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.

Nanni Moretti's Cannes-winner is restrained and moving, with the Italian writer/director forsaking his comic urges to examine how a teenage son's death affects a family. Moretti plays the father, a psychoanalyst who, grieving, loses interest in his patients. Awkward emotions are deftly handled: Hollywood should watch this and learn.

Tight script and fantastic acting from Rob Brydon, but what is the actual point of this much lauded two-hour divorcee monologue? In theory it's a comedy, but with not a single laugh in the entire series there's a very real danger for non-pseuds that its supposed greatness will completely pass you by. They won't be running repeats of this at Christmas next year, that's for sure.

Three Hollywood favourites starring the silver-tongued man of style

In an ideal world, Blondie would have existed only on video. The golden Deborah, adored by the camera, would now live forever as a shimmering punk siren, blessed with a voice of both honey and crystalline clarity. Harry fronts Blondie at their 1983 farewell concert in Toronto uncomfortably, inelegantly, and sings without any of the vitality of the sassy little Kittens whose success has prompted this release.

Clint Eastwood's classic final word on the western genre