DVD, Blu-ray and TV

Brian De Palma's taken several critical and box office beatings in his erratically compelling career, but Femme Fatale's straight-to-video UK release must mark an all-time low for him. Not that the film deserves much better—it's glossy tosh, a supposedly erotic crime thriller about deceit and redemption in which De Palma lavishly indulges his stylistic obsessions to very little purpose. Painfully poor work from a great director.

Mildly engaging Mexican comedy concerning female empowerment; a kind of My Big Lardy Greek Wedding for liberals. Should our heroine work to feed the poor folks, or follow her dream of further education? Will she learn that true beauty comes from within and body size isn't everything as we arrive at the dénouement? At least it hasn't got Rosie Perez screeching through it.

Written and directed by the perennially underrated French-Canadian Denys Arcand, this engrossing 1989 fable sees Lothaire Bluteau as an actor playing Jesus who's caught up in conflict with the church. His problems begin to echo those of the Biblical Christ. Oscar-nominated, the dry, ironic style gives it a wry resonance more effective than any breast-beating.

Being John Malkovich team twist the rules of narrative to ingenious comic effect

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.

A dazzling epic with a dark and bracing tone, George Stevens' Giant details Rock Hudson's old-fashioned Texan cattle baron (and American national metaphor) as he races towards modernity, neck and neck with neighbouring self-made trailer trash oil-swiller Jett Rink (James Dean). Hudson's sometimes stiff, and the pacing is certainly stately, but it's worth it to catch Dean's final intricately self-conscious screen turn.