Five best friends, 48 hours and a bucketload of ecstasy pills make for an enjoyably lightweight slice of pop-cultural ephemera from debut director Justin Kerrigan. Cardiff is the city, and hardcore partying, clubbing and pubbing is on the menu as Jip (John Simm) and his renegade band of McJobbers clock off and head out for a weekend of debauchery. Among Jip's hedonistic posse are the cheeky cockney drug-dealer Moff (Danny Dyer), the terminally jealous boyfriend Koop (Shaun Parkes) and the bad-boy magnet Lulu (Lorraine Pilkington). And that's pretty much it. Our heroes meet in a pub, get drunk, take drugs, go to a club, then to a party, then home and then meet up in another pub, just in time for the closing credits. Along the way there's a shamefully lethargic attempt to establish character back-story: Jip is temporarily sexually impotent because his mother's a prostitute; Koop's father is institutionalised; Lulu has nasty boyfriends; and Moff has conservative parents. But generally Human Traffic is happier at the heart of the party, celebrating the intoxication of club culture-which it does in style. Kerrigan pulls out all the formal stops with an energetic melange of jump cuts, slo-mo, and speeded-up "smudge" motion camerawork. There's also direct addresses to camera, fantasy sequences and some self-conscious cameos from DJ Carl Cox and former-drug dealer Howard Marks, author of Mr Nice. Wall-to-wall music from the likes of Fatboy Slim, William Orbit and even Primal Scream help paste over the occasional cracks in the veneer, which include some particularly duff lines ("We're gonna get more spaced than Neil Armstrong ever did!") and a drawn analysis of drug references in Star Wars, a nod to the films of Kevin Smith, such as Clerks, Mallrats and Chasing Amy. [+]

Producer Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) is behind this decadent comedy about a pair of lowlife but oddly intelligent Welsh brothers who generally make a pain of themselves in their small community, but who get serious about exacting revenge for a family tragedy. Director Kevin Allen succeeds at turning the entire film into a jacked-up freak show, with petty terrorism, cops on the take, a young virgin getting it on with a middle-aged creep and a male choir inexplicably singing Mungo Jerry's ancient hit "In the Summertime". Twin Town is loony, nasty stuff all around, but the only good laughs in the movie are top loaded into the first few minutes. After that, it's sheer tedium. -Tom Keogh.

Shameless, the BAFTA award-winning and brilliantly funny drama series from writer Paul Abbott, follows the roller coaster lives and loves of the highly un-orthodox yet extremely tightly-knit Gallagher family. Head of the family, in name only, is Dad Frank - a feckless, charmless, self-pitying, unemployed bully - a model father. Since mum went AWOL, dad hit the bottle leaving his six remarkably well-balanced children Fiona, Lip, Ian, Debbie, Carl, and Liam to fend for themselves. But the Gallaghers need not worry anymore, now they've teamed up with the local gangsters the Maguires, who continue to explode the myth of a conventional family. The Complete Series 1-5 Box Set is a sixteen disc set consisting of all five series, plus the feature length Christmas and New Year Specials. Extras - Behind the scenes with David Threlfall - Audio commentaries on Episodes 9 & 11 - Building the Shameless estate - Outtakes - Deleted Scenes.

While the plot of this Australian film may seem a bit familiar (the Ugly Duckling meets Dirty Dancing), the humourous tone and superb dance sequences will make you forget the movie's predictability. Scott (Paul Mercurio) is a champion ballroom dancer who wants to dance "his own steps". Fran is the homely, beginning dancer who convinces Scott that he should dance his own steps. with her. Complicating matters are Scott's domineering mother (Pat Thompson), a former dancer herself, who wants her son to win the Australian Pan-Pacific Championship (the same contest she lost years ago), and a conniving dance committee that is determined that "there are no new steps!" The dancing is enjoyable, yet not overwhelming, and the movie strives hard not to take itself too seriously (the beginning of the film is even styled as a pseudo-documentary). Strictly Ballroom, while not so subtly imparting its moral ("A life lived in fear is a life half-lived"), is a funny romp that's sure to be a crowd pleaser. -Jenny Brown, Amazon. com.

Jennifer Garner's lips grow more Angelina-esque every year. In the romantic comedy Catch and Release, Garner (Alias,13 Going On 30) plays Gray Wheeler, a young woman whose fiance dies unexpectedly before the wedding, leaving Gray unable to afford her home-so she moves in with her fiance's best friends, Sam (Kevin Smith, director of Clerks and Dogma) and Dennis (Sam Jaeger, Lucky Number Slevin). But the presence of another old friend named Fritz (Timothy Olyphant, Deadwood) leads to the unveiling of a secret: Gray's fiance had a child with another woman. Catch and Release lacks the clear story structure that most romantic comedies are built on, but trades it for a richer sense of the ambiguities of human relationships. Garner, though lovely and personable, is a bit bland-fortunately, she's surrounded by actors with all kinds of edges, including Smith (who shows an unexpected and uncloying earnest side), Fiona Shaw (from the Harry Potter movies) as the fiance's grieving mother, and Juliette Lewis (Cape Fear), who demonstrates once again her powers as a fearless and surprising actress. Catch and Release is an uneven movie with a remarkably elegant visual style that sometimes clashes with the workman-like dialogue, but it can't be written off as the same old Hollywood claptrap. Though a happy ending is inevitable, the path it takes has some surprising turns and flashes of unexpected emotional depth. - Bret Fetzer.

