One of Clint Eastwood's two most important filmmaking mentors was Don Siegel (the other was Sergio Leone), who directed Eastwood in Dirty Harry, Coogan's Bluff, Two Mules for Sister Sara and this enigmatic, 1979 drama based on a true story about an escape from the island prison of Alcatraz. Eastwood plays a new convict who enters into a kind of mind game with the chilly warden (Patrick McGoohan) and organises a break leading into the treacherous waters off San Francisco. As jailbird movies go, this isn't just a grotty, unpleasant experience but a character-driven work with some haunting twists. --Tom Keogh

Fifteen years after John Carpenter squandered a great idea on a mediocre movie (Escape from New York), he does it again--this time on the Left Coast. Kurt Russell is back as the terminally cynical one-eyed action hero Snake Plissken who, this time, has been coerced into saving the world in Los Angeles. It's 2013 and L.A. is now an island maximum-security prison off the coast of California. Snake has 10 hours to find a doomsday weapon that's fallen into the hands of revolutionaries before he dies of a virus with which he's been injected. But the action is clumsy and unimaginative: lots of shootouts and very little suspense. Even the bad guys aren't particularly inventive; only Pam Grier, as a transsexual gang leader, strikes any sparks. Russell growls his way through the role but can only blame himself: He cowrote the script with Carpenter. --Marshall Fine

It's easy to be cynical about Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's adventures as a downshifted smallholder in Escape to River Cottage; after all, given his fame and fortune, he could upshift again faster than a BMW sports gearbox whenever he chose. "Why don't you give it a go?", he asks us. Because we don't all have fat media contracts to fall back on, we roll our eyes and reply.

However, despite HF-W's seeming like a Posy Simmonds character, the fact remains that no TV chef has come close when it comes to reminding the supermarket generation about where food really comes from, or indeed where it should come from, as well as the values of indigenous produce (also a largely overlooked aspect of macrobiotics, incidentally). In this well-stuffed double DVD set Weirdly-Eatingall does alarming things with a goose, smokes fish in his chimney, eats his rather cute pigs, monitors the movements of mice by marking them with lipstick (why does he just happen to have some lippy lying around?) and, almost in passing, cooks up some wonderful dishes with his home-grown ingredients.

On the DVD: Escape to River Cottage two-disc set includes six episodes, plus a bonus in the form of the Christmas special. Extras are on-screen recipes, F-W's biography and some outtakes, which are deeply unfunny except when various things decide to bite the presenter, which they do fairly often. The extras are duplicated on both discs, which is pointless and/or a bit of a swizz. --Roger Thomas

The effects are low-tech and no longer special, but Escape to Witch Mountain still has plenty of Disney live-action charm. It's rather quaint by later standards, coming just two years before Star Wars upped the ante on movie magic, but the story's got timeless appeal as a precursor to Harry Potter's more lavish brand of kid-wizardry. Here you've got Tony (Ike Eisenmann) and sister Tia (Kim Richards), orphans unaware of their mysterious past, who are taken in by a nefarious liar (Ray Milland) seeking to exploit their supernatural powers. Populated by '70s stalwarts like Donald Pleasance and Eddie Albert (the latter playing the kids' grown-up accomplice, unwittingly rescuing them from Milland), this lightweight Disney fare is perfect for kids under 10, with such enticements as a clever cat mascot named Winky (because he winks a lot), Tony's magical harmonica... and a Winnebago that flies! With a sci-fi climax, this popular hocus-pocus spawned a 1978 sequel (Return from Witch Mountain) that proved similarly popular with kids. --Jeff Shannon