One of the very finest French films released in 2000, Claire Denis' resetting of Billy Budd among modern-day French Foreign Legionnaires welds near-experimental formal minimalism with a savage exposure of male aggression, jealousy and repressed homosexual desire, all set in an eye-peeling desert setting and choreographed to the grunts of men at work. Ravaged-featured Denis Lavant plays Galoup, who narrates his story in flashback, perhaps at the moment before his life ends. A sergeant in charge of a troop of Legionnaires, Galoup's position as the favourite of the Commander (Michel Subor) is threatened by the arrival of pretty-boy Sentain (Grégoire Colin, who played the spoiled wastrel in The Dream Life of Angels). Galloup plots to discredit his rival. As the drama unfolds through indirection and Galloup's unreliable disclosures, Denis dwells lovingly on the ballet of men at work as the soldiers run through their obstacle courses, practice combat pas de deux and disport like lean, khaki-clad dolphins by the Mediterranean shore. Sort of like Full Metal Jacket meets early Derek Jarman. It's a sensuous and exquisite film, as perceptive about relationships between men as it is about those between colonisers and the colonised. --Leslie Felperin

Firmly in the spirit of the late 90s wave of British crime films, Beautiful Creatures stars Rachel Weisz and Susan Lynch as two young Glasgow women united against their brutally abusive boyfriends. With a corpse in the bathroom, a golf bag with a secret and seedy detective on their trail Dorothy (Lynch) and Petula (Weisz) hatch an ill-conceived fake kidnapping as their passport from an impossible situation. The film is an entertaining 84 minutes, but though there are several suspense scenes and some queasily amusing black comedy the TV style direction and generic plot fail to deliver any originality. First time feature director Bill Eagles concentrates on winning strong performances from an excellent cast and referencing The Wizard of Oz (1939) (Dorothy has a dog called Pluto, rather than Toto), Wild at Heart (2000) (watch Pluto and those fingers). Added to these are references to Thelma and Louise (1991), Shallow Grave (1994), Butterfly Kiss (1995), Bound (1996), and the film its title echoes, Heavenly Creatures (1994). Considering the graphic violence against women this would have been a stronger, more honest film had it taken itself seriously. As it is, the fashionable yet often inappropriate humour prevents Beautiful Creatures making any serious point about women's reaction to male violence, the finale degenerating into routine feel-good exploitation.

On the DVD: This is a bare-bones release with brief on-screen production notes, cast and crew credits, a page about Universal's DVD email newsletter and a static menu. The Dolby Digital 5.1 sound locks most of the audio to the centre speaker, though there's plenty of dog-barking all around the room. The anamorphically enhanced 1.77-1 transfer clearly cuts off part of the original image at both sides of the screen and is often, especially in the many night scenes, far grainier than one would expect from a feature film released in the year 2000. --Gary S Dalkin

An all-star cast sparks this captivating comedy about a group of old friends whose 10-year high school reunion creates some hilariously unexpected surprises.

A grim, gritty South London housing estate makes an unlikley setting for a romantic fairy-tale, but Hetti MacDonald's gay teenage love story all but brings it off. Adapted by screenwriter Jonathan Harvey from his own stage play, Beautiful Thing tells how teenage loner Jamie falls for next-door neighbour Ste, one of the tough kids who bullies him at school. Amazingly, he finds his feelings reciprocated, and the two progress to a tender, tentative affair. Sidestepping conventional notions of working-class homophobia, the film succeeds in presenting its central relationship not as anything startlingly different, but simply as a teenage romance--with all the joy and heartbreak it implies--that happens to be between two 15-year-old guys. Problems of brutality and deprivation are acknowledged but never allowed to dominate, and under the influence of love even the harsh walkways and terraces of the estate take on a sunlit glow. --Philip Kemp