Train To Busan (15)

Studio Canal, £7

A smash hit in its native South Korea, where 11 million people watched it out of a population of 50 million, Yeon Sang-ho's impressive film takes the basic ingredients of a 1970s Hollywood disaster movie, adds some influences closer to home – such as 1975 Japanese thriller Bullet Train, the inspiration for Speed – and slaps on top of it a cute kid caught up in the start of the zombie apocalypse.

She is Soo-an (Kim Su-an) and along with her ruthless, workaholic fund manager father Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) she is travelling from Seoul to Busan, South Korea's second city, to see her mother, Seok-woo's ex wife. But as their super slick train is leaving Seoul station, Soo-an starts to realise things aren't quite right on the platform – and, when a woman infected with whatever it is that's turning people into starving crazies hops on board at the last minute, on the train itself. Soon, Soo-an, Seok-woo and a gang of survivors headed by no-nonsense, working class tough guy Sang-hwa (Ma Dong-seok) are fighting the zombies from carriage to carriage, improvising battle tactics as they go (gaffer tape over their wrists helps, so does the fact that the zombies can't open doors and stop dead when the train goes through a tunnel). But Sang-ho leavens the action with comic interludes and heavy doses of social commentary: when the heroic and self-sacrificing Sang-hwa finds out what Seok-woo does for a living, he nicknames him Arsehole and the film's out-and-out baddie is Yon-suk (Kim Eui-sung), a powerful CEO who will do anything to survive.

Premiered at Cannes in the festival's Midnight Screening slot and followed nine months after release by an animated prequel, Seoul Station (out on DVD next month), Train To Busan proves once and for all that Hollywood isn't the only player in the world of special effects-laden horror blockbusters. Nor is it always the best or the most inventive.

Mildred Pierce (PG)

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, £17.99

Joan Crawford made her Hollywood comeback and also won a Best Actress Oscar for her role as the titular Mildred in Michael Curtiz's 1945 adaptation of James M Cain's novel, released here in a new, digitally restored version.

Caught up in a noirish, late night murder as the film opens and then seen attempting suicide, Mildred's story unspools in flashback as she talks to the detectives investigating the killing of her profligate husband, Monty Beragon (Zachary Scott) – a crime for which her ex-husband, Bert Pierce (Bruce Bennett), has claimed responsibility.

Those nods to noir aside, the bulk of the film is a powerful melodrama in which Mildred throws out Bert and takes up with Beragon while all the time trying to raise a family and earn a living through the chain of restaurants she opens with the help of old friend Wally Fay (Jack Carson). In fact, the murder subplot which tops and tails the film isn't in the original novel and the makers of the five-part 2011 HBO mini-series starring Kate Winslett had the good sense to excise it from their version too.

Among the rich cast of supporting actors are Eve Arden, Ann Blyth (as Mildred's capricious and untrustworthy daughter Veda) and Gone With The Wind's Butterfly McQueen.

The generous extras package in this Criterion Collection release includes interviews with Blyth (from 2006) and Cain (from 1969). But the pick of the bunch is an interview with Crawford from the David Frost Show of January 1970. Resplendent in a shimmering pink dress and matching turban, she bewitches the presenter with a series of well-buffed anecdotes about how she won the part of Mildred Pierce in the teeth of Curtiz's disapproval and why it's still her favourite out of all her film roles.

Blonde Fist (15)

Network, £9.99

Directed by Frank Clarke, who wrote Letter To Brezhnez, and starring Clarke's sister Margi, who also featured in that film, Blonde Fist is one of those British movies which has undeservedly fallen between the cracks. Originally released in 1991 and released here as part of Network's ongoing British Film Collection of “vintage” classics, it starts on a Liverpool housing scheme as single mum Ronnie O'Dowd (Clarke) battles neighbours, the DSS and her own family history – her boxer father left when she was young – and then moves to a women's prison after she is convicted of assault. Inside, she stands up to the prison bully (“What are you going to do for a face when Jabba the Hutt wants its arse back?” is her cute opening line) and then goes on the lam with cellmate Brenda (younger sister Angela Clarke, another Letter To Brezhnev alumni). Finally, she winds up in New York looking for her Scottish father John (Ken Hutchison), supposedly a “tycoon” living in a hotel, at least according to his letters home. In fact he's a drunk working in the hotel kitchen. In a nightclub, she boxes for money and finally hits paydirt. Cue happy(-ish) ending.

It's occasionally clunky but mostly fun and funny, with a generous helping of Loachian social realism. Clarke and Hutchison are both excellent – and look out for a baby-faced Stephen Graham making his film debut in the opening scenes.