DVD, Blu-ray and TV

Jules Dassin's 1955 heist flick is the genre's benchmark movie. The silent 28-minute set-piece robbery scene provides the film's highlight, but elsewhere there's much to admire in Jean Servais' hangdog protagonist and Dassin's pre-Nouvelle Vague documentary approach to shooting Parisian nightlife.

Collecting all four Python movies. And Now For Something Completely Different was a 'greatest hits' retread of sketches from the early TV shows, Holy Grail is worth seeing for Cleese's French knight alone, the wry and occasionally profound Life Of Brian was the best of the bunch, and The Meaning Of Life had some truly wonderful tunes. Did I say "indispensable". yet?

The year's most controversial release, Gaspar Noe's French frenzy (which unfolds backwards, like Memento) has been hammered for its scenes of rape and violence. His argument's that if you don't show them as ugly, you don't show the truth. However you react, there's no denying his visceral energy.

Cult Britpunk director's brief Hollywood foray in full

Richard Linklater's emotionally ambivalent high school homage is a cutting riposte to the rosy teen nostalgia of both American Graffiti and the entire John Hughes canon. Set in Nowhere, Middle America, 1976, during the first day of summer break, it lazily and amiably follows Hollywood freshmen, including Ben Affleck and Matthew McConaughey, as they drink beer, smoke grass, and cultivate the slacker apathy of future generations.

A subversive pleasure from the pen of Nicholas Kazan (son of Elia Kazan), Enough is an ostensibly ridiculous yarn about battered wife Jennifer Lopez who learns Jujitsu and exacts revenge on millionaire husband Billy Campbell. Yet it's also an extremely un-Hollywood evisceration of white America, the family unit, and capitalism itself. Clever, stupid film-making at its best.

Anthony Hopkins completes his Hannibal Lecter set with this remake of Michael Mann's Manhunter (1986). It's more faithful to Thomas Harris' novel, but a lot less stylish, and the performances are uniformly worse: Ed Norton is merely adequate as the empathic FBI detective, while Ralph Fiennes is positively wooden as serial killer Francis Dolarhyde, and even Hopkins is below par.

Described by its proto-feminist French director Virginie Despentes as an attempt "to seize woman's true sexuality back from the male gaze", Baise-Moi is therefore a visceral, explicit re-imagining of the road movie (Thelma And Louise with cum shots), buffered by chunks of jaded '70s film theory. Too inept to be engaging, too light to be controversial. A mess.

Intense Israeli thriller merging politics, religion and thwarted romance in which Rabbi Meltzer (Assi Dayan) encourages his soldier students to embrace martyrdom. A huge hit on home turf, it's fiery spirit ensures it translates.

Magisterial, tough-hearted 1967 western from writer/director Tom Gries. Charlton Heston is a revelation as the eponymous ageing cowhand, a lonesome, unemployed illiterate, bushwhacked by deranged preacher Donald Pleasence and his boys. While recovering, he encounters Joan Hackett, who, although travelling through the wilderness to join her husband, offers the chance of a life he's never known.