Peter Stollett's refreshing debut is somewhere between Larry Clark's Kids and a witty Lower East Side comedy of manners. It takes a hugely charismatic teen cast, light docu-style shooting and a textured screenplay and then follows eponymous virgin-surgeon Victor (Victor Rasuk) and his embattled Latino clan over one momentous and hormonally challenged summer.

Innovative, much admired collage documentary about mankind's physical journey from cradle to grave, culled from 100 years of archive footage by Simon Pummell and graced with an avant-rock score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. Bodysong is hypnotically beautiful in small doses, even if Pummell comes across in the interviews as rather too pleased with a cod-profound idea which, in any case, Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass pioneered much more convincingly 20 years ago in Koyaanisqatsi.

When we rave about the force of nature that is James Woods, we tend to neglect this cautionary 1988 Harold Becker tale of how cocaine destroys the careers and marriage of a silver-tongued salesman and his wife (Sean Young, with whom, notoriously, Woods had a history). We shouldn't: it absolutely rocks, with Woods in his element as a cocky crack-up waiting to happen. And then, explosively, happening. Electric.

For all his bravado, Vincent Gallo's reputation as a lunatic genius rests chiefly on this (not always intentionally) hilarious/absurd 1998 psalm of self-pity. The writer/director stars as a just-freed convict who forces Christina Ricci's dancer to pretend to be his wife to impress his folks. It's beautifully shot, and support from Mickey Rourke and other cult figures is staunch.

Macaulay Culkin (contractually refusing to kiss any men—fact) blows hard but fails to convince as camp '90s New York club cyclone Michael Alig. Seth Green's equally berserk, but when Alig brags of murdering his buddy/dealer, everyone assumes he's kidding. Much gay disco muzak, and cameos from Marilyn Manson and Chloe Sevigny, but this is no Last Days Of Disco or even 54.

Straightforward biopic of country chanteuse Patsy Cline, with a chain-smoking Jessica Lange in the lead and Ed Harris as her drunken husband. Excellent performances from both, with good period detail and great music (Lange miming along to original Cline recordings)... but otherwise very dull indeed (domestic bickering followed by a plane crash).

Before The Trip starts, an earnest middle-aged voice warns us that we're about to witness "a shocking commentary on a prevalent trend of our time". This is Roger Corman's ass-covering joke at Middle America's expense:his 1967 drugzploitation classic is nothing more than Jack Nicholson's paean to lysergic acid. Ad exec Peter Fonda takes the trip in question, encountering sundry LA groovers along the way: Bruce Dern, the inevitable Dennis Hopper, even an unknown Gram Parsons. Turn on and tune in!

Oscar-nominated documentary from last year which, unexpectedly, grips like a vice in its climactic stages. Swotty geek-kids competing for the National Spelling Bee contest might not strike you as gutsy drama, but the obsession, the commitment, the heartbreak and the pushy parents make for a brilliantly dynamic and ghoulishly funny interpretation of the American mindset. Word.

Eight Quebecois intellectuals, four boys and four girls, discuss sex, history, the state of the world, sex, each other and sex as they prepare for a weekend together in the country. Gabby, but engrossing in a My Dinner With André sort of way, this 1986 movie marks the first appearance of the old friends who are reunited in Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions.

Swiping gleefully at management, and more affectionately at the unions, this uproarious satire on the politics of British working life is probably the best-loved Boulting Brothers movie. Ian Carmichael stars as the well-meaning university stooge used to provoke a strike by crooked industrialists Richard Attenborough and Dennis Price—but the film belongs to the ever-nimble Peter Sellers, sublime as the buzzcut factory shop steward with a Hitler moustache. A by-the-book cartoon, but curiously sympathetic.