It's 1967 and Terry meets Julie under a Wessex downpour as opposed to a Waterloo sunset. John Schlesinger addresses Thomas Hardy's torrid melodrama of love, betrayal and sheep farming with the epic cinematographic sweep it deserves, while the tension between Christie and her three suitors-the doomed Peter Finch, the stoical Alan Bates and, of course, the dastardly Terence Stamp is spellbinding.

Based on the Kurt Vonnegut novel and featuring an amazing central performance from Nick Nolte as an American spy living in pre-WWII Berlin, broadcasting military secrets in code under the guise of anti-Semitic, Nazi propaganda. Once the war is over, though, he's arrested for war crimes and put on trial. Will the truth out? A mixture of the disturbing and the bizarre, it's both haunting and thought-provoking. John Goodman co-stars.

Veteran NYC noiseniks' impressive video portfolio

Sam Fuller's explosive pulp classic, a red-menace thriller, pitched near hysteria from start to finish. Richard Widmark's lone-wolf pickpocket winds up caught between the Feds and the Reds when he unwittingly lifts stolen microfilm from Jean Peters, a hooker being used as a courier by a Soviet spy ring. Thelma Ritter's loveable stool-pigeon suffers one of the great movie deaths. Definitive Fuller, definitive noir.

Directed at mercilessly cool, wickedly tense pace by René Clément, the original 1960 French adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley pisses from on high all over the Anthony Minghella remake. As Ripley, the ambiguous sociophobe planning to steal dissolute playboy Maurice Ronet's life in a blazing Mediterranean, Alain Delon has never looked so much like a saint made of ice. Delon versus Matt Damon? Where's the contest?

A decade ago, Heather Nova burst forth as a kind of female Jeff Buckley. She's never quite fulfilled the promise but is a hugely popular live act. Her understated backing band are superb, but it's her soaring vocals that grab the attention at this show dating from September 2003, which concentrates mainly on material from her most recent album, Storm, and suggests she's toned down some of her earlier jagged edges.

Aussie heist thriller about crooked Guy Pearce's relationships with his two partner-in-crime brothers and his wayward wife, Rachel Griffiths. The team scheme to rip off the bookies, but Pearce and Griffiths are in top gear and make roadkill of any flaws in the plot. Bitter, tough and funny.

Given short shrift by most cinema critics, Robert Benton's flawed adaptation of Philip Roth's novel is wonderfully acted by two stars who've been praised for far inferior performances. Anthony Hopkins is the professor sacked for alleged political incorrectness; Nicole Kidman the damaged younger woman with whom he enjoys "not my first love, not my great love, but my last love." Both risky and tender.

Mega-rock festival staged in Toronto in July 2003, where a bizarre line-up included The Isley Brothers, AC/DC, Justin Timberlake and The Rolling Stones. A voiceover drones on about how Toronto needed a "big idea" to restore its confidence after the city's SARS crisis, but this event is pretty average, and Timberlake's duet with Jagger on "Miss You" is, weirdly, the highlight.

The ingredients are there: Nicolas Winding Refn (Pusher) directs John Turturro and James Remar in a (minimal) script by the late Hubert Selby Jr, with Eno scoring. Yet somehow this just doesn't gel as it wades through its slow pretensions. Turturro's a recently widowed security guard, obsessive over photos and CCTV as he seeks his wife's killer. Intelligent, but rather drab.