French director Chris Marker's short "film novel" from 1962, La Jetée, couples sequential still photographs with narration to tell the tale of a time-traveller from a post-apocalyptic future coming to the present day (Terry Gilliam remade it as Twelve Monkeys in 1995). Marker's feature-length philosophical 1983 travelogue Sans Soleil focuses on the subjects of Tokyo and the nature of memory.

Unfairly pilloried on its theatrical release for co-opting the dolefully serious subject of capital punishment into a twist-ending thriller, Alan Parker's depiction of the eponymous philosophy professor and death row defendant (Kevin Spacey—droll), gutsy crusading journalist Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet—er, enthusiastic), and their frenetic race to prove Gale's innocence is fundamentally competent—sometimes clinical—studio entertainment. DVD EXTRAS: Commentary from Parker, deleted scenes, Making Of..., music featurette, posters, trailers.

Michael Chiklis often grabs the plaudits for his portrayal of detective Vic Mackey, controlling the dealers and gang-bangers of LA's fictional Farmington with his renegade Strike Team, but this DVD release of The Shield's first series is a jolting reminder of how creator Shawn Ryan conceived it as a complex ensemble piece steeped in moral ambiguity. Ryan exposes the politics and brutality that underpin police work, while the handheld photography makes gunfights, rape and murder hideously real. Brilliant.

Three intense '60s masterpieces from Polanski in one box set, plus his Oscar-garlanded WWII ghetto drama from 2002

Comic book adaptation with Woo favourite Chow Yun-Fat as a kind of near-immortal arse-kicking Dalai Lama who's spent the last 60 years battling baddies for possession of the Scroll of the Ultimate. And now it's time to pass the baton to a younger chap. You could see it as a martial arts Raiders Of The Lost Ark, or a Crouching Tiger for nitwits. Or you could not see it at all. The choice is yours.

Rumour has it that the CIA funded Halas and Batchelor's 1954 cartoon adaptation of George Orwell's political barnyard allegory. But even though it's dated and stilted, it remains not only darkly savage anti-Stalinist satire but also a quite stunning piece of animation. Surely long overdue for a Babe-style remake?

Two cops are shot at; the survivor (John Savage) is ostracised by his colleagues for alleged cowardice, which takes him years to live down. Joseph Wambaugh's novel was faithfully treated by Harold Becker in this 1979 curate's egg, but brilliant as Savage is, it's an up-and-coming, intense actor named James Woods who lights the bonfire.

Patrice Leconte (Ridicule) brings a sombre poetic realism to this elegiac meditation on the nature of fate and the road less travelled. Johnny Hallyday, battered and craggy with gravitas, is awesomely iconic as the taciturn gangster who encounters Jean Rochefort's inquisitive retired schoolteacher. The two men are inexorably attracted, seeing in the other the tragedy of the life they never lived.

Barbet Schroeder's outré 1976 tale of feral love between petty criminal Olivier (Gérard Depardieu) and high-class Parisian dominatrix Ariane (Bulle Ogier), complete with scrotum piercing and golden showers, was originally denied a BBFC certificate. In retrospect, the analogy between S&M and romantic power games is overplayed, but Schroeder's willingness to draw sex and death so close together is compelling.

Brendan Fraser is an American aid worker in Vietnam who just might be masterminding a US-backed anticommunist coup while seducing Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen), the classically demure oriental lover of cynical British hack Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine). An intriguing, morally muddy adaptation of Graham Greene via director Philip Noyce.