DVD, Blu-ray and TV

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.

In a small Arizona town a toxic waste dump creates a plague of hundreds of giant spiders. Cue mass destruction and enormous fun, since the SFX are first-rate, the cast (led by David Arquette) is solid and the script strikes the right balance between laughs and twitch-inducing 'arach-attacks'. The best giant bug movie for decades. DVD EXTRAS: Trailer, commentary, deleted scenes, plus Larger Than Life—director Ellory Elkayem's first award-winning short horror film. (PH)

Stunningly beautiful and utterly bizarre Japanese fable about a medieval Kabuki actor (Kazuo Hasegawa), renowned as a female impersonator, who carries his on-stage portrayal of a woman out into the world in order to seduce and murder the noblemen responsible for his parents' death. The direction is haphazard, the imagery is amazing. DVD EXTRAS: Director's biography, web link.

American thriller writer Peter Neal (Tony Franciosa) arrives in Rome to publicise his latest novel. Then people start dying in increasingly grisly ways—all copied from Neal's book. Dario Argento's long-banned blood-drenched whodunnit is released in uncut form for the first time... but this hasn't cured the gaping holes in the plot. For gorehounds only.

Delbert Mann's earnest 1955 slice-of-life drama about an ordinary Bronx butcher (Ernest Borgnine) mustering the courage to find a girlfriend earned four Oscars—Best Picture plus one each for Borgnine, Mann and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who later penned the far superior Network. It's decently acted and well-meaning but very slight, dated and a little condescending.