Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (15)

BFI, £19.99

TWICE nominated for an Oscar for The Last Picture Show and The Exorcist, Ellen Burstyn finally bagged a gong for her role as the titular Alice in Martin Scorsese's bittersweet road movie, one of the few films in his early career which took him outside his familiar stomping ground of New York.

This one begins in New Mexico and then makes for California as the recently-widowed Alice and her Mott The Hoople-obsessed 11-year-old son Tommy (Alfred Lutter) leave bad memories behind them and journey to the place she thinks she was happiest: her childhood home of Monterey.

California-bound they may be, but in fact Arizona is as far as they get. They leave Phoenix in a hurry after Alice becomes involved with a violent married man (Scorsese regular Harvey Keitel, also prised out of New York for the duration) and then wind up in Tucson, where Alice finally gives up on her dream of resurrecting her singing career and takes a job in a diner. There she meets regular David (Kris Krisofferson), a local rancher, and fellow waitress Flo (Diane Ladd, also Oscar nominated). Tommy, meanwhile, moons around the streets of Tucson where he befriends hard-nosed delinquent Audrey (Jodie Foster). Foster, 11 at the time, is brilliant – Scorsese would cast her in Taxi Driver two years later – while Lutter, also 11, so impressed the director with his off-screen raconteur shtick that Scorsese wrote some of it into the script.

They almost deserve a film in their own right, but this movie was intended as a vehicle for Burstyn, who chose the script and the director (on the recommendation of Francis Ford Coppola). And its her passionate and kooky performance as Alice that drives it. An anomaly in the career of Scorsese, perhaps, but a deeply satisfying one – and undoubtedly one of the high-water marks of 1970s American cinema.

The Proud Valley (PG)

Studio Canal, £11.99

AFRICAN-American actor, singer, activist and all-round renaissance man Paul Robeson stars in this extraordinary 1940 film from Ealing, set in the fictitious colliery town of Blaendy in South Wales. It was directed by Ealing regular Michael Balcon but has a script by a married couple Robeson had befriended when he visited Moscow – socialist theatre-maker and academic Herbert Marshall and his wife Fredda Brilliant, a Polish actress and sculptor. By 1939, when shooting began, they were living in London.

Robeson plays American stoker David Goliath, who turns up in the coalfields looking for work after his ship has docked at Cardiff and he has been laid off. His singing ability immediately finds him friends among the choir-daft miners, who find him a job and a place to live, and slot him into the basses for the upcoming Eisteddfod. But when choirmaster Dick Parry (Edward Chapman) is killed in a gas explosion underground, the mine is closed and the miners forced onto the dole, so Goliath joins Parry's son Emlyn (Scottish actor Simon Lack) on a walk to London to plead with the mine owners. With war having broken out, the company agrees: but once again disaster strikes.

The hokey Welsh accents are a little hard to take and the writers lay the sentiment on a little too thickly, but as a three-dimensional representation of a black man it's unique for its time. Among the choicest morsels in the fascinating extras package is news footage of Robeson visiting (and singing for) miners at Woolmet colliery near Edinburgh in 1949 and an interview with British actor David Harewood, who describes America's treatment of Robeson as “a stain” and recalls how Vanessa Redgrave was so amazed he'd never heard of Robeson when the pair were working together in New York that she immediately went out and bought him a biography of the singer.

Paterson (15)

Soda Pictures, £19.99

THE LATEST film from veteran American indie director Jim Jarmusch sees him team up with man of the moment Adam Driver for the story of Paterson, a bus driver whose apparently dreary daily routine hides a deep inner life: he is a devoted poet, who scribbles his lines in a notebook during his lunch hour and before his shift begins. Then he returns home to his kooky girlfriend Laura (Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani), eats with her, takes her pug for a walk and ends up in his local bar where he talks with avuncular, chess-playing owner Doc (Barry Shabaka Henley). As with all Jarmusch films it's mannered and stylised, and the gentle protagonist is an outsider of sorts. There are regular shots of twins, for some reason, and another twinning of sorts in the setting, the city of Paterson, New Jersey, where Beat poet Allan Ginsberg grew up and where Driver's character's poetic hero William Carlos Williams worked as a doctor. There's a pleasing cameo from Japanese actor Masatoshi Nagase, star of Jarmusch's cult 1989 film Mystery Train, and Driver is endlessly watchable, but otherwise Paterson feels slight and a little aimless given its two hour running time. Extras include a Q&A with Driver, though as he famously never watches his own films, it's of limited interest.