Wunderkind writer-director PT Anderson presents what has been dubbed 'The Goodfellas of porn movies'. Film making that is so hip it hurts, this is a must see - we follow the rise (erm...) and fall of a young buck in the seedier side of Holly 'wood'.

The Book Group, the creation of writer-director Annie Griffin, is a superb, Glasgow-based comedy-drama. Annie Dudek stars as Claire, the prissy and neurotic American expatriate who initiates the titular group with a view to meeting high-minded types like herself. Instead, she gets Dirka, Fist and Janice, three Scottish footballers' wives, the wheelchair-bound Kenny, a leisure-centre worker with ambitions to be a writer despite his apparent inarticulacy, the stubbly-faced football-mad Rab and the insufferable Barney, a post-grad student and heroin addict at whom Claire makes one of the most embarrassingly disastrous passes in TV history in the opening episode.

The Book Group is a magnificent device for bringing an unlikely cast of characters together, supposedly out of a love of literature but in fact because each of them in their own way has pretensions or ambitions to make something different out of their lives. Waves of sexual longing between the group members are among the many things that interfere with the discussions of the texts, with Kenny in particular an object of fascination for both Dirka and Fist. With each episode cleverly themed around the chosen book of the week, The Book Group is hilarious yet wise, understated and often painfully melancholic, based on detailed character study rather than contrived situations or eye-catching melodrama. It is indispensable viewing.

On the DVD: The Book Group's main extra is a poorly edited but absorbing sequence of interviews with all of the cast members except James Lance, who plays Barney. Rory McGann (Kenny), who comes from a non-acting background, is particularly interesting. --David Stubbs

A pair of undercover agents team up to bust dope smugglers along the U.S./Mexico border -- all the while suspecting each other of being crooks.

Born Romantic is a second slice of what David (This Year's Love) Kane does best: a quirky picture of contemporary London with young and variously screwed-up protagonists getting a second chance at love. This time, the premise is that there is a salsa club somewhere in East London where three boys meet three girls and things go other than smoothly until they actually take the trouble to learn to dance--and in case we didn't guess the metaphoric point of this, Olivia Williams' cold control freak lays it out for Craig Ferguson's Dean Martin obsessed retro-lounge singer at an early stage. The other central characters are Jane Horrocks as a party girl who is not exactly keen to pick up again with David Morissey, the man who jilted her years earlier and who has now come to London to make amends; and Jimi Mistry as an incompetent thief who falls for a neurotic grave-tender. Adrian Lester is the widower mini-cab driver who listens to all six moan about each other and dispenses wisdom on a regular basis; back at the cab office, Ian Hart rants misogynistically until Kenneth Cranham tells him he is wrong. The stylised and schematic script is redeemed by loud La tin music and an affection for these characters' quirks.

On the DVD: The DVD is generously filled with deleted scenes, the trailer and extended interviews with Kane and most of the stars: Horrocks and Williams in particular talk intelligently about the challenges and advantages of working as part of an ensemble cast. The recorded sound is just good enough to give the dance-club scenes a real energy. --Roz Kaveney

Bottle Rocket is a quietly daffy comedy that should have been an indie hit, but ended up being ignored by audiences. Too bad; it's a wonderfully sustained caper movie about friends whose career choice is all wrong. Low-key Anthony (Luke Wilson) and high-strung Dignan (Owen C Wilson--the two actors are brothers) are brought into a life of crime by Dignan's ambition to be a small-time thief. After a few amusingly laid-back trial burglaries, they (and a third buddy) find themselves over their heads when they hook up with an experienced crime boss (James Caan).

Because this movie is so relentlessly deadpan, you really have to be dialled in to its brand of humour--but you're once there, Bottle Rocket shoots off plenty of sparks. Above all, Owen Wilson's portrayal of Dignan is a terrifically original comic creation; Dignan is so sincerely focused on his goals that he can't see how completely absurd his ideas are. Owen Wilson, who has since made something of a trademark out of similarly knuckle-headed performances in everything from Armageddon to Starsky & Hutch, wrote the screenplay with director Wes Anderson. --Robert Horton