Public Enemy (15)

Arrow Films, £24.99

RELEASED under Arrow Films' Nordic Noir And Beyond imprint – the beyond in this case stretching only as far as Belgium – this French language crime thriller takes virtually every formulaic Euro-cop trope, chucks them into the blender and still manages to come up looking fresh. Not daisy fresh exactly, but fresh enough to maintain interest over 10 hour-long episodes – thanks in large part to lead actress Stephanie Blanchoud's performance as intense, troubled Brussels detective Chloe Muller.

In truth, the four-strong creative team can't be blamed for centring on themes of serial killing and child abduction given Belgium's recent history, and it's no surprise to learn that Public Enemy is based (very loosely) on the case of Marc Dutroux, who murdered or tortured six girls in the mid-1990s.

Here the killer is Guy Beranger (Angelo Bison), whose release on parole into the hands of a community of rural monks sends Muller out of Brussels on guard duty, a mission aimed at protecting Beranger from the locals as much as the other way round. Troubled by nightmares and visions, and by an early trauma which suggests she has more than a passing acquaintance with child abduction, she finds a fairly routine posting turned on its head when a young girl in the neighbourhood goes missing a week after Beranger arrives. When the girl turns up dead in a chapel and the body bears Beranger's signature mark – a looped incision in the skin – the mood in the village turns ugly. The trouble is, Beranger appears to have been locked up tight in the monastery at the time and can't possibly have committed the crime.

Public Enemy screened on Sky Atlantic in May, and has since been renewed for a second series by Belgian channel La Une, which means we'll be seeing more of the intriguing Ms Muller.

Stalker (PG)

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, £17.99

IN a new, 2K restoration as part of Sony's Criterion Collection, Andrei Tarkovsky's mind-blowing sci-fi puzzler is more than deserving of its masterpiece tag. Engrossing and beguiling from the start of its 161 minute run time to the end, it's based on 1972 Soviet sci-fi novel Roadside Picnic and stars Tarkovsky regulars Anatoli Solonitsyn and Nikolai Grinko as a writer and a scientist respectively who travel into The Zone – a strange, still, endlessly confusing area which has suffered some kind of extra-terrestrial visitation and is now devoid of people and animals. Guiding them through it to a fabled room where their innermost desires will be made to come true is the Stalker (shaven-headed Alexander Kaidanovsky). The opening sections, set outside The Zone, are shot in sepia. When inside The Zone, the film suddenly becomes full colour. But The Wizard Of Oz this is not.

Jonathan Nolan, the man responsible for re-fashioning 1973 film Westworld as a hit HBO series, has cited Stalker as an influence on that show, and it isn't hard to see other films and TV series where its influence has been felt: Lost, for instance, or the look and feel of The Nebuchadnezzar in The Matrix.

As with all of Tarkovsky's films, Stalker leaves an indelible impression, but its the dense philosophising that repays repeated viewings as much as the extraordinarily precise image-making. Extras include an interview with Geoff Dyer, author of Zona: A Book About A Film About A Journey To A Room, and 2002 interviews with composer Eduard Artemyev, set designer Rashit Safiullin and cinematographer Alexander Knyazhinsky, the second lens man Tarkovsky employed – the famously exacting director sacked the first one.

Bridgend (18)

Axiom Films, £22.99

For his first feature film, young Danish documentary maker Jeppe Ronde turns to the Welsh town of Bridgend and in particular the spate of teen suicides which afflicted it a decade ago and which made ghoulish headlines around the world. Ronde brings a noirish Scandinavian eye to the place and to the people, which gives his film a strongly authored feel but makes it hard to shake the feeling that he's an outsider looking in. Perhaps that's why he makes his central character an outsider too: new-girl-in-town Sara (Hannah Murray from Games Of Thrones), who arrives in Bridgend with her father Dave (Steven Waddington). Complicating her life is the fact that Dave also happens to be the new police chief and therefore the man investigating the deaths. Josh O'Connor, fast-rising star of God's Own Country, which opened this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival, plays the dangerous Jamie, who seems to be at the centre of the suicide cult.

Bridgend screened at last year's Glasgow Film Festival but it was at New York's prestigious Tribeca Film Festival where it met with the most acclaim, picking up three awards including Best Actress for Murray.