The Mourning Forest (12)

Eureka Video, £17.99

Japanese director Naomi Kawase's stately meditation on death, ageing and grieving won her the prestigious Grand Prix award at the 2007 Cannes film festival and is given a 10th anniversary re-issue here by Eureka as part of its Masters Of Cinema strand.

Essentially a two-hander, it follows the relationship between Machiko (Machiko Ono), a young worker at an old people's home in rural Japan, and Mr Shigeki (Shigeki Uda), a taciturn, irascible and unpredictable resident obsessed with the memory of his wife, Mako, who died 33 years earlier. Like him, Machiko is also grieving: for her young son, who died in an unspecified accident.

Subtlety and understatement are Kawase's favoured tools, and the story unspools in episodic fashion until Machiko takes Mr Shigeki for a drive, skids off the road and then, when he runs away, follows him into the forest where they are both soon lost. A long, dark, cold night of revelation follows as the cause of Machiko's son's death becomes clear, and Mr Shigeki is visited by Mako's ghost – they waltz together in a clearing. When he plunges further into the forest on some kind of quest, Machiko can only follow.

Risk (15)

Dogwoof, £12.99

This revealing documentary about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange starts in 2011 in the wake of the publication of leaks provided by US soldier Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning. With the odd hiatus, it runs up to the dropping earlier this year of the sexual assault case brought against Assange by Swedish prosecutors, a charge which caused him to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Much of the footage is shot there and some of it, such as when Lady Gaga turns up to film an interview with Assange, is pleasingly bizarre. Other footage reveals Assange to be, by turns, pompous, self-aggrandising, narcissistic, domineering, slightly creepy and, yes, charismatic.

The director, by the way, is investigative journalist and film-maker Laura Poitras – and if you know the name it's because one of the other projects which caused her to down tools on the Assange documentary was her collaboration with fellow journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill of The Guardian in putting the Edward Snowden leaks into the public domain. (In Snowden, Oliver Stone's film about the former CIA intelligence officer, Poitras is played by Melissa Leo).

Poitras films Assange as he sets out to fight the sexual assault allegations – there's an awkward scene with Helena Kennedy QC – and follows various other Wikileaks activists to places such as Tunis, Cairo and Washington. She airs leaked audio of an FBI agent discussing her in the New York field office, shows high profile hacktivist Jacob Appelbaum of the Tor Project laying into a room full of suited Egyptian telecoms executives, and films Assange trying (vainly) to get Hillary Clinton on the phone to warn her about an upcoming leak.

In the explanatory inter-titles which pepper the footage, Poitras sometimes falls into to the same sort of protestor-speak shorthand that her subjects use, such as when she refers to “telecoms” meaning big (i.e. corporate and self-serving) telecommunications companies. A late revelation that early in the course of filming she had began a relationship with Appelbaum, who by then had left his position at the Tor Project after allegations of sexual abuse and who she had filmed using an ill-judged sexual metaphor to a room full of hijab-wearing Tunisian activists, underlines the extent to which the lines became blurred. An intriguing film that never quite goes where the viewer – or the director – expect it to.

Lord Of The Flies (PG)

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, £17.99

Did Sony rush release this celebrated 1963 adaptation of William Golding's famous novel to capitalise on the furore surrounding Channel 4's Eden: Paradise Lost programme? Or was it just good luck that the themes of the first – how people behave when resources are scarce, all social norms have been abandoned and a kind of poisonous anarchy reigns – chime perfectly with the second? Who knows. Either way, it's an appropriate time to give another viewing to Peter Brook's film, here looking as good as it ever did thanks to a lush, 4K digital restoration and re-engineered soundtrack.

Most people are familiar with Golding's 1954 novel. It not, it's about a group of schoolboys who turn feral and savage when they're marooned alone on an island after a plane crash during some kind of unspecified conflict. The film stays true to the novel and, just like it, has remained provocative and shocking over 50 years after its original release. Though in any other directorial hands it might have come to feel dated, Brook's fly-on-the-wall approach to shooting his young actors has kept it fresh.

Among the wealth of extras are an audio recording of Golding reading passages from the novel, never-before-seen home footage shot by the young actors during production, a deleted scene, audio commentaries by Peter Brook and cameraman/editor Gerald Feil, and a new interview with Feil.