Unearthing Hidden treasure

This week sees the release of brilliant, Oscar-nominated French film Hidden, Orson Welles's remastered follow-up to Citizen Kane, the Rolling Stones's road movie Sypathy For The Devil, made by eccentric director Jean-Luc Godard, and low-budget Brit fantasy flick MirrorMask.

Hidden
Artificial Eye, 15, £19.99
Review: Nina Caplan
*****

Michael Haneke is a variable director but Hidden is his best yet: a cunning construction that examines the voyeurism of cinema via a clever, self-reflexive story. Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) are being filmed by persons unknown; they receive videotapes of their unexceptional actions wrapped in a sinister drawing. Who is filming them? And why? And, given that we are frequently given the culprit's viewpoint - and don't always know whether we're watching the videos or the so-called reality - how implicated are we, the viewers?

Building skilfully to a powerful denouement, this is a fantastic thriller that deserved the Oscar nomination that only its cross-cultural origins (made in France, by an Austrian) cruelly denied it.

Extras: Haneke interview, making-of doc.

The Magnificent Ambersons
Universal Pictures, U, £15.99
Review: Nina Caplan
****

'The magnificence of the Ambersons began in 1873...' but their grandeur, like Orson Welles's, was complex and transitory and his film The Magnificent Ambersons is as flawed as the family it describes. Simon Callow's new volume of Welles biography, Hello Americans, goes into sympathetic detail over the director's problematic shoot and subsequent desertion of his film but, although it's frustrating that we'll never have his original version, there is much to love here.

Joseph Cotten is marvellous as Eugene, harbinger of a speedier, less gracious world but in love with the more dignified past in the form of Isabel (Dolores Costello). There is wonderful cinematography, as you'd expect from the enfant terrible who had made Citizen Kane only the year before, while the layers of nostalgia - Welles's for some 19th-century utopia, ours for a golden age of cinema - build up to a delightful climax.

Extras: Interview with Bill Krohn, who 13 years ago put together surviving footage from It's All True, the film for which Welles deserted Ambersons.

Sympathy For The Devil
Fremantle Home Entertainment, 15, £15.99
Review: Nina Caplan
****

Even by Jean-Luc Godard's standards, Sympathy For The Devil is a bizarre concoction: part civil rights drama, part Rolling Stones doc, filmed in long takes as the band constructed the title song in 1968.

The two strands are melded with the usual Godardian glue: intertitles, graffiti and narrative non sequiturs but, although this is a mess, it's a fascinating one - more so because included is One Plus One, the director's cut, as well as the better-known version (which famously prompted Godard to punch his producer on stage at the NFT after it was created without the tyrant director's permission).

Extras: Fascinating behind-the-scenes doc constructed in Godardian style, full of humour and nuggets of gossip.

MirrorMask
Sony Pictures, PG, £19.99
Review: Larushka Ivan-Zadeh
***

Low-ish budget, Brit-created flick MirrorMask has more creativity than a year of blockbusters. Helena (Stephanie Leonidas) is a 15-year-old circus girl who wants 'to run away and join real life', until real life intrudes, when her mother (Gina McKee) is hospitalised and she retreats into her imagination.