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 d

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)

Great fun for surfers, but?considering it’s made up entirely of scenic beaches and hotties in bikinis?crashingly inane tedium for the rest of us. A kind of Pointless Break for girls, directed by John Stockwell, it stars Kate Bosworth as the teen rebel surfer who wants to be just like all the other teen rebel surfers. A Ladyshave ad in thin disguise.

Pristine restoration of Bruce Lee’s only movie as star, director, writer and producer, released to mark the 30th anniversary of his death. He’s a country boy come to the city, in this case Rome, where he must kung-fu kick the collective badass of gangsters trying to take over a Chinese restaurant. Not Lee’s best, but it does have nunchakus and that great, no-frills fight with a hairy Chuck Norris in the Colosseum.

Since it was made in 1975, James Szalapski’s documentary about the set of young country songwriters who in the early ’70s turned their back on mainstream Nashville has assumed classic status?largely, you imagine, because it has been so rarely seen. I saw it in 1976, at a press screening to which about four other people turned up?country music of any description back then utterly unfashionable. I was fascinated by it, though, since it offered a rare, early glimpse of performers I had lately been listening to a lot, principal among them Guy. Clark and the great Townes Van Zandt.

What seemed odd about the film then and seems even odder now, however, is its complete lack of context and explanation?something that will surely baffle anyone coming to it without prior knowledge of the people in it, especially since most of them are even less well known today than they were 30 years ago.

Whatever its narrative failings, the film is still worth five stars if only for the footage of Clark, Van Zandt, a very young Steve Earle and a fabulous sequence in the pool room of old geezer’s hangout The Wigwam Tavern that looks like something from a David Lynch movie.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a fan. This study of Mitchell is a model of musical biography in DVD form. Over two hours we get her life story in perfectly matched words, music and images. The interviews with Mitchell are candid, the recollections from the likes of James Taylor, David Crosby and Graham Nash are fascinating, and the musical excerpts, which cover her entire career, are luminous.

Recorded during a series of gigs in Japan with his band The Oddballs two weeks before he died of a heroin overdose in April 1991, Who’s Been Talking offers a voyeuristic insight into the twilight world of Thunders. Gaunt and deathly pale, the wonder is how he played at all, for he’d been immediately hospitalised on arrival in the country. He summons a chaotic-narcotic energy during a set of more than 20 songs. But there’s a ghoulish irony to hearing him sing “Sad Vacation”, his Sid Vicious tribute.

A booted and suited Cave looks disarmingly like a door-to-door evangelist in this live French show from 2001. The intensity of his earlier work has of late been tempered by a more pensive, hymn-like calm and it’s the latter which is to the fore in a set that concentrates on the No More Shall We Part album. Yet it’s older material such as “The Mercy Seat” and “Saint Huck” which provide most of the highlights.

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.

“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.

Abel Ferrara’s excoriating study of how a man wallowing in his own filth at rock bottom finds the way to salvation. In an utterly naked performance as the corrupt, drug-addled, self-loathing New York cop unwillingly turned around by the rape of a nun, a desperately committed Harvey Keitel goes all the way. Then keeps going.