Lords Of Dogtown (15)

Eureka! Video, £17.99

CATHERINE Hardwicke's 2005 skateboarding origins story is essentially a fictionalised version of the tale told in documentary form in 2001's Dogtown And Z-Boys - the invention of skateboarding in the Dogtown area of Santa Monica in the mid-1970s - and even has as its writer that film's director and one its main subjects, Stacy Peralta.

Peralta was in his late teens when he became a skateboarding superstar thanks to his success with Dogtown's Zephyr team. Joining him in the venture were his friends Tony Alva and Jay Adams, and the team was managed by colourful local surf shop owner Skip Engblom. In an interview in the Lords Of Dogtown extras package, Peralta says the screenplay actually came first, but that he had to make the documentary before any studio would pay attention to the Dogtown story. It's hard to believe: the tale of how three lawless kids turned their passion for surfing into a new, screamingly authentic subculture with its own aesthetic and, even today, untouchable aura of cool is great material.

Hardwicke came at the project on the back of her Oscar-nominated film Thirteen, which also dealt with troubled adolescents. As with Dogtown And Z-Boys, the soundtrack is awesome and so are the many skateboard action sequences, and John Robinson, Emile Hirsch and Victor Rasuk bring real depth to the roles of Peralta, Adams and Alva. But the stand-out is Heath Ledger as Skip Engblom. The Australian plays him as a ragged, fond, aggressive, drunken maelstrom of a man, but with so much nuance that he uncovers a tender and vulnerable side too. Ledger's only Oscar win came posthumously, in 2009: it could easily have come here instead.

Released on Blu-ray for the first time, the generous extras package includes interviews with Hardwicke, Peralta and Alva; scene-setting featurettes; and on-set footage including an interview with Ledger.

The Blue Lamp (PG)

Studio Canal, £14.99

RELEASED in 1950 and directed by Basil Dearden for Ealing Studios, The Blue Lamp is best known today for introducing the character of PC George Dixon, who would go on to become the mainstay of long-running TV police procedural Dixon Of Dock Green. There, as here, Dixon is played by Jack Warner.

The screenplay was by TEB Clarke, who also penned Ealing favourites The Lavender Hill Mob (for which he won an Oscar) and Passport To Pimlico. More importantly, Clarke had served as a reserve constable during the second world war, an experience which fed into a film which blends elements of social realism with film noir. In fact at points The Blue Lamp feels like two separate films in tone, with Dirk Bogarde's edgy, nihilistic killer Tom Riley having stepped out of the second genre and the background milieu - drunks, domestic abusers, runaways and bobbies on the beat - coming from the first.

The plot turns on the criminal spree undertaken round Warner's manor of Paddington in London by Riley and his partner Spud (Patric Doonan). Their entrance into proceedings brings the plain-clothes CID into play, though prior to that the emphasis has been on Dixon and new recruit Andy Mitchell (Jimmy Hanley) as they run through their decent-British-bobby-on-the-beat shtick. Modern viewers will look on that with a slightly jaundiced eye - some contemporary critics did too, mind - though when the action steps up for thrilling car chase through long-gone west London streets and a tense denouement at the White City dog track, The Blue Lamp shows why it's still rated and still deserves an audience. In this digitally restored version it still looks pretty good too.

Almost Holy (15)

Curzon Artificial Eye, £15.99

THIS GRIM and troubling documentary by American film-maker Steve Hoover follows the work of Gennadiy Mokhnenko, a fireman in Soviet-era Moscow who returned to his native Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union and founded his own church. He then made it his life's mission to rescue - or in some cases forcibly abduct - homeless and drug-addicted children living rough in sewers and basements in the city of Mariupol. To some he is a saviour, to others a publicity-addicted vigilante. As far as Mokhnenko is concerned, his moral right to take the children to his refuge, called Republic of Pilgrim, trumps the fact that he has no legal power to do so.

Hoover tells Mokhnenko's story by cutting together his own footage with the pastor's archive recordings of his work as well as scene-setting news reports and a linking motif involving a famous Russian cartoon called Crocodile Gennadiy. And it's brutal stuff for the most part: in one grainy archive recording a boy suffering from blood poisoning is dragged into a room on a mattress to be chastised for his reckless intravenous drug taking. Mokhnenko makes him promise to stop before he agrees to call an ambulance. Another ill boy subsequently dies. We watch as he is buried. In company with Hoover's film crew, Mokhnenko removes a young girl from the home she shares with a deaf mother who prostitutes herself for vodka. The girl, Anjela, tells him how she watched her own father hang himself with a TV cable. Factor in the political and social unrest which engulfed Ukraine and Mokhnenko while Hoover and his team were filming, and you have a troubling portrait of a country and a people in crisis.