Daughter Of The Nile (15)

Eureka Video, £17.99

Acclaimed Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien made his name with two loose trilogies filmed over an 11 year period between 1984 and 1995. The first dealt with his own family background and childhood, the second with the history of his homeland, beginning with 1989's A City Of Sadness which detailed Taiwan's difficult and bloody post-war period and won Hsiao-hsien the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Now 70 and still working, he was back on the film festival award circuit in 2015 when his sumptuous historical epic Assassin won the Best Director award at Cannes.

In between those two important film cycles Hsiao-hsien made 1987's Daughter Of The Nile, released here under Eureka Video's Masters Of Cinema imprint and a deliberate attempt on his part to engage with Taiwanese youth and its concerns. It takes as its starting point a popular manga comic of the time, the eponymous Daughter Of The Nile, and a teenage fan, Lin (pop singer Lin Hsiao-yang), who finds her life mirroring that of the comic's time-travelling heroine, Carol. Or sort of: Lin doesn't wake up in Ancient Egypt – she's stuck in the badlands of Hsiao-hsien's neon-soaked Taipei – but she does fall for her gangster brother's best friend Ah-sang (Fan Yang) and like Memphis, the hero in her book, he's destined to die young. Meanwhile her mother is long dead, her father is living elsewhere, her brother Lin Hsiao-fang (Jack Kao) is running into trouble of the bullets-and-baseball-bats sort and a variety of relatives come and go through the increasingly dysfunctional family home. Rhythmic and episodic, Daughter Of The Nile blends the observational camera-work of Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu with the after-hours milieu of Jean-Pierre Melville's French gangster flicks – only in vibrant colour rather than moody black and white.

Madame De (U)

BFI, £14.99

Released in 1953 and based on a novel by Louise Leveque de Vilmorin published two years earlier, Max Ophüls' penultimate film is simple enough: it tells the story of a pair of ear-rings – sold at the start of the film by Louise (Danielle Darrieux), the Belle Epoque Countess of the title whose surname is famously never revealed and who claims she lost them at the opera; bought by her General husband (Charles Boyer) and given to his mistress (Lia De Leo) before he packs her off to Constantinople; sold there by her to pay for a gambling debt; bought by Italian diplomat Baron Fabrizio Donati (Vittorio de Sica, Italian director of neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves); and then inadvertently returned to Louise by him when the pair meet and fall in love.

Predictably enough it ends with a duel – outcome unknown – and much of the rest of the running time is taken up by a dizzying array of balls, trips to the opera or theatre, and wry exchanges between the three central characters. “I lack the imagination for unhappiness” the General tells Louise at one point, having earlier decided that their marriage is only “superficially superficial”. These are languid sophisticates skating through a world of privilege which requires deceit and flippancy in equal measure. Oscar-nominated for its costumes, it's a consummate piece of film-making in which Ophüls, who died four years later, returns to some of the themes of his 1933 work Liebelei. It too features an ill-fated love affair and a duel.

The film is released here on Blu-ray for the first time, and the extras include an hour-long 2013 documentary about the German-born director and the making of Madame De … plus a 2005 interview with Alain Jessua, Ophüls' assistant director on it.

Prevenge (15)

Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment, £9.99

Actress and comedian Alice Lowe not only wrote and directed this blackly comic serial killer flick about a pregnant woman driven to kill by her unborn child – she also starred in it while heavily pregnant with her first child.

Lowe plays Ruth, whose partner has died in a climbing accident for which she (or her unborn child, or her subconscious speaking through her unborn child) blames the other members of the party. And so she sets out to murder them one by one. It's a neat framing device which allows Lowe to invert the norms of the slasher flick – it's usually the helpless woman meeting a grisly end, not inflicting pain herself – and also lets her bus in a pleasing supporting cast of victims which includes Scottish actress Kate Dickie, Games Of Thrones star Gemma Whelan (most recently seen as Karen Mathews in BBC's acclaimed true life drama The Moorside), Murder In Successville's Tom Davis (cover your eyes when he gets his comeuppance, gents) and Kayvan Novak, of Facejacker and Four Lions fame. An assured debut from the multi-talented Lowe which promises much for the future.