Cry Of The City (12)

BFI, £19.99

Film noir veteran Richard Conte stars in this classic example of the genre, adapted from Henry Edward Helseth's novel The Chair For Martin Rome and directed by another film noir great, Robert Siodmak. Conte plays Martin Rome, a smooth-talking New York hoodlum who, when we first meet him, is dying in a hospital bed and receiving the last rites having shot and killed a policeman and been mortally wounded in return. Or not, as it turns out: Rome recovers, escapes custody and sets out to flee New York with his girlfriend though not before trying to lay his hands on the proceeds of a jewellery robbery sitting in the safe of corrupt lawyer WA Niles (Berry Kroeger). Ranged against him, in an oppositional relationship familiar to any fans of Martin Scorsese's film, is homicide detective Candella (Victor Mature), an old friend from the same tough, Italian-American neighbourhood as Rome. Walking a line between the two older men is Rome's impressionable younger brother Tony (Tommy Cook).

Siodmak, whose fascination with masculinity in extremis finds powerful expression here, sets the final encounter between Candella and Rome in a church. By that point both men are suffering from gunshot wounds and, with Niles dead on the floor of his office with Rome's stiletto in his back, the only question is which path young Tony will take when the smoke clears. In a wonderfully subtle closing shot, Siodmak tells us all we need to know. A great film made even more watchable by the dazzling interplay between Conte and Mature, who's on top form here.

The Shop On The High Street (15)

Second Run, £12.99

Numerous films vie for the right to be called the one which kickstarted the Czech New Wave, but this 1965 work, set in Slovakia in 1942 and directed Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos, has a better claim than most. Winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar and acclaimed by the critic Kenneth Tynan as the most moving film ever made about anti-Semitism, it turns on the relationship between middle-aged carpenter Tono and elderly Mrs Lautmann, the slightly dotty Jewish widow whose shop he is given sway over when appointed its “Aryan controller” by his fascist brother-in-law.

The shop sells buttons and Mrs Lautmann earns the same: as Tono learns from a friend of hers, she lives mostly on hand-outs from the Jewish community. In the end, so does Tono, given a monthly wage by the local Rabbi in return for looking after (and out for) the elderly woman. The tone is initially one of black comedy, a Kadar and Klos trademark, but as the local fascist thugs flex their muscles and a round-up of Jews is organised, the film becomes much darker and considerably more tragic.

Based on a story by Slovakian-Jewish writer Ladislaz Grosman, it deals with a specifically Slovakian incident, namely the setting up of the Slovak state as a client state of Nazi Germany. But the specifics of the historical situation don't matter in the face of the broader theme of anti-Semitism, and the way decent but weak people can be overpowered by events. As critic Michael Brooke observes in a commentary in the extras package, in that regard The Shop On The High Street offers a far more nuanced and morally complex view of Jewish persecution than even Schindler's List - impressive when you learn that Jan Kadar lost most of his family at Auschwitz and spent time in a Hungarian labour camp where he was forced to wear the yellow star.

Don't Look Back (E)

Criterion, £17.99

DA Pennebaker's fly-on-the-hotel-room-wall documentary of Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of England is an stone cold classic and any Dylan fan who hasn't seen it is no fan at all. Here Criterion give it a Blu-ray release in a package loaded with extras, including a second, shorter film compiled by Pennebaker using previously unseen footage, and an engrossing interview between the director and cultural critic Greil Marcus, the go-to guy for all things 1960s. Marcus points up scenes like the one in which Dylan follows Donovan's hotel room rendition of his icky To Sing For You with It's All Over Now, Baby Blue, effectively destroying the Scot on camera. He also spies (or thinks he spies) the moment Dylan gets the idea for Like A Rolling Stone, during his playing of Hank William's Lost Highway.

The film itself is fascinating on so many levels, whether it's moments like Joan Baez complaining about the eight different endings Dylan has given Love Is A Four Letter Word (“If you finish it, I'll sing it,” she tells him); the view it gives of mid-1960s Britain; the insights into the working methods of Dylan's fearsome manager, Albert Grossman; the sheer amateurishness of the whole tour (at the Liverpool gig there's no sound because a plug has been pulled out); and of course the person of Dylan himself - stylish, slim and God-like enough to have nervous British acolytes falling at his feet. There's plenty of music, too, though if a criticism can be levelled at the film it's that we learn little about the singer beyond his liking for wearing sunglasses indoors and his penchant for teasing journalists.