Tragi-comic genius' big-screen outings are period treats

Jack Nicholson's second film as director, an anarchic western, with Jack's filthy outlaw saved from hanging, married off to Mary Steenburgen and put to work on her land. It's a shaggy, high plains African Queen, with Nicholson the director simultaneously coarse and tender and allowing Nicholson the actor one of his more raggedly wolfish turns.

"If God could do the tricks that we can do, he'd be a happy man," declares megalomaniacal film director Eli Cross (Peter O'Toole, on epic form), who's just hired a wanted fugitive (Steve Railsback) to be a stunt man in his anti-war movie. Richard Rush's decidedly offbeat comedy thriller from 1980 lies somewhere between genuinely unsettling and extremely likeable.

Arguably the two most powerful kitchen-sink dramas of the early '60s were both adapted from the works of author Alan Sillitoe. Saturday Night And Sunday Morning (1960), directed by Karel Reisz, provided British cinema with an equivalent to Brando thanks to Albert Finney's electrifying performance as marriage-wrecking factory-hand Arthur Seaton ("I'm a fighting pit-prop of a man who wants a pint of beer, that's me!"). But Finney perhaps lacked the surly sophistication of borstal boy Tom Courtenay in Tony Richardson's later The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner (1962).

A monumental 150-minute attempt at tracking China's cultural transition from Mao-ish uniformity to the eccentricities of Deng Xiaoping's quasi-capitalism, Platform (1990) follows four wannabe performers from Fenyang over a long and turbulent decade (1979-1989). Unlike director Jia Zhang-ke's excellent 1997 drama Xiao Wu, Platform has a bizarre disregard for character and narrative coherence.

Brilliant comedy about snobbery and class, set in 1947: with food rationing (and the black market) still in operation, chiropodist Michael Palin and his piano teacher wife Maggie Smith discover the only way to climb the social ladder is to steal a pig. Great cast, but Alan Bennett's screenplay's the real star.

James Coburn's last film is a well-meaning but hardly unforgettable drama about a father's search across America for the owner of the gun that killed his daughter. The narrative structure is contrived, and although it's only 86 minutes long, you feel yourself growing old watching it.

The much-praised Hunter-Hunsinger debut was one of last year's best Britflicks, boasting deft characterisation and a staunch refusal to be 'bubbly'. Three stories spin off from a mutual friend's funeral, with Douglas Henshall, Tom Hollander and the sublime Bill Nighy pursuing ill-advised affairs. So subtle it could almost be French!

Tom Stoppard directs this 1990 screen version of his ingenious 1967 play about two supporting characters from Hamlet. Stoppard opens up the play's theatrical setting well, and his brilliant dialogue remains intact. Sadly, the two leads—Oldman and Roth—are uninspiring.

There are no headless bats in Black Sabbath—Never Say Die SANCTUARY and Ozzy doesn't even get to shout, "Sharon, how does the DVD work?" But we do find Osbourne in typically headbanging form in a 1978 Sabbath concert that includes "War Pigs" and "Paranoid". No extras, though.