Dheepan (15)

Studio Canal, £19.99

From Read My Lips, which featured a deaf woman caught up in a heist, through The Beat That My Heart Skipped and A Prophet, which centred on a piano-loving criminal and an Algerian teen adrift in a violent French prison, director Jacques Audiard has long been an observer of outsiders. Dheepan, which took top prize at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, is no different.

Beginning in Sri Lanka, it introduces us to Dheepan (Anthonythasan Jesuthasan) as he burns the bodies of his dead Tamil Tiger colleagues. Then we watch as he is smuggled out of the country to France in the company of a young woman he has never met and an orphaned nine-year-old girl unrelated to either of them. To secure their refugee status, however, the trio has to use the passports of a dead family and pretend to be husband, wife and daughter.

In France, Dheepan and his pretend family are re-located to a housing estate where he is given the job of janitor. He has to sort the mail, clean and sweep up after the local gang members. His “wife”, Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan), takes a well-paid job caring for old Mr Habib, whose flat is used as an office by young drug dealer Brahim (Vincent Rottiers), who's just out of prison. Meanwhile daughter Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby) is put in the Special Needs class at school because she doesn't speak French. 

Gradually Dheepan, Yalini and Illayaal adapt to their new lives, stoically facing down its challenges and threats while coming to a kind of accommodation with each other and, ultimately, becoming a family in practice as well as in name. Audiard lets it all happen at a stately pace and Jesuthasan is a powerful presence at the heart of the film. An ill-judged denouement involving an extended shoot-out adds a jarring note - as one critic noted, the estate where Audiard filmed hadn't actually had a shooting incident in 20 years - and there's yet more incongruity in the final scene, set in a in a well-heeled London suburb. But the film is only a little diminished as a result.

A Kind Of Loving (12)

Studio Canal, £17.49

These days it's fashionable for metropolitan types to turn their cameras on themselves, but in the early 1960s it was in England's industrial north that directors such as Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson and John Schlesinger - public school-educated Oxonians to a man - cut their teeth on so-called “kitchen sink dramas”.

This 1962 adaptation of Stan Barstow's recent novel was Schlesinger's debut feature (followed a year later by Bill Liar) and stars Alan Bates as Vic Brown, a young draughtsman. It was filmed in Manchester, Blackburn and Bolton, and, though the location isn't stated, in a scene filmed at a football match we learn that Vic and his friend Jeff (a fresh-faced James Bolam) are both Wanderers fans. Love, marriage and sex come into Vic's life (though not quiet in that order) in the form of typist Ingrid Rothwell (June Ritchie) while Thora Hird, doing irreparable damage to the reputation of mothers-in-law everywhere, plays Mrs Rothwell. There's also a pleasing cameo for Leonard Rossiter as one of Vic's co-workers.

Released on Blu-ray for the first time, and digitally restored in collaboration with the BFI, it doesn't have the same impact today that it had on release. But for every moment of creaking quaintness there's another revelation that seems fresh or timeless: viewed now, it tells us as much about changes in workplaces, communities and families as it does sexual mores.

High-Rise (15)

Studio Canal, £10

Veteran producer Jeremy Thomas had held the film rights to JG Ballard's dystopian 1975 novel almost since it was published but had despaired of ever seeing it turned into a film until Ben Wheatley came calling. Luckily, Thomas had seen Wheatley's breakthrough hit Sightseers just a couple of weeks earlier and was delighted to entrust it to a director whose own work isn't without its Ballardian overtones.

With its awkward, futuristic 1970s look and fragmented, episodic nature, the resulting film is a bit of a muddle, to be honest. But the set design is fantastic and strong central performances from Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Luke Evans, Sienna Millar and Elisabeth Moss keep the engine running smoothly.

Hiddleston plays dispassionate physiologist Dr R Laing, newly arrived in a swish apartment block where floor level brings status. The higher you are, the higher you are. At the very top, in a penthouse suite with a garden his wife can ride her white horse around, lives the building's architect, Anthony Royal (Irons).

So far, so ordered. But we know what's coming because the film opens with a bloodied Laing in a trashed flat cooking a dog over a home-made barbecue so, over the course of two hours, Wheatley shows us what happens when hierarchical societies break down into lawlessness. Think Lord Of The Flies-meets-The Towering Inferno, with a little of Kubrick's take on A Clockwork Orange thrown in.