It's tempting to see Pedro Almodóvar's career as one steady progression from early Warholian kitsch like Pepi, Luci, Bom to recent audience-pleasing, Oscar-winning standouts like All About My Mother. If so, then the breathtaking Talk To Her is easily his career apogee and deftly confirms his status as one of the world's foremost filmmakers.

In a small Arizona town a toxic waste dump creates a plague of hundreds of giant spiders. Cue mass destruction and enormous fun, since the SFX are first-rate, the cast (led by David Arquette) is solid and the script strikes the right balance between laughs and twitch-inducing 'arach-attacks'. The best giant bug movie for decades. DVD EXTRAS: Trailer, commentary, deleted scenes, plus Larger Than Life—director Ellory Elkayem's first award-winning short horror film. (PH)

Stunningly beautiful and utterly bizarre Japanese fable about a medieval Kabuki actor (Kazuo Hasegawa), renowned as a female impersonator, who carries his on-stage portrayal of a woman out into the world in order to seduce and murder the noblemen responsible for his parents' death. The direction is haphazard, the imagery is amazing. DVD EXTRAS: Director's biography, web link.

Frank Capra's festive classic is one of those rare standards which not only lives up to its rep but reveals new treasures on every viewing. James Stewart is forlorn George Bailey, who thinks life just isn't worth living, 'til it's revealed to him how meaningful his meaningless existence really is. Containing more snow than a TV presenter's nostril, it'll melt even the frostiest among you.

Dennis Hopper got an Oscar for his supporting role to Gene Hackman's high-school basketball coach in David Anspaugh's heart-tugging 1986 tale of sport-equals-life heroics. This was based on a real basketball comeback fight in '50s Indiana and released as Hoosiers in the US. Aptly enough, Hopper was fresh back from his own decade-long trip through chemical hell at the time. Sentimental slush, but redeemed by a knockout cast of veteran heavyweights.

Retired actor Alexander (Erland Josephson) is celebrating his birthday with friends and family when an imminent nuclear catastrophe is announced on TV. So Alexander offers to make a deal with God to avert the disaster. Andrei Tarkovsky's final film is as powerful as you'd expect.

Sandwiched, chronologically, in between Jules Et Jim (1962) and Fahrenheit 451 (1964), La Peau Douce (The Soft Skin) is an intriguing anomaly in the François Truffaut canon. A neo-Hitchcockian tale of infidelity, it methodically observes the extra-marital deceptions of apathetic intellectual Pierre (Jean Desailly) before rashly culminating in a bizarre shotgun shootout courtesy of Pierre's hysterical wife. For Truffaut completists.

More personal than Knowing Me, Knowing You and sharper than the series just broadcast, this masterfully observed, grotesquely populated comedy is to the '90s what Fawlty Towers was to the '70s—but you know all that. Buy this, then, for the meaty extras and as a handy reminder that UK comedy can still be the best in the world.

With director Eastwood Oscar-hot from Unforgiven and star Costner hit-hot from The Bodyguard and JFK, 1993's A Perfect World should've been a smash. Yet there's a darkness to the story of possibly psychotic boy-befriending recidivist Costner that simply killed the movie at the box office. On re-examination, it's a fascinating film, a blatant conflict of arch American sentimentality and subversive menace. And Costner's great in it, too.

Comprising this summer's Hyde Park concert (a rocking preview of the Illumination album that followed) and last year's BBC Later... special of Paul unplugged circa Days Of Speed, this double-header is a timely celebration of the Modfather's continuing success. Both blinding, though the latter set of acoustic Jam and TSC chestnuts (a Noel Gallagher assisted "That's Entertainment" included) is pretty much unbeatable.