DVD, Blu-ray and TV

On this "Special Edition" DVD you get a wealth of biographical information and visual material, as well as a Renault 21 TV ad based on this legendary Cold War-era feast for late-'60s conspiracy theorists. The holy grail for Prisoner fanatics, however, is a rough-cut, alternative version of episode one, "Arrival", never officially available before, featuring different intro music.

Touted as 'Sex & The City: The Movie', as Nicole Holofcener often directs the series, this nervy comedy's actually closer in neurotic spirit to her earlier, excellent Walking And Talking. Catherine Keener stars, but Brenda Blethyn's mugging threatens to upset the work of Jake Gyllenhaal and Emily Mortimer. Women on the verge.

Awful slapstick version of Conan Doyle's tale from 1978, with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (as Holmes and Watson) recycling old sketches badly as they head up a cast of vintage British comic talent (Kenneth Williams, Irene Handl, Max Wall). It's basically 'Carry On Sherlock', and it does the memory of all concerned no favours. DVD EXTRAS: Trailer, biographies, interview with director Paul Morrissey.

All 10 hours of US television's WWII epic in a box set

Ken Loach's 1969 masterpiece (based on Barry Hines' novel and produced/co-written by Tony Garnett, later behind This Life and The Cops) remains the template for grim oop north dramas. Its honesty, spontaneity and spiky humour shame more recent dilutions such as the appalling, infuriatingly overrated Billy Elliot. When a young Yorkshire lad, ignored by his loutish mom and brother and beaten down by grumpy, bullying teachers, finds a baby kestrel on the moors, he discovers a purpose in life, vowing to train it to fly. Only one teacher (Colin Welland) is sympathetic.

Joyously kitsch or shamefully ham-fisted, Tom Holland's Disclosure esque erotic office thriller sees the surprisingly blank Timothy Hutton as a cookie company kingpin with a suspiciously enthusiastic secretary, Lara Flynn Boyle, who has her own secret and ultimately homicidal plans to take over the entire cookie-making empire. Enjoyably silly until it completely reneges on narrative logic or plot cohesion.

Richard Linklater takes the po-faced monologues of Slacker up a level with this extraordinary, state-of-the-art, animated dream trip. The endless navel-gazing and philosophising (Are we alive? Are we imagining everything? There's not gonna be a car chase in this, is there?) are undeniably wearing, but you have to admire the only sentient Texan's ambition and nerve. DVD EXTRAS: None. (CR)

A morbidly slow but ultimately touching vignette from France, starring the legendary Michel Piccolia an ageing actor whose wife and kids are killed in a car crash. He mopes around Paris, but is persuaded by an American director (John Malkovich) to take a movie part. He muffs his lines, ensuring no feel-good ending. It earns its melancholia. DVD EXTRAS: Interviews, trailers, production notes, filmographies

Chronically misfiring comedy written and directed on an off day by Billy Bob Thornton, who also stars. He and Laura Dern are a bickering Arkansas couple, spending time with her eccentric white trash family. Little happens, but the casting of Ben Affleck and Jamie Lee Curtis as husband and wife has to be among the world's weirdest.

It's tempting to see Pedro Almodóvar's career as one steady progression from early Warholian kitsch like Pepi, Luci, Bom to recent audience-pleasing, Oscar-winning standouts like All About My Mother. If so, then the breathtaking Talk To Her is easily his career apogee and deftly confirms his status as one of the world's foremost filmmakers.