A refreshing take on a well-tried formula, The Banger Sisters proves that there is always room for a polished new "women's picture", particularly one with a high astringent content. The eponymous sisters are a couple of girlfriends with a groupie past who haven't seen each other for years. Suzette (an ebullient Goldie Hawn) has remained a confirmed rock chick. When she's sacked from her bar job, she goes in search of Vinnie (Susan Sarandon) who has excised her past from her life as a staid wife and mother.

The performances are good and there are some cracking moments, not least as the initially resistant Sarandon seizes the memory of her youth and sheds her skin of respectability to the bewilderment of her husband and two daughters. Suzette's visit is the catharsis her old friend has long needed. (In many ways, of course, the most interesting aspect of the picture is the one we don't get to see: the long-term consequences of some pretty sleazy old revelations on a middle class family). But there's a pleasing poignancy in Hawn's decision to go home, her work done. And Geoffrey Rush, as usual, is outstanding as Harry, the neurotic writer she has picked up on the way and who could, just possibly, provide some stability in her itinerant life.

On the DVD: The Banger Sisters is presented in widescreen with a throbbing Dolby soundtrack. There are no extras. --Piers Ford

The Barbra Streisand Collection consists of four movies: What's Up, Doc? (1972), Up the Sandbox (1972), The Main Event (1979) and Nuts (1987)

In What's Up, Doc?, director Peter Bogdanovich tipped his hat to the classic screwball comedies of the 1930s, and especially the most glorious of them all, Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby. Barbra Streisand plays a charming flake who distracts a self-absorbed musicologist (Ryan O'Neal). He's engaged to be married, but soon Streisand's character has him chasing after stolen jewellery and getting into one madcap fix after another. --Tom Keogh

Up the Sandbox springs from the early 1970s, when Streisand's career was in full stride. She stars as Margaret, a stay-at-home mum in the middle of New York who's feeling the strain of her narrow life. Frustrated by her self-involved husband and the mentally unstimulating tasks of motherhood, she escapes into fantasies--such as being chatted up by a cross-gendered Fidel Castro, bombing the Statue of Liberty with black militants and having a furious catfight with her overbearing mother. The movie's strength lies in these fantasies' slippery nature; some are over the top, but others are so subtle you're not always sure where they start and stop, making the portrait of Margaret's psyche intriguingly complex. --Bret Fetzer

The Main Event is a comedic misfire from the mid-1970s, a futile attempt to bottle the same lightning that struck when Streisand teamed with Ryan O'Neal in What's Up, Doc? Here, Streisand plays a spoiled rich girl, the head of a bankrupt cosmetics company, who discovers she's lost everything--except her ownership of the contract of a washed-up boxer (O'Neal). So she tries to rally this dispirited pug into a comeback that will earn the kinds of purses that will put her back on her feet. Naturally, in the process, romantic sparks are kindled. But despite a loud and energetic performance by Streisand, the comedy doesn't add up to much. --Marshall Fine

In Nuts Streisand is a mad high-priced "escort" accused of murder, but whether she's mad as hell or mad as a hatter is the question in this courtroom drama, adapted from the play by Tom Topor. While her doting, wilfully uncomprehending mother (Maureen Stapleton) and stepdad with a secret (Karl Malden) try to have her judged incompetent and sent to an asylum, she fights for her day in court with the help of a hapless legal aid attorney (a refreshingly understated Richard Dreyfuss). James Whitmore presides over the hearing with a compassion and sense of justice that gives one faith in the system, and la Streisand (who developed and produced the project) sinks her teeth into the tempestuous role like a starving actress. The plot holds few surprises, but the drama lies in the characters; veteran director Martin Ritt brings out the best in a top-flight cast. --Sean Axmaker

The pre-Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Jim Carroll, the poet and musician who spent much of his adolescence addicted to heroin and shooting hoops with fellow Catholic high-school kids. As a biography, the film doesn't amount to more than the sum of its gritty scenes of smack use, violence, perversions (poor Bruno Kirby plays a lecherous coach who comes on to young Jim), and the usual scream-and-puke dramas that go along with a cold-turkey session. Director Scott Kalvert doesn't seem to realise that most people don't know who Carroll is and therefore can't possibly understand why they should care about his gutterball youth. DiCaprio, having nowhere to go with his performance but maintain Carroll's tailspin, is boring and redundant. Some kind of allusion to the literary and rock & roll life that follows the mess we're watching might have been helpful. The DVD release offers the choice of a full or widescreen (letterbox) picture, plus interviews. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com

Director Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 movie The Battle of Algiers concerns the violent struggle in the late 1950s for Algerian independence from France, where the film was banned on its release for fear of creating civil disturbances. Certainly, the heady, insurrectionary mood of the film, enhanced by a relentlessly pulsating Ennio Morricone soundtrack, makes for an emotionally high temperature throughout. With the advent of the "war against terror" in recent years, the film's relevance has only intensified.

Shot in a gripping, quasi-documentary style, The Battle of Algiers uses a cast of untrained actors coupled with a stern voiceover. Initially, the film focuses on the conversion of young hoodlum Ali La Pointe (Brahim Haggiag) to FLN (the Algerian Liberation Front.) However, as a sequence of outrages and violent counter-terrorist measures ensue, it becomes clear that, as in Eisenstein's October, it is the Revolution itself that is the true star of the film.

Pontecorvo balances cinematic tension with grimly acute political insight. He also manages an even-handedness in depicting the adversaries. He doesn't flinch from demonstrating the civilian consequences of the FLN's bombings, while Colonel Mathieu, the French office brought in to quell the nationalists, is played by Jean Martin as determined, shrewd and, in his own way, honourable man. However, the closing scenes of the movie--a welter of smoke, teeming street demonstrations and the pealing white noise of ululations--leaves the viewer both intellectually and emotionally convinced of the rightfulness of the liberation struggle. This is surely among a fistful of the finest movies ever made. --David Stubbs