Being John Malkovich team twist the rules of narrative to ingenious comic effect

Tom DiCillo's fascination with the chasm between talent and celebrity comes to the fore in this mischievously smart relationship comedy. New Yorkers Matthew Modine and Catherine Keener are drifting apart; when aspiring thespian Modine is fired from a role as an extra in a Madonna video, he hits rock bottom. Bitingly brilliant, with cameos from Steve Buscemi and Daryl Hannah. DVD EXTRAS: Scene selection. (CR)

"The night has its price," mysterious blonde Jenny Wright tells Adrian Pasdar's hapless Oklahoma farm boy before giving him a love bite and dragging him off on the road with her Mansonesque 'family' of white-trash serial-killer vampires—headed by a fantastic, dead-eyed Lance Henriksen. Kathryn Bigelow's genre-bending mix of horror, western and Southern gothic drags blood sucking into the modern world. One of the best horror movies of the last 20 years.

Stunningly dark, neurotic and indeed erotic drama from the matchless Nic Roeg who, in 1980, was flying. Set in Vienna, it traces the tangled affair between the passionate Theresa Russell and the deadpan (and very subtle) Art Garfunkel, with Harvey Keitel looking on suspiciously. Riddled with narrative and stylistic flash and mad degeneracy, somehow Roeg makes it stick. DVD EXTRAS: Trailer, scene selection.

King Lear re-enacted in modern-day Liverpool as crime boss Richard Harris, broken by the senseless murder of wife Lynn Redgrave, splits his empire between his two black-hearted daughters. The dialogue's got a touch of the Guy Ritchies and the violence is silly, but Harris—cunning, lean, leonine—commands the screen.

Handsome widescreen digital transfer for one of Sam Peckinpah's most underestimated films, 1975's angrily prescient satire on corporate America, whose ultra-cool surface belies the roiling fury at its bleak and bitter heart. James Caan and Robert Duvall are cynical operatives for a San Francisco-based intelligence agency, doing jobs too dirty even for the CIA. Early on, Caan is crippled by gunfire in a bloody double-cross and 'retired' from the company.

A dazzling epic with a dark and bracing tone, George Stevens' Giant details Rock Hudson's old-fashioned Texan cattle baron (and American national metaphor) as he races towards modernity, neck and neck with neighbouring self-made trailer trash oil-swiller Jett Rink (James Dean). Hudson's sometimes stiff, and the pacing is certainly stately, but it's worth it to catch Dean's final intricately self-conscious screen turn.

Keaton-esque Palestinian comedian Elia Suleiman's sporadically successful and loosely-bound compendium of sketches Divine Intervention features two lovers, from Ramallah and Jerusalem, who pass their romance at an Israeli checkpoint while a surreal world of humorous vignettes pass before them—some of which are sublime (like the Yasser Arafat balloon), others unsophisticated (like the Palestinian ninja who dispatches five Israeli henchmen).

Abel Ferrara's excoriating study of how a man wallowing in his own filth at rock bottom finds the way to salvation. In an utterly naked performance as the corrupt, drug-addled, self-loathing New York cop unwillingly turned around by the rape of a nun, a desperately committed Harvey Keitel goes all the way. Then keeps going.

Director Lynne Ramsay draws a mesmerising performance from Samantha Morton as the titular heroine, who discovers her author boyfriend has committed suicide on Christmas Day and passes his unpublished manuscript off as her own before heading off to Spain on an extended jolly. Naturally, serious complications arise. Dreamy and druggy but often difficult, this is an important, original film.