Toni Erdmann (15)

Soda Pictures, £19.99

Awarded the Best Film of 2016 accolade by many critics, and a hit at last year's Cannes film festival where it screened in competition, this German comedy-drama from director Maren Ade stars Peter Simonischeck as Winfried, a genial, bumbling divorcee with a grown-up daughter who lives for his pet dog and is hopelessly fond of pranks. We see him at play in the film's opening sequence: pretending that a package being delivered by a postman is for his wayward brother who has just been released from prison, he sets off to get him and soon returns in a wig and wearing a handcuff.

When the dog dies, Winfried's life is turned upside down. And so, having sensed from one of her rare visits home that his outwardly successful daughter Ines (Sandra Huller) isn't as happy as she makes out in her high-powered job in Bucharest, he travels to Romania from Germany to visit her.

What he finds confirms his suspicions, so in a cock-eyed attempt to re-connect he adopts an alter ego, Toni Erdmann, complete with ludicrous wig and buck teeth. Ines reluctantly plays along as Toni pops up here and there – at a club, where he pretends to Ines's friends that he's a well-connected German businessman; at a party, where he pretends to be the German ambassador – and gradually the pair are reconciled. Sort of, anyway.

Put like that it doesn't sound like much. But over a massive running time (a shade under three hours) Ade allows her characters space to develop and interact so that the film feels more like a condensed mini-series than a feature. Simonischeck and Huller both act out of their skins too, but it's the jaw-dropping final act which is the real crowd pleaser: one of the most inventive, bizarre, anarchic and toe-curling party scenes you will ever see in a movie.

Citizen Jane: Battle For The City (U)

Dogwoof, £15.99

Directed by film-maker, journalist and critic Matt Tyrnauer, also the man behind an acclaimed 2008 documentary about fashion designer Valentino, Citizen Jane tells the story of author-turned-community activist Jane Jacobs and her battle to stop swathes of New York being earmarked for slum clearance and bulldozed in the 1960s. Pitted against her were developers and city planners, in particular New York's so-called “master builder”, Robert Moses. When Jacobs's own neighbourhood in Greenwich's West Village was in the cross-hairs she organised a vigorous and imaginative local campaign which can be viewed as a sort of Ground Zero for all grass roots campaigns since. More than that, her 1961 book The Death And Life Of American Cities came to form, along with Rachel Caron's Silent Spring (1962) and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), a trio of seminal texts written by women which would give to the later political struggles of the 1960s an intellectual bedrock. She looked cool too: a sparky, feisty figure in heavy-rimmed oval glasses, her steel-coloured hair cut into a short bob.

It's a great story and an inspiring one, which Tyrnauer tells in straight-forward fashion, using talking heads (many bearing titles like “Urban theorist” or, in the case of TED Talk guru Geoffrey West, “Theoretical Physicist”) and a wealth of archive footage, among it interviews with Jacobs and Moses, dizzying aerial shots of New York and vintage photographs of some of the areas Jacobs couldn't save, such as Harlem and the Bronx. Two things come over very clearly, though: first, that Jacobs's main ideas – you cannot impose order on cities without damaging them; cities are created by people not planners; and cities exist primarily at street level so vibrant cities need a vibrant street culture – are as relevant today as they were then. And second, that developers, city planners and city officials still haven't learned much of the above.

Hinterland Trilogy (15)

Arrow Films, £34.99

Season three of the gloomy Anglo-Welsh crime drama concludes on BBC Four tomorrow. But if you missed it, or you want to binge on all 13 90 minute episodes, Arrow release the Trilogy boxset under their Nordic Noir imprint. It's a happy home for the series: despite what the makers of Shetland might like to think, Hinterland (or Y Gwyll, to give it its Welsh title) is about the closest British TV has come to replicating the lugubrious feel of Scandinavian hits like The Killing, The Bridge and Trapped. Scenes of rural isolation abound, bad weather is a constant and the regular use of Welsh, even in the English version (two were filmed), underscores the feeling signalled by the show's title: we are, refreshingly, deep in the Celtic fringe. It's just a shame we still haven't managed a Gaelic equivalent.

To the plot and the characters: Richard Harrington is troubled DCI Tom Mathias, newly posted to Aberystwyth as the series starts and trying to put personal tragedy behind him by throwing himself into a sequence of deaths and murders against an overarching narrative about police corruption which has strong post-Saville undertones.