The Salesman (12)

Curzon Artificial Eye, £15.99

Asghar Farhadi. If you know the name, it's because he's the Iranian director who refused to attend this year's Oscar ceremony in protest at Donald Trump's now-infamous travel ban. Typically, he won on the night, giving him a second Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film to sit alongside the one he did pick up in person in 2012 for A Separation. Prior to February's ceremony The Salesman had already won two awards at the 2016 Cannes film festival (Best Screenplay for Farhadi, and Best Actor for the film's star Shahab Hosseini) and it comes now to DVD and Blu-ray courtesy of Curzon Artificial Eye, with a package of extras which includes a featurette on Farhadi's response to the travel ban: a free outdoor screening of The Salesman mounted in London's Trafalgar Square just a few hours before the Oscar ceremony began.

In The Salesman, Hosseini plays Emad, Tehran teacher by day and amateur actor by night, who's in the middle of rehearsing a production of Arthur Miller's The Death Of A Salesman with his wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) when the couple are forced to leave their home. A cast member helps them out and they move into a flat he owns, empty save for a locked room containing the previous occupant's belongings. One night the entry-phone rings. Rana thinks it's Emud, buzzes him in and leaves the door open while she washes her hair. When Emud returns home he finds blood everywhere and Rana in hospital. She has been attacked by a person or persons unknown.

As with another 2016 Cannes winner – Cristian Mungiu's Graduation – off-screen violence committed by an unseen actor sets in train a series of events with lasting consequences both for the victim and her immediate family. As Rana clams up and refuses to go to the police, in part because she's ashamed to have been found bloodied and naked in the shower by the couple's new neighbours, Emud obsessively tries to find out who attacked his wife, and why. By journey's end, everyone is damaged. A powerful and exquisitely-paced examination of love, revenge, shame and pride which – though its director wasn't on hand to receive it – is certainly worth its gong.

The Naked Civil Servant (15)

Network, £14.99

Nestling among the clips from Harry Potter and Alien shown in tribute to John Hurt when he died in January you may have spotted a snippet from this, the 1975 adaptation of Quentin Crisp's famous 1968 memoir of the same name.

Made for ITV by Thames Television back when that channel still took risks, it gave Hurt his first BAFTA win and to many it ranks as one of his greatest screen performances. He is certainly magnificent in it, dominating virtually every scene as he plays Crisp from his early 20s up to his early 60s, a journey which takes him from middle-class suburbia to art college to the Soho demi-monde where he set up camp, as it were. There are early roles for Roger Lloyd-Pack, John Rhys-Davies and an exuberantly bohemian Patricia Hodge - and don't blink in the closing scene or you'll miss a fresh-faced, tussle-haired Phil Daniels on a Raleigh Chopper. Four years later he'd be on a Lambretta for his break-out role of Jimmy in Franc Roddam's 1979 Mod classic Quadrophenia.

As for the real-life subject, The Naked Civil Servant cemented Crisp's cult status as a fearless and acid-tongued agitator for gay acceptance. Quite how fearless and acid-tongued you can judge for yourself through this re-issue, a high-definition restoration made from the original film released in part to mark the 50th anniversary of the passing of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act which decriminalised homosexuality. Extras include a fascinating interview with Crisp conducted in New York, his home from 1981 until his death in 1999.

Minute Bodies: The Intimate World Of F Percy Smith (U)

BFI, £19.99

F Percy Smith was a naturalist, inventor and film-maker who combined all three activities in the first decades of the 20th century to make an extraordinary series of films using time-lapse and stop-motion photography combined with extreme close-ups. One of his most famous studies, 1910's The Birth Of A Flower, is contained in the extras package of this BFI release dedicated to him. Other highlights include The Wonders Of Harmonic Designing (an awesome demonstration of a drawing method that uses weights at right angles to each other) and The Life Cycle Of A Newt, shot in 1942 just three years before Smith gassed himself at the London home where he made many of his films.

However the main event is Minute Bodies, an edited selection of Smith's original footage set to a pulsing, droning score by Stuart Staples and his band Tindersticks, more commonly found sound-tracking the films of Claire Denis. It provides a brooding and at times menacing sonic backdrop to Smith's films of moulds spreading, alien-looking buds fighting their way through topsoil and more pond life than you can shake a stick at. It all passes by at a stately enough rate to qualify as mesmerising. But for Tindersticks fans who want the music without the visuals, the soundtrack is released today on the City Slang label.