Autumn Almanac (15)

Curzon, £15.99

Thanks to the rigorous formality of his film-making and the gruelling intensity of his philosophical inquiries - the human condition is a favourite subject - Hungarian director Bela Tarr has a reputation for miserabilism which has made him a firm favourite on the arthouse circuit. His most recent films, 2007's The Man From London (which starred Tilda Swinton) and 2011's The Turin Horse (which he has said will be his last), both showed at the Edinburgh International Film Festival after high profile premieres at Cannes and Berlin. Laszlo Nemes, whose debut feature Son Of Saul won the Best Foreign Language Film at last months' Oscars, is a Tarr protege.

Here, Curzon bring Tarr's 1985 film Autumn Almanac to DVD, a pivotal work in that it marks his departure from the social realism of previous films - what you might call his Cassavetes period - and the advent of something more experimental. In this case, it's a stagey drama set in a once grand but now dilapidated apartment lit in greens, reds and yellows.

The camera moves from room to room through these odd theatrical tableaux as the apartment's inhabitants - an elderly woman, her son, her nurse/lodger, the nurse's lover and a drunken teacher in debt to money-lenders - conspire in tandem and against each other. “Everybody here lies to me,” says the nurse, Anna, at one point.

The film starts with a quote from Pushkin but it might as well be Jean-Paul Sartre's “Hell is other people”. In fact, Autumn Almanac is a little like Sartre's Huis Clos shot by Alfred Hitchcock: in a nod to the famous scene from Hitchcock's 1927 silent film The Lodger, Tarr even shoots a fight between the lover and the teacher from underneath, using a piece of glass instead of the real floor. It doesn't quite work - the set shakes and hand smears appear as the struggle wears on - but it's a startling interlude and matches an earlier scene in which the director shoots from above as Anna's lover shaves the teacher with a cut-throat razor.

Fan of Peter Greenaway's painterly films will enjoy the set design - or mise-en-scene as it's known in Tarr's arthouse milieu - but for anyone wanting to start their own inquiry into the work of this great but difficult European director, it's an excellent place to start.

Valentino (18)

BFI, £19.99

Ken Russell's sexually-charged 1977 sort-of biopic of Rudolph Valentino comes to Blu-ray for the first time courtesy of this extras-laden BFI re-issue, one of a series of Russell releases in the offing (his much-admired Great Composers series follows later in the month). Not that Valentino needs extras to be a mouth-watering proposition: the presence in the cast of Rudolf Nureyev is all the enticement you need. He takes the lead role alongside Leslie Caron, Seymour Cassel, Carole Kane, Michelle Phillips and (here's a great pub quiz question) The Good Life's Felicity Kendal. There are also appearances by Kemp and Dudley Sutton, whose recollections form one of those extras. For added pep, Russell himself called the film “the biggest mistake of my career”.

Mississippi Grind (15)

Entertainment One, £8

Pulling together two much-loved American tropes - the road movie and the high-stakes poker game - directors Ryan Boden and Anna Fleck pitch the ever-watchable Ben Mendelsohn into a comedy-drama in which he plays Gerry, an indebted and down-on-his-luck gambler. When he meets Curtis (Ryan Reynolds), his luck changes. Or seems to anyway. Sienna Miller plays Simone, a prostitute the pair meet in St Louis en route to New Orleans and that fateful card game.

The Visit: An Alien Encounter (PG)

Metrodome, £9.99

What would a “first contact” encounter with alien life actually be like? In this intriguing film Danish documentary-maker Michael Madsen interviews a series of experts from organisations such as NASA, the United Nations and SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) to ask how we - and they - will cope. And that “will” is important because for the purposes of the documentary, the first contact is taken as fact: The Visit is described at the outset as “a simulation”, a film documenting an “event which has never taken place - man's first encounter with intelligent life.”. First up is astrophysicist Mazlan Othman, director of the UN's Office for Outer Space Affairs. Who knew they even had one? The talking heads, meanwhile, are intercut with artful, slow-motion shots plucked from the Koyaanisqatsi school of film-making.

The Lady In The Van (12)

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, £9.99

How much mileage can you can get out of a parked van? If you're writer/national treasure Alan Bennett, the answer is: a considerable amount. Bennett's account of how eccentric former pianist Mary Shepherd parked her Bedford van in London drive and then didn't move for 15 years has already been a memoir, an award-winning play and a radio drama. The last two had Maggie Smith attached and she reprises the role in Nicholas Hytner's cockles-of-your-heart-warming 2015 film. Alex Jennings plays Bennett.