Goddess (PG)

BFI, £19.99

“GOSSIP is a fearful thing” wrote Ruan Lingyu in the suicide note found next to her body on March 8, 1935. The Chinese silent film actress died from an overdose of barbiturates in her Shanghai home following a fight with her abusive boyfriend and after years of tabloid intrusion which had taken its toll on her emotional well-being and mental health. She was 24. Her funeral cortège trailed through the city for over three miles and there were a further three suicides as fans distraught at the news of her death took their own lives.

Digitally-restored and featuring a newly-commissioned score performed by the China Philharmonic Orchestra, this 1934 film is one of her last appearances and one of her most famous – perhaps the high water mark of the first Golden Age of Chinese cinema in which she was a superstar, an iconic figure often referred to as the Chinese Garbo.

Lingyu plays the unnamed “Goddess” of the title, an ambiguous, double-edged term that references both her role as sole parent to young son Shuiping (Li Keng) and her occupation: sex worker. It's while escaping from the police during a street round-up that she has her first fateful meeting Boss Zhang (Zhang Zhizhi), a thuggish gambler who becomes her pimp and who will ultimately cause her downfall when she kills him with a broken bottle. We leave her in prison entrusting the care of her son to the kindly teacher who has taken pity on both of them.

It's a beautiful and moving film with some dazzling camera work – at one point director Wu Yonggang suspends his camera high above the action so we're looking directly down on the characters' heads – but it's Ruan Lingyu, the quiet presence at its heart, which provides it with its considerable power.

Lost In France (15)

Curzon Artificial Eye, £15.99

FOLLOWING on from Big Gold Dream, an interview-based documentary hymning Edinburgh's early 1980s post-punk bands, comes Lost In France, a less formulaic re-telling of the story of Glasgow label Chemikal Underground and the bands and people which clustered around it from mid-1990s onwards, notably Mogwai, The Delgados (who ran the label), Arab Strap and Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand. Director Niall McCann's somewhat awkward conceit is to take the main players – Kapranos, his friend and fellow musician RM Hubbert, Delgados bassist (and Chemikal Underground boss) Stewart Henderson, his former bandmates Paul Savage and Emma Pollock, and Mogwai's Stewart Braithwaite – back to Mauron, the small Brittany town in which they played/drank/wreaked havoc in 1997. The story is interesting enough without the staged return, though some of the best scenes are when Braithwaite, Kapranos and Henderson are just sitting around talking. Henderson's bitterness at the difficulties the label faces in the digital era is palpable, as is his disappointment that some of the great music Chemikal Underground produced didn't reach a wider audience. But otherwise this is a bold and inspiring reminder of how prodigiously talented (and vital) that generation of Glasgow musicians was and remains.

Praying Mantis (15)

Simply Media, £19.99

IT IS sobering to learn that this two-part 1982 thriller was one of Channel 4's first original commissions – sobering because it's hilariously dated, but also because these days it would have a dozen co-producers, be stretched over 13 episodes (to better feed our monstrous appetite for “box set” drama) and have half the budget. In either era, it would be preposterous, though whether a modern director could be bothered trying to capture the eerie atmosphere of foggy Rouen by actually filming there is doubtful. Full marks, then, to jobbing TV director Jack Gold for doing it.

Adapted by Philip Mackie from Hubert Monteilhet's 1960 novel Les Mantes Religieuses, a typically French study in murderous amorality, it stars Jonathan Pryce as intense young historian Christian who marries sexually-liberated secretary Beatrice (Cherie Lunghi) for rather murky reasons. She's already having an affair with his boss, Professor Paul Canova (Pinkas Braun), whose second wife, the glamorous Vera (ex-Bond girl Carmen Du Sautoy), may or may not be the insect of the title – the fact that she will inherit Canova's considerable wealth in the event of his death has already aroused the suspicion of a team of Zurich insurance investigators. That death duly occurs, leaving Christian, Beatrice and Vera trying to figure out who holds which cards as each vies for the winning hand.

Praying Mantis may not have aged as well as the film Pryce starred in three years later – Terry Gilliam's dystopian sci-fi Brazil – but it isn't without its appeal, both as a curio item and as a well-paced (if far-fetched) psychological thriller.

Broadchurch: Series 1-3 (15)

Acorn Media, £24.99

OVER nine million people watched the recent finale of series three of ITV's blockbuster crime drama, but if you were one of the few sentient adults who didn't and who has never watched the TV phenomenon about life, death and mismatched police officers in a cliff-top Dorset town, you can gorge yourself on all 24 episodes in this definitive boxset. And definitive it certainly is: Broadchurch creator Chris Chibnall has stated that season three is the last. And besides, he's off to head up the Dr Who scriptwriting team for the BBC so he won't have time to think about what Olivia Colman and David Tennant's characters Ellie Miller and Alec Hardy might be getting up to. Which is, as everyone who has seen the show will admit, a great pity.