Nothing happens in the video tapes they receive, but just the knowledge that someone is watching them is enough to unsettle the enviably chic existence of Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche). Their lives unravel as their nerves fray. Who is stalking them, and does it have anything to do with Georges’s childhood connection to an Algerian whose parents died in October 1961? The date has an immediate and shameful resonance for the French. Although the official death toll was three, everyone knew that hundreds of demonstrating immigrants had been killed by the police. The director, Michael Haneke, calls his film “a moral tale on the theme of ‘how can I bear the fact of being guilty?’” — and, ultimately, to try to work out who is making the tapes is to miss the point. Imbued with all the tricksy ambiguities of contemporary French thought, this is a nervy thriller, and superbly played. It may irritate you, but it will stay in the mind. The illuminating extras include a half-hour interview with Haneke and a behind-the-scenes documentary that shows him true to type as an unreasonable, short-tempered martinet. David Mills
Artificial Eye, 15, 109 mins; £19.99
The Searchers
Film Five stars
Extras Four stars
Given its iconic status today, it’s remarkable how poorly John Ford’s iconic western did when it first came out in 1956. Though it grossed a respectable amount at the box office, the film was greeted with astonishing indifference by the critics and failed to get a single Oscar nomination.
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(The lamentable Around the World in 80 Days got best picture that year.) As well as presenting the western in a crisp, handsomely restored print, one of the real bonuses of this excellent two-disc, 50th-anniversary edition (almost worth it just for the rare off-set clips of Ford and John Wayne carousing) is how well it makes the case for the film as one of the great American movies. Peter Bogdanovich’s commentary is outstanding, his director’s eye focusing time and again on Ford’s economy and intelligence. Martin Scorsese does a fine job, too, stressing, in one of the documentaries, both the film’s beauty — “All that space on the screen!” — and its dark and brooding take on racism. What comes across most clearly, though, is Wayne’s skill as an actor and his instinctive feel for the Frank S Nugent script. Die-hard fans may be tempted by a bumper crop of 29 of the actor’s films released for father’s day by Universal. But, though the selection includes Ford’s cavalry trilogy, Stagecoach and The Quiet Man, there is nothing here as rich or compelling as The Searchers, which, though Wayne hardly ever talked about it afterwards, was undoubtedly his finest moment. Andrew Holgate
Warner, U, 114 mins; £16.99
The Last Seduction (Special Edition)
Film Four stars
Extras Three stars
The femme fatale, enduring icon of film noir, has refused to die. Although the 1990s spawned copious noir-style films (Basic Instinct, LA Confidential), few transcended unselfconscious B-picture origins in the classic noir manner and had a femme as fatale as The Last Seduction’s (1994). Linda Fiorentino is outstanding as the ruthless yet vulnerable Bridget Gregory, a scheming seductress riding roughshod over any man who gets between her and the money. The numerous extras here (commentary, deleted scenes, documentary) repeatedly emphasise how low expectations were during filming: the studio wanted an erotic thriller for the video market (hence the high sex content); while the director, John Dahl, saw it as a black comedy. Made on a tiny budget ($2.5m), it was sold to cable television — ruling Fiorentino out of Oscar consideration — and gained distribution only after success in Europe. Less showy but valuable turns from Peter Berg and Bill Pullman, and an insistent jazz score, help lift this way above its origins — almost high enough to be considered alongside Double Indemnity, to which the clever script explicitly pays homage. Seductive. Jeff Potter
Network, 18, 96 mins; £15.99