You wouldn't think that a movie, which mostly consists of two old guys talking could be a thriller, but that's exactly what L'Homme du Train is. French singer Johnny Hallyday plays a professional criminal who comes to a small town to take part in a robbery. By chance, he meets talkative Jean Rochefort, who invites the laconic Hallyday to stay at his house because the hotel is closed. The two form an unlikely friendship, each curious about (and envious of) the other's life. But all the while plans for the robbery continue, while Rochefort is preparing for a dangerous event of his own. The pitch-perfect performances make L'Homme du Train completely involving. Rochefort and Hallyday play off of each other beautifully; it's impossible to put your finger on what makes these subtle, supple scenes so magnetic. The whole is directed with spare authority by Patrice Leconte (La Veuve de Saint-Pierre). -Bret Fetzer.

Britain's foremost multi-award-winning joke technician Jimmy Carr returns with his fourth live stand-up DVD, Jimmy Carr In Concert. No-one writes sharper or meaner jokes and no-one delivers them better than Jimmy. He commands his audience with twisted little aphorisms - 'the sort of thing you might find in a fortune cookie baked by Satan' (Sunday Herald) - with no-one escaping his biting, withering sarcasm and take-no-prisoners approach to subject matter. The release also includes a stack of exclusive DVD extras, including a specially commissioned 36-minute cartoon - a montage of Jimmy Carr's most brutal audience putdowns - brought to life by Jimmy drawn in various different animated guises. Here we get to see Jimmy, amongst other things, as a life-sized puppet, Jimmy `cartoonised', line-drawn and sketched Monty Python-style as he battles and belittles audience members who have dared to heckle! Bonus Material Carrtoons - a specially commissioned animated feature starring Jimmy Carr. Carrtoons Comic Strip - nine bespoke cartoon comic strips. Alternative subtitles - Australian, Glaswegian, Polish, Scouse and Welsh.

After a string of mediocre movies, director Tim Burton regains his footing as he shifts from macabre fairy tales to southern tall tales. Big Fish twines in and out of the oversized stories of Edward Bloom, played as a young man by Ewan McGregor and as a dying father by Albert Finney. Edward's son Will (Billy Crudup) sits by his father's bedside but has little patience with the old man's fables, because he feels these stories have kept him from knowing who his father really is. Burton dives into Bloom's imagination with zest, sending the determined young man into haunted woods, an idealised southern town, a travelling circus and much more. The result is sweet but-thanks to the director's dark and clever sensibility-never saccharine. The film also features Jessica Lange, Alison Lohman, Helena Bonham Carter, Danny DeVito and Steve Buscemi. -Bret Fetzer.

Sophia Coppola's alternately dreamy and unsettling film about five suburban sisters who all mysteriously kill themselves (the voice-over tells you as much in the first five minutes) casts a witchy spell that lingers like drugstore perfume on a hot day. Beautifully adapted from Jeffrey Eugenides' icily perfect novel (perhaps the best, if not only, work of fiction narrated exclusively in the first-person plural), the 1970s-set film is constructed as the collective memory of the neighbourhood boys who worshipped the beautiful Lisbon girls, blonde sylph-like teen siblings whose beauty and self-destruction still haunts and perplexes the narrators, now grown men. Why did they do it? Maybe because their Catholic mother (Kathleen Turner, magnificently clenched) locked them all up when near-youngest daughter Lux (the exquisite Kirsten Dunst) stayed out all night after the prom. Maybe it was due to a kind of pubertal feminine hysteria, set off by the first suicide of the youngest daughter Cecilia. Maybe they were infected by a more general malaise (the film fairly teams with images of dying elm trees, infested lakes and fetid nastiness). Or maybe they will just never know what it's like, in the words of Cecilia, to be a 13-year-old girl. Coppola has a canny eye for 1970s kitsch and the tawdry, touching magic totems of girlhood (tampons, bright bikinis, half-used make-up) and coaxes terrific deadpan performances both from the younger cast and the veterans. (James Woods as the nerdy Lisbon patriarch is as delightfully cast against type as Turner. ) For all the languid gloom, there is great wit in the observation of 1970s decor and playful touches abound: airbrushed flashbacks like vintage Timotei commercials; inserts to reveal Lux has the name of her date magic markered on her knickers; teeth and eyes that sparkle unnaturally with post-production tricks. The soundtrack hits just the right wistful ironic note with a mix of period tunes by Todd Rungren, Gilbert O'Sullivan and the like, complemented by the electronica of French pop band Air (whose standalone efforts for the film are also available on a separate CD. [+]

Blarney and bliss, mixed in equal proportions. John Wayne plays an American boxer who returns to the Emerald Isle, his native land. What he finds there is a fiery prospective spouse (Maureen O'Hara) and a country greener than any Ireland seen before or since-it's no surprise The Quiet Man won an Oscar for cinematography. It also won an Oscar for John Ford's direction, his fourth such award. The film was a deeply personal project for Ford (whose birth name was Sean Aloysius O'Fearna), and he lavished all of his affection for the Irish landscape and Irish people on this film. He also stages perhaps the greatest donnybrook in the history of movies, an epic fistfight between Wayne and the truculent Victor McLaglen-that's Ford's brother, Francis, as the elderly man on his deathbed who miraculously revives when he hears word of the dustup. Barry Fitzgerald, the original Irish elf, gets the movie's biggest laugh when he walks into the newlyweds' bedroom the morning after their wedding, and spots a broken bed. The look on his face says everything. The Quiet Man isn't the real Ireland, but as a delicious never-never land of Ford's imagination, it will do very nicely. -Robert Horton.