Gomorrah: Complete Seasons One & Two (18)

Arrow Films, £37.99

While Italian TV director Stefano Sollima kept the look, spirit and characters of Michele Placido's gangster hit Romanzo Criminale when he transferred it to the small screen, his adaptation of Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah little resembles the acclaimed original, itself based on journalist Roberto Saviano's harrowing first-hand account of Naples's Camorra crime gang.

Sure, the backdrop is the same but perversely there's a widescreen, cinematic glossiness to the TV series that wasn't there in the original, where much of the action took place at street level among aspiring gangsters like ill-fated friends Marco and Sweet Pea. It's their mundane assassination on a deserted beach by two pot-bellied men in shorts and vests that ends the film. So although Saviano has had a hand in the series, it now feels more like a hybrid of The Sopranos and The Wire, hitched to the sort of neon-soaked visual pizzazz Nicolas Winding Refn brings to his violent films. No matter. As templates go, that's still pretty good.

Season one introduces the men of the pre-eminent Savastano gang, primarily Ciro (Marco D'Amore). He's known as The Immortal for his ability to evade bullets and, in the high octane opening episode, a couple of grenades chucked into a bar which is then sprayed with machine gun fire. Head of the clan is suit-wearing Pietro Savastano (Fortunato Cerlino) and ranged against him and his men is a younger crime boss, pony-tailed Salvatore Conte (Marco Palvetti). It's the machinations of these three, along with Savastano's wife Imma (Maria Pia Calzone) and son Gennaro (Salvatore Esposito), which drives the action across the first two seasons. Not everyone's still standing by the end, but with two more series already commissioned, those who have survived still have plenty to play for. If you long ago tired of the tepid Inspector Montalbano and hanker after something a little more lurid and sprawling, Gommorrah certainly does the trick.

Mapplethorpe: Look At The Pictures (18)

Dogwoof, £9.99

This HBO-produced documentary about controversial American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is certainly informative, but it's also oddly artless, a functional trawl through Mapplethorpe's life and work rather than the sort of authored documentary more often seen on the film festival circuit (it screened at both Sundance and Berlin).

Mostly it relies on images of the work, documentary footage and sit-down interviews with family members, former lovers and friends, among them people like Debbie Harry and authors Bob Colacello and Fran Lebowitz. Linked by the motif of a shot through a medium format camera's viewfinder, many of these interviews take place in palatial New York loft apartments which ooze good taste but which differ greatly from the squalid down-town studios in which Mapplethorpe lived. Patti Smith features, of course, and film-makers Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey have worked hard to give a flavour of the milieu in which Mapplethorpe lived and worked in the early days: places like Max's Kansas City, the Chelsea Hotel and Fire Island loom large.

But ultimately the idea of the film is to discuss the pictures as works of art so the recollections of Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDs in 1989, are intercut with shots of curators doing just that as they prepare for two massive museum retrospectives. It's those scenes which provide some of the most unintentionally funny moments as these severe taste-makers stand around discussing form, light and composition while strenuously avoiding the fact that what they're looking at is a self-portrait of the photographer with a leather bull-whip in his anus. Mapplethorpe would certainly have enjoyed the joke.

Akenfield (12)

BFI, £19.99

Long unseen, Peter Hall's influential 1974 film about three generations of farm workers in a Suffolk village finally comes to DVD and Blu-ray in a digital restoration undertaken by the BFI National Archive. Adapted from Ronald Blythe's best-selling 1969 oral history, Akenfield: Portrait Of An English Village, it was notable at the time for casting non-actors from the local community, notably farm-hand Garrow Shand, who plays three generations of men called Tom Rouse.

The action takes place over the course of one day as Young Tom prepares for the funeral of his grandfather, Old Tom. Young Tom's own father - Middle Tom, if you like - died in the second world war and makes only fleeting appearances. So mostly we watch as Young Tom wanders the village talking to friends and neighbours (you'll need the subtitles on here: the Suffolk dialect is hard to catch), and listen to the words of Old Tom as he narrates, addressing his grandson and talking about his own life.

And it's that life, and its echoes in the present, which make Akenfield so enthralling: Old Tom talks about the hardships of agricultural labour, his experiences of love and marriage, of the Great War (he was one of only three men out of 70 who returned alive) and, most poignantly, of the time he walked the 40 miles to Newmarket to try to find a job in a racing stable. He failed, and had to walk all the way back. Apart from his years in the army, it was the only time he left the village. In the film's closing scene, Young Tom sets out to make a similar journey - though Hall leaves it to us to decide whether he too will be forced to return.