Producer Lawrence Bender wears his Tarantino badge with pride. Which is fine when producing QT movies but problematic in everything else (see Killing Zoe, From Dusk Till Dawn 3). Knockaround Guys, in classic Tarantino fashion, has edgy twenty somethings (Barry Pepper and Vin Diesel), a bag of loot, leather jackets, guns, the mob and, natch, a high-intensity Mexican stand-off finale. Derivative.

Danny Aiello dominates this ensemble drama as the weary owner of an Italian restaurant in New York’s Tribeca, caught between mobsters and his son’s desire to transform the place into a chiceatery. Director (and restaurateur) Bob Giraldi keeps things hustling between tables, but cranks up the pace in the kitchens. A grittier companion to Stanley Tucci’s gastro-porn classic Big Night. Tasty.

The culmination of a sell-out 2002 tour sees a middle-aged Williams return to his maniacal roots, musing on Michael Jackson, the Puritans and Viagra, among other topics. However, his breakneck delivery, camp mannerisms and array of accents (including a dismal Winston Churchill) only emphasise, rather than conceal, the weakness of his material. And the “Joe I’m Pregnant” routine is shamelessly lifted from Sam Kinison.

A terrific primer on Scott-Heron’s lyrical, funky jazz bluesology, Robert Mugge’s semi-concert documentary was first broadcast on Channel Four in 1983. Two decades on, the charismatic proto-rapper still comes over as a warm and eloquent performer, wry social commentator and effortless stand-up comedian.

An opening tour of the interior of Snoop Doggy Dogg’s mink-lined Cadillac gives an indication of the spiritual journey that awaits the viewer here. Essentially an extended promo for the roster of Snoop’s label Doggystyle, this is a mixture of interviews, dull footage of Snoop cruising the ‘hood and music videos, the whole exercise redeemed by the divine, Aretha-esque vocal interventions of La Toiya Williams.

Yes Years chronicles the band’s career from the late ’60s through to their ’90s reunion via two hours of archive footage and interviews. Greatest Video Hits is more focused and concentrates on the late ’70s and ’80s when Trevor Horn and Buggles bizarrely joined the line-up. It’s easy to scorn Yes’ pretension, but Yes Years reminds us that the early material at least boasted some great tunes.

Psychiatric patient Prot (Kevin Spacey) seems remarkably sane, except for his assertion that he’s really an alien visitor from a distant planet named K-Pax. It’s Starman meets One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (in a nicely ironic piece of casting, Jeff Bridges plays the psychiatrist determined to discover Prot’s real identity), and works nicely even if it does err on the side of sentimentality.

Football terrace choruses, phonetically spelt song titles, top hats with mirrors, half-mast trousers, bad haircuts, bugger-grips and Superyobs. It was said that glam “cheered up the ’70s” and none seemed cheerier than Slade, the former Black Country bower-boys who, by late 1974, had become the genre’s most successful exponents. With 12 consecutive Top Five hits and six No 1s to their name (a statistic that knocked Sweet, Bowie and even T. Rex into the shade) Slade seemed invincible. Until, that is, they decided to make their first and only feature film.

Released in 1975, Flame wasn’t, as anticipated, a light-hearted glamorama choc-a-bloc with glitter boots, big hits and slapstick capers (even though it was initially suggested they commit to a Quatermass sci-fi spoof entitled The Quite-A-Mess Experiment). Instead, the band first took debut director Richard Loncraine and writer Andrew Birkin (who would go on to make Brimstone And Treacle and The Cement Garden, respectively) on the road in America to show them the harsh, dismal, sexless and drugless truth behind the rock’n’roll clich

Made for HBO, John Frankenheimer’s final film shows how the US stumbled into the Vietnam war. Alternating choppy chaos with slow control, it considers the view from the White House during Lyndon B Johnson’s troubled administration. An ambitious three hours in length, with Michael Gambon’s LBJ backed by an incredible cast including Donald Sutherland, Alec Baldwin and Philip Baker Hall.

One of the last spasms from the gross-out “wave”, this National Lampoon effort has?among the boobs, belching and frat-boy self-fingering?moments of comic charm from Ryan Reynolds. He has a knack for letting us know he’s above it all while throwing himself into the stench. Bet he sleeps nights by telling himself Tom Hanks began his career in such muck.

The spaghetti western was flagging by 1970 when Enzo Barboni gave it a spoof shot in the arm with this breezy global smash and its sequel?now a one-disc double bill. Terence Hill plays the eponymous drifter with a lightning draw and an appetite for beans; Bud Spencer is his bear-like half-brother, Bambino, who dispatches opponents by thumping them on the head; a laid-back but lethal Laurel & Hardy favouring slapstick over ultraviolence.

Donnie darko is a lot of things?mesmerising, hallucinatory, shocking, sad and often very funny. In its off-kilter evocation of adolescent disturbance, the gnawing oddity of growing up with the dawning knowledge that life only goes so far and that everything we cherish is in the end not much more than ash on the wind, it’s also one of the most truly touching films in years.

There are vivid echoes here of Gus Van Sant when he was still making strikingly individual films like My Own Private Idaho and various debts are owed to David Lynch, but first-time writer-director Richard Kelly is a hugely promising talent and brings a tremendous freshness and skewed apocalyptic humour to the film. He’s well served by a great cast?especially Jake Gyllenhaal as troubled teenager Donnie, who is advised of the world’s imminent demise by what appears to be a six-foot rabbit and tells us at one point: “The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.” Brilliant soundtrack, too.