When a small time stripteaser is promised to be made a real star by Cincia, she agrees to be her roommate. But then, bizarre happenings take place in the house, and she starts suffering from terrible nightmares.

French director Luc Besson broke the commercial taboo against female-driven action movies with Nikita, his seminal, seductively slick film about a violent street punk (Anne Parillaud) trained to become a smooth, stylish assassin. Though it amounts, in the end, to little more than disposable pop, the film has a cohesiveness in style and tone--akin to the early James Bond films--that gives it a sense of integrity. Parillaud is compelling both as a wild child and chic-but-lethal pro (trained in good manners by none other than Jeanne Moreau). Tchéky Karyo is also good as the cop mentor who develops feelings for her. --Tom Keogh

Glorious Bach is a simple, straightforward record of a concert at the Benedictine Abbey of Melk of three Bach works for the season of Advent. All of them are, in different ways, meditations on the imminent arrival of Christ, both as child and as Messiah, and on the role of Mary as his mother. Nikolaus Harnoncourt has this music in his bones and so do his impressive team of soloists and the Arnold Schoenberg Choir; the Concentus Musicus of Vienna by now play original-style instruments so smoothly that one has almost to remind oneself of how shocking the authenticity movement sounded a few short years ago. Ian Bostridge is especially fine in the extended tenor part of the less well-known piece Nun Komm, der Heiden Heiland; Bostridge combines an absolute vocal purity with a fierce intelligence in his approach to the words--the advantage of the DVD is that it lets us see him and his fellow soloists thinking as well as singing. Christine Schafer is particularly fine in the Magnificat in D, in which Harnoncourt lets his orchestra rip, reminding us why this is such a popular festival piece.

On the DVD: The DVD, presented in 16:9 visual ratio, has sumptuous Dolby Digital sound, subtitles in English, German, Italian, Spanish and French and no other frills whatsoever. --Roz Kaveney

Gary Oldman took a break from acting to write and direct this unflinching family drama out of the kitchen-sink British school. Oldman doesn't appear in the film, instead handing the heavy lifting to the remarkable Ray Winstone (Sexy Beast, Cold Mountain) and Kathy Burke, who won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival for her work. The scummy drug trade of lower-class London is Oldman's turf, but he puts special focus on the miserable cycles of violence that fuel a family's struggle within this world. The results are not always easy to watch, but they are devastating (and the final sequence is chilling). Oldman may be guilty of indulging his actors a bit, but it's forgivable, given the big, roaring performances. --Robert Horton