After Love (12)

Curzon Artificial Eye, £15.99

DIRECTED by Belgian Joachim Lafosse and starring actor-director Cedric Kahn and The Artist's Berenice Bejo, both French, After Love examines the last skirmishes in a failing relationship as it heads for whatever peace a legal dissolution brings. Shot entirely within the confines of a walled and gated family home – somewhere in France or Belgium, presumably, though we're never told – it follows Marie (Bejo) and Boris (Kahn) as they bicker and fight while also cooking, cleaning and looking after their pre-teen twin daughters Jade and Margaux. Imagine Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? but without the endless boozing.

Complicating matters is the fact that Boris won't move out unless he's paid half of what he says the house is worth. Marie, who paid for it, thinks that's unfair but admits that he did all the renovation work, thereby adding value. It's the very definition of an impasse.

There's little in the way of music, no explanation as to why the relationship failed in the first place and no external actors barring Marie's mother, who visits briefly, some toughs who turn up demanding money from Boris at one point, and, in one of the film's pivotal scenes, the guests at an outdoor dinner party Marie holds while Boris is out one night. It's the only time she talks to a third party about him and the only insight we're given into her true feelings. But things turn rancorous when he comes home early and interrupts the party by demanding to know if Marie and her friends were talking about him. Of course they were and, while the men try to maintain an amiable equanimity, it's clear to him (and the viewer) who the women present side with.

In tone the film is more often banal than bleak, less an emotional rollercoaster and more a bumpy, undulating ride. So when Lafosse does speed things up – after Jade mistakenly overdoses on Marie's sleeping tablets, for instance, or when the family dance together to a cheesy pop song in a rare moment of unity – you really notice the gear change. Meanwhile Kahn's gruff, bearlike physicality makes him a restless and energetic presence in the home while Bejo plays Marie as a woman on the verge of a breakdown but doing very well to hide the fact. Well-observed and beautifully acted it may be, but this is definitely isn't one for date night.

Black Orpheus (12)

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, £17.99

RELEASED under Sony's Criterion Collection imprint, this gorgeous restoration of Marcel Camus's Oscar and Palme d'Or-winning 1959 film will certainly blast the January blues away – at least until its harrowing climax. It is based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, after all, and those stories never ends well. But for 90 minutes it's a vibrant and mesmerising riot of colour and music, set against the backdrop of Rio de Janeiro at Carnival time and telling the story of tram driver Orfeo (former Santos FC footballer Breno Mello), his fiancee Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira), her friend Serafina (Lea Garcia) and Serafina's cousin Eurydice (American-born actress and dancer Marpessa Dawn).

Orfeo runs the samba school in a favela high in the hills overlooking Rio and falls in love with Eurydice when she arrives there saying she's on the run from a man who wants to kill her. This is Death, of course, and it isn't long before he turns up, dressed in a Carnival-style skeleton suit and played by two-time Olympic gold medal winning athlete Adhemar da Silva. When Death finally takes Eurydice, Orfeo tries to find her by descending into the underworld, in this case the gloomily-lit and eerily empty city morgue. He even meets a guard dog called Cerberus, though this one doesn't have three heads. Adapted by Frenchman Camus from a 1956 play by Brazilian poet and songwriter Vinicius de Moraes and featuring music by the great Antonio Carlos Jobim, Black Orpheus popularized samba and bossa nova in American and Europe. And, though it has an outsider at the helm, it steers a course deep into the heart of Carnival and its strange rituals. Great stuff.

The Missing: Series One & Two (15)

RLJ Entertainment, £34.99

WRITTEN by brothers Harry and Jack Williams, the two series of The Missing so far have given the BBC a compelling and critically-acclaimed crime drama which, due to its nature, also preys on every parent's worst fear: losing a child to an unknown abductor. Series one aired in 2014 and clearly referenced the case of Madeleine McCann, right down to the casting of Frances O'Connor as Emily Hughes, whose son Oliver is snatched on a holiday in France. The resemblance between O'Connor and Madeleine McCann's mother Kate will have escaped nobody. Co-star James Nesbitt was nominated for a BAFTA for his performance as Oliver's tortured father Tony, whose return to France eight years after the abduction kicks off the action.

Series two screened on BBC One last autumn and uses as its framing device a story more commonly associated with Belgium, namely the abduction, imprisonment and sexual abuse of girls and young women, and sets it on a British army base in Germany. Only here it's a re-appearance rather than a disappearance that begins the story as army parents David Morrissey and Keeley Hawes find their lives once more thrown into turmoil when their daughter Alice, abducted years earlier, returns to them having escaped her captor. The only linking device is the presence in both stories of mercurial French detective Julien Baptiste (the excellent Tcheky Karyo), though whether he'll last into the mooted third series is anyone's guess. Enjoy him here, then, in these gripping, if occasionally far-fetched, dramas which put family and community at their heart.