The Bureau: Season One (15)

Arrow Films, £12.99

EVERY country has its police and crime dramas. But films and TV series about spies and intelligence services are the preserve of those nations which, for one reason or another, have muscular real life versions and like to obsess about them as a result. Case in point: the US and the UK, whose recent, spy-related dramatic output have included Homeland and an increasing number of adaptations of John le Carré novels. Golden Globe-winning series The Night Manager is the latest but certainly not the last.

Now the French join the fray with this acclaimed (and rightly so) 10-part thriller about the country's version of MI6, the General Directorate of External Security - or DGSE, for short. Like all the best spy stories The Bureau deals heavily in character, relationships, trust and betrayal, with a skein of geopolitics laid over the top and the baroque gun play and car chases of the Bond and Bourne franchises well down in the mix. The series screened on Amazon Prime in the UK last year after its 2015 debut in France, and after a rip-roaring season two, it has already been renewed for season three.

French A-lister Mathieu Kassovitz plays Guillaume Debailly, recently returned from Damascus where he was undercover for six years. He left behind a lover - married university history professor Nadia El Mansour (Zineb Triki) - and an identity he finds it increasingly difficult to part with: Paul Lefebvre, supposedly a teacher. When Nadia unaccountably turns up in Paris, the passion is re-kindled. But is she all that she seems? When episode two ends with Debailly wired up to a polygraph and recounting some of the details of their relationship to persons unknown, you start to wonder what all her furtive mobile phone use was about. Meanwhile the Bureau is seeking to place an agent in Tehran to work in the Iranian nuclear industry and a DGSE agent has gone missing in Algiers, a fact which compromises the Bureau's operations across Africa and the Middle East.

Takashi Miike’s Black Society Trilogy (18)

Arrow Films, £24.99

HIS prodigious output contains everything from family films to spy thrillers and J-Horror classics like 1999's Audition, but Takashi Miike is best known for violent, stylish and idiosyncratic crime thrillers set among Japan's mafia gangs with titles like Osaka Tough Guys, Young Thugs and Full Metal Yakuza. This two-disc collection from Arrow pulls together three of the most acclaimed examples which, though connected more by casting than anything else, form what's known as his Black Society trilogy.

And violent they most certainly are. The best known is Shinjuku Triad Society, from 1995, which opens with a montage of scenes showing a nightclub, an abattoir and a police clean-up after a particularly bloody gang fight - there's a close-up of a severed head within the first few seconds - and then follows a three-way clash between the police and opposing groups of Chinese triad gangs.

In the atmospheric Rainy Dog, from 1997, the action moves to Taiwan where former yakuza hitman Yuuji (Show Aikawa) is licking his wounds having been cut loose by his gang boss. In Taipei he finds alternative work of the same sort, at one point shooting a man dead as he eats with his family. Followed doggedly by the mute son a former girlfriend drops off at the start of the film, and pursued by a killer from his past in Japan, he finds himself embroiled in a tale of spiralling violence which is only ever going to have one outcome. As the title suggests, virtually every scene is played out in torrential rain.

Finally there's Ley Lines, from 1999, which follows three young Japanese friends led by Ryuichi (Kazuki Kitamura) who travel to Tokyo, fall in with a prostitute and then fall foul of a local Triad gang. As ever, the female characters generally fare poorly which is to say that Miike's portrayal of Japan's societal underbelly - and in particular its sexual foibles - is always graphic and unflinching.

His Girl Friday (U)

Sony Pictures Homes Entertainment, £17.99

REGARDED as one of the best screwball comedies of all time, Howard Hawks's 1939 adaptation of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's play The Front Page is also a fast and furious dissection of American journalism in all its ugly glory. Cary Grant is on top form as unscrupulous (but fastidiously well-dressed) New York Post editor Walter Burns while Rosalind Russell plays his one-time star reporter Hildy Johnson, who has left the paper to marry a nice-but-dim insurance salesman from Albany (here used as shorthand for Hicksville). Burns will do absolutely anything to get her back. Adding a hefty dose of romantic complication is the fact that Johnson is the former Mrs Burns, though it's clear from the off that if two driven, wise-cracking “newspapermen” were ever made for each other it was this pair.

This two-disc Blu-ray edition from the Criterion Collection comes loaded with extras, including a digitally-restored version of Lewis Milestone's pre-Code 1931 version of The Front Page, made from a recently-discovered print of a director's cut. It's worth watching in its own right but also as part of a compare-and-contrast exercise: Hawks's crucial innovation for his version was to make Hildy Johnson female. In the original, she's a man.