Commendably lurid directorial debut from Asia Argento—international soft-porn horror princess and Vin Diesel's way-cool goth-vamp co-star in xXx. Dario's daughter not only writes and directs but also stars as a thinlyveiled version of herself, shagging and fighting her way through a sinister, male-dominated, sex-driven film business. Demented, narcissistic, monstrously self-indulgent—all the qualities, in fact, of the very best cult cinema.

Sterling 1949 comedy from the Ealing stable, directed by Henry Cornelius (Genevieve) and featuring Stanley Holloway, Margaret Rutherford and Charles Hawtrey among others. A London community demonstrate typical British verve and spunk in establishing their right to devolve from Britain altogether, asserting their ancient right to be part of the duchy of Burgundy, thereby avoiding the miseries of post-war Britain like rationing and licensing laws. Lots of "We'll soon see about that!" and harrumphing civil servants. Marvellous.

That a Kathryn Bigelow movie starring Sean Penn and Liz Hurley's gone straight to video tells you much: it's a muddled attempt to carry two parallel stories, one ancient (with Sarah Polley), one modern (where Penn recites bad poetry while Hurley rubs ice cubes over her nipples). Confused, pompous.

George Stevens' Biblical epic is sometimes sluggish and often po-faced, but it's never less than fascinating. A political film-maker and a great chronicler of national identity (see Shane, Giant, A Place In The Sun), Stevens consistently swamps the New Testament in blatant Americana, letting Charlton Heston, John Wayne, and the massive crags and buttes of Utah boldly reinvent Jesus, and Israel, for the American century.

Directed by Jimmy Page, it took a year of intensive research to assemble this five-and-a-half-hour digital re-tooling of the Zeppelin legend. Previously, the only officially-sanctioned live footage was the 1976 film The Song Remains The Same. Here, a trawl of the band's own unreleased archives combines with reclaimed bootleg material to tell the Zep story in chronological fashion, via 30 performances from four memorable concerts—the Albert Hall (1970), Madison Square Garden (1973), Earls Court (1975) and Knebworth (1979).

Occasionally ponderous 1983 thriller set in pre-Glasnost Russia (in fact filmed in Helsinki). William Hurt stars as the cop who teams up with Joanna Pacula's Soviet dissident and Lee Marvin's American businessman to investigate the mystery of three bodies found in Gorky Park.

Gary Oldman, miscast but blowing hard in Peter Medak's 1993 thriller, is a sleazy cop who takes bribes to spend on his wife (Annabella Sciorra) and mistress (Juliette Lewis). As if that wasn't enough girlie action, he lusts after hot hitwoman Lena Olin, but his dick leads him into a world of violent trouble. Wilfully sexist and almost camp, but hey, you can't say it's dull.

The Clash imploded just as promo videos became the norm, which is a shame, as their "Rock The Casbah" short, shot on an oil derrick, is more timely than ever in the wake of the current Iraq conflict. But the really great thing about this collection is the numerous incandescent live performances culled from throughout their meteoric career.

After an almost imperceptible slight to his honour, gruff Napoleonic soldier Harvey Keitel challenges effete cavalryman Keith Carradine to a duel. The duel is fought, the outcome is inconclusive, and thus begins 16 long years of sporadic but all-consuming bouts between these two barely acquainted foes. An ambitious 1977 Cannes Award-winning debut from Ridley Scott, The Duellists is visually sumptuous, and is nicely underplayed by both Keitel and the endearingly camp Carradine. Yet it's a film defined by the brevity of its source material, a 'short' short story by Joseph Conrad.

Director Metin Hüseyin's breezy adaptation of Meera Syal's terrific fictionalised memoir about growing up Anglo-Asian in the West Midlands in the early '70s suffers a little from British film's TV smallness, feeling at times like an extended episode of Goodness Gracious Me. But the crisp script and immense charm of 14-year-old newcomer Chandeep Uppal as the sassy prepubescent heroine Meena bring Syal's rites-of-passage story to life.