Stockholm My Love (PG)

BFI, £19.99

Following his 2015 film-essay I Am Belfast, a cinematic love poem to his Northern Irish hometown, Edinburgh-based film-maker and critic Mark Cousins sets out for Stockholm in the company of 1980s pop star Neneh Cherry and acclaimed cinematographer Christopher Doyle – Wong Kar-wai's lens man of choice – for his first non-documentary feature, an atmospheric meditation on life, death and architecture shot on the streets of the Swedish capital. In some ways it's also a meditation on the act of walking and thinking, a past-time which (I'm guessing) had its own part to play in the genesis of the project. The French call this “flânerie”. Maybe the Swedes do too.

In truth, phrases like “1980s pop star” and “non-documentary” aren't the most appropriate ones to use in the context of Stockholm My Love. For the first third of the film, Cherry's character Alva communes with the memory of her dead father, an African immigrant who built bridges in Stockholm, married a Swede and had Swedish children. This, of course, echoes Cherry's own life: her father was a Sierra Leonean engineer in Stockholm and her mother (who later married legendary avant garde trumpeter Don Cherry) was a Swedish artist. So if there's a layer of meaning here relating to the actress's own life, it has nothing to do with Top Of The Pops and Buffalo Stance. Likewise the term “non-documentary” pre-supposes that what Cousins has done previously is “documentary”. It isn't, not really. It's far less easy to categorize than that.

In the middle section, Alva addresses herself (in Swedish) to the memory of another man, who died exactly a year earlier, while the final “act” unspools almost in silence as she strikes up an interior monologue whose object is the city itself, her terse thoughts rendered as text on the screen, again in Swedish.

Stockholm My Love probably works best if you know your Gunnar Asplund from your Franz Berwald – the first is a Modernist architect, the second a Romantic composer ignored in his lifetime: both men's work feature to some degree – but Alva's narration provides enough exposition to fill in any blanks. And there's another layer to the film in the form of its soundtrack, a collaboration between Cherry and her music producer husband Cameron McVey (of Massive Attack's Blue Lines fame), which tends more towards Cherry's own recent work with Swedish jazz trio The Thing.

Another impressive chapter in Cousins' ongoing career, then. And if a trilogy of city films is planned, it's to be hoped that for the final part he sets his imagination to play closer to home and puts his adopted hometown of Edinburgh in the frame.

Stockholm My Love opens tonight at the Glasgow Film Theatre, Glasgow (until June 20) and the Filmhouse, Edinburgh (until June 21). It's out on DVD on June 26

Diabolique (12)

Sony Home Entertainment, £17.99

More commonly known in the UK as Les Diaboliques, or The Devils, this digitally restored re-issue of Henri-Georges Clouzot's spine-tingling 1955 thriller does everything that Hitchcock at his best can do, plus a little bit more. Too much detail risks giving away important twists, but essentially the story turns on a plot to murder a particularly unpleasant teacher at a residential school, cooked up between his mistress and his fragile wife. The killing goes more or less to plan, but it's what happens afterwards that takes up the bulk of the film, and gives it its ever-increasing sense of tension. It's almost unbearable at points.

Paul Meurisse is the teacher, Vera Clouzot is his wife, and the great Simone Signoret plays the conniving mistress, Nicole. Extras include an introduction by Clouzot expert Serge Bromberg, and an interview with author and horror film aficionado Kim Newman.

Best (George Best: All By Himself) (12)

Dogwoof, £9.99

At the start of his footballing career, George Best was, to quote two observations in Daniel Gordon's absorbing documentary about his life, “the boy with the Beatles haircut” and “the boy with the world at his priceless feet”. For the great Scottish sports journalist Hugh McIlvanney, he was first and foremost a kid who became addicted to football. “He spent every possible hour developing his abilities,” he observes. “He had an interest in enjoying and almost having, one imagines, transcendental experiences when he found out what he could do on a football park”. And for fans of most every team he played for – there are too many to list, so let's name four: Manchester United, Fulham, the Los Angeles Aztecs and Scotland's Hibernian – Best was box office, pure and simple.

Gordon's film charts his rise and fall using archive interviews, footage of some of those great goals and – more sombre – interviews with his surviving contemporaries, such as his friend Mike Summerbee (of rivals Manchester City) and his second wife, Alex Best. And, of course, it's their reflections on the man's other addictions – alcohol, primarily – which give Gordon's film its tragic flavour.