DVD, Blu-ray and TV

Rumour has it that the CIA funded Halas and Batchelor's 1954 cartoon adaptation of George Orwell's political barnyard allegory. But even though it's dated and stilted, it remains not only darkly savage anti-Stalinist satire but also a quite stunning piece of animation. Surely long overdue for a Babe-style remake?

Two cops are shot at; the survivor (John Savage) is ostracised by his colleagues for alleged cowardice, which takes him years to live down. Joseph Wambaugh's novel was faithfully treated by Harold Becker in this 1979 curate's egg, but brilliant as Savage is, it's an up-and-coming, intense actor named James Woods who lights the bonfire.

Patrice Leconte (Ridicule) brings a sombre poetic realism to this elegiac meditation on the nature of fate and the road less travelled. Johnny Hallyday, battered and craggy with gravitas, is awesomely iconic as the taciturn gangster who encounters Jean Rochefort's inquisitive retired schoolteacher. The two men are inexorably attracted, seeing in the other the tragedy of the life they never lived.

Barbet Schroeder's outré 1976 tale of feral love between petty criminal Olivier (Gérard Depardieu) and high-class Parisian dominatrix Ariane (Bulle Ogier), complete with scrotum piercing and golden showers, was originally denied a BBFC certificate. In retrospect, the analogy between S&M and romantic power games is overplayed, but Schroeder's willingness to draw sex and death so close together is compelling.

Brendan Fraser is an American aid worker in Vietnam who just might be masterminding a US-backed anticommunist coup while seducing Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen), the classically demure oriental lover of cynical British hack Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine). An intriguing, morally muddy adaptation of Graham Greene via director Philip Noyce.

Tom DiCillo's fascination with the chasm between talent and celebrity comes to the fore in this mischievously smart relationship comedy. New Yorkers Matthew Modine and Catherine Keener are drifting apart; when aspiring thespian Modine is fired from a role as an extra in a Madonna video, he hits rock bottom. Bitingly brilliant, with cameos from Steve Buscemi and Daryl Hannah. DVD EXTRAS: Scene selection. (CR)

"The night has its price," mysterious blonde Jenny Wright tells Adrian Pasdar's hapless Oklahoma farm boy before giving him a love bite and dragging him off on the road with her Mansonesque 'family' of white-trash serial-killer vampires—headed by a fantastic, dead-eyed Lance Henriksen. Kathryn Bigelow's genre-bending mix of horror, western and Southern gothic drags blood sucking into the modern world. One of the best horror movies of the last 20 years.

Stunningly dark, neurotic and indeed erotic drama from the matchless Nic Roeg who, in 1980, was flying. Set in Vienna, it traces the tangled affair between the passionate Theresa Russell and the deadpan (and very subtle) Art Garfunkel, with Harvey Keitel looking on suspiciously. Riddled with narrative and stylistic flash and mad degeneracy, somehow Roeg makes it stick. DVD EXTRAS: Trailer, scene selection.

King Lear re-enacted in modern-day Liverpool as crime boss Richard Harris, broken by the senseless murder of wife Lynn Redgrave, splits his empire between his two black-hearted daughters. The dialogue's got a touch of the Guy Ritchies and the violence is silly, but Harris—cunning, lean, leonine—commands the screen.

Handsome widescreen digital transfer for one of Sam Peckinpah's most underestimated films, 1975's angrily prescient satire on corporate America, whose ultra-cool surface belies the roiling fury at its bleak and bitter heart. James Caan and Robert Duvall are cynical operatives for a San Francisco-based intelligence agency, doing jobs too dirty even for the CIA. Early on, Caan is crippled by gunfire in a bloody double-cross and 'retired' from the company.