Love & Friendship (U)

Curzon Artificial Eye, £9.99

For much of his career, American director Whit Stillman has made films whose characters talk as if they've just stepped out of a Jane Austen novel, though transplanted to New York's Upper West side or one of the Ivy League universities. With the exception of Woody Allen in his prime, nobody is better at laying bare the mores and manners of America's wealthy, liberal elites. The difference is that the well-connected, Harvard-educated, unashamedly patrician Stillman does it with the eye of an insider.

Given all that, it's odd that it's taken him so long to tackle a real Jane Austen novel, but he finally gets round to it with this period adaptation of Lady Susan, written around 1794 but never published in the author's lifetime.

Kate Beckinsale is Lady Susan Vernon, recently widowed (a relief to her) and now free to pursue her sexual dalliances unencumbered by a husband. Like every other female character in the film, she wraps men around her finger though her formidable intelligence and verbal dexterity means she runs rings round them intellectually as well. In orbit around this stellar, if unlikeable presence are brother-in-law Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel), teenage daughter Frederica (Morfydd Clark), her American friend Alicia Johnson (Chloe Sevigny) and various male admirers, some of whom Lady Susan wishes to marry, some simply to bed.

But despite Beckinsale and Sevigny re-uniting in a Stillman film for the first time since 1998's The Last Days Of Disco, Love And Friendship never quite lives up to its promise. Perhaps it's because we're overly familiar with (and a little weary of) Austen adaptations. Perhaps it's because having characters talk like they're in a Austen novel works when they're not in one, and doesn't when they are. Perhaps it's all just a little hard to follow: there's a large cast of characters, each one introduced with on-screen explanations about how they relate to everyone else. Mine will still be among the first hands raised when they need a volunteer to proclaim Whit Stillman's genius, but he's a stronger film-maker when he sticks to home turf and the present day.

Dead-End Drive-In (15)

Arrow Video, £12.99

“Ozploitation” describes a brand of low-budget horror and sci-fi films produced in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s. Mad Max is the best known example and among the directors who contributed to the genre is Peter Weir, who later moved to Hollywood. His compatriot and fellow Ozploitationeer Brian Trenchard-Smith pretty much stayed put, however, turning out films like 1983's BMX Bandits (which gave Nicole Kidman an early screen role and inadvertently spawned a much-loved Scottish indie band of the same name) and 1989 Vietnam shoot-em-up, The Siege Of Firebase Gloria. Quentin Tarantino has spoken warmly of Trenchard-Smith and cited Firebase Gloria as an influence, but it's tempting to see Dead-End Drive-In as the real jewel in the Australian's crown.

Released in 1986 and (notionally at least) based on a short story by Peter Carey, it blends the best of Mad Max and The Warriors with some inspired image-making on the director's part and a meaty sub-text that could have come straight out of a JG Ballard novel. In short, a combination of natural disasters, racial strife and a financial crash have turned Australia into a lurid dystopia where reckless teens run amok. The government's solution is to round them up and imprison them in open-air drive-in cinemas, which is where Crabs (Ned Manning) and girlfriend Carmen (Natalie McCutty) find themselves and their 1956 Chevrolet. Their new home resembles the car park at a Grateful Dead gig, but with the tie-dyed hippies replaced by skateboarding punks, hip-hop graffiti and breakdancing B-Boys.

But as the film unspools and a convoy of Indian and Vietnamese immigrants are bussed in, racism rears its head. And this is where it gets really interesting, because any way you cut it Dead-End Drive-In speaks to our times: the drive-in itself could be the Jungle at Calais or, if you prefer, a Nazi concentration camp, while the fear of outsiders and the over-riding sense of hopelessness - only Crabs has the gumption to try to escape - replay the themes of the EU referendum debate and its aftermath. A B-movie classic that for once actually deserves the name.

Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words (12)

Soda Pictures, £19.99

Drawing on television interviews given in three languages - English, French and Swedish - and dipping deep into diaries and letters, Stig Bjorkman's moving and exhaustively-researched documentary does pretty much what it promises in its title: tells us Ingrid Bergman's life story from her early days in Sweden to her final years as a venerated great from Hollywood's Golden Age.

Helping immeasurably with what is essentially a visual document are Bergman's home movies - a compulsive recorder of day-to-day life, she shoots everything from her co-stars to the Hitler Youth cadres she encountered on a visit to Germany in 1938 - and expansive interviews with her children, notably Pia Lindstrom (Bergman's daughter with her first husband) and actress Isabella Rossellini, one of three children Bergman had with Italian Neo-realist film-maker Roberto Rossellini. Narration is by Swedish actress Alicia Vikander and among the wealth of extras are the home movies themselves, a clip from Bergman's first screen outing (1932's Landskamp) and newsreel footage from the early 1950s showing Bergman and Rossellini at home.