden as serial killer Francis Dolarhyde, and even Hopkins is below par.

Though it didn't burn up the box office during its theatrical release, Danny Boyle's jittery zombie flick is actually a far more satisfying small-screen experience. Gone is the distracting texture of large-scale digital video, and gone too is the weight of expectation (will it be better than The Beach?). Instead, the movie simply plays as it is—a brashly original post-apocalyptic B-movie.

Written by Joel Schumacher, Car Wash traces a day in the life of the Dee-Luxe car wash in smoggy downtown LA circa 1976. Part blaxploitation comedy and part Altman-esque ensemble drama, the huge cast includes Antonio "Huggy Bear" Fargas and, in a brief cameo, Richard Pryor. Norman Whitfield's score is a trash classic, but the story's muddled and full of dated caricatures.