Not in truth the most comprehensible or riveting of tales, but it doesn't matter much: this is another chance to root around in the imagination of Guillermo del Toro.

An enormous profusion of inventive grotesques could give a small child a year full of nightmares. But in the hands of Del Toro and the comic character's originator, Mike Mignola, it's always humorous as well as scary.

True to form, Del Toro gives us lots of eyes in the wrong places (here it's wings) and masses of odd inventions. The titular golden army are a typically dangerous one, balanced out by millions of evil insects, which make your average cockroach seem benign by comparison.

The DVD is a splendid package too, with commentaries from Jeffrey Tambor (playing practically the only normal human on show), Luke Goss and fiery Selma Blair in addition to Del Toro's own, and a fascinating look at the vivid visuals in the director's notebook and how they turned out on screen.

A taste of la vie sur Mars is what Jacques Maillot gives us with his rough-and-ready cop thriller from 1970s France, full of fag-smoking, big hairstyles, retro-porn dirty bits and unending tribal warfare between cops and bad guys which allowed for a good deal of fraternisation with the enemy.

Guillaume Canet and François Cluzet play brothers François and Gaby. The first is a cop having a love affair with the wife of a villain he's just put inside; the other is a fully-fledged criminal just out of the joint, notionally going straight, but soon headed back to his old ways.

The result is an enjoyably rich, gamey stew of crime and family betrayal - and there's an interesting mention of 70s French super-crim Jacques Mesrine, the subject of a new biopic starring Vincent Cassel.

Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's movie about Hurricane Katrina is, in its way, quite as powerful as Spike Lee's massive documentary on the subject.

They follow the fortunes of New Orleans rapper Kimberly Rivers Roberts and quote from the first-person camcorder record she and her husband made of the catastrophe.

It wasn't until seeing this movie that I grasped the full horror of how many people drowned in their own homes: extended families with babies climbed into attics to evade the rising floodwater - and desperately tried to break holes in their ceilings as the water continued inexorably to climb.

The sheer incompetence and complacency of President Bush is, once again, scalp-pricklingly shameful.

There are flashes of insight and genuinely moving moments in this long, meandering, wildly indulgent movie record of poet and singer-songwriter Patti Smith, and the way she went therapeutically back on the road after the death of her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith, in the mid-1990s.

These tours included what were by all accounts sensational appearances with Bob Dylan, although sadly Dylan does not appear here. Smith is transforming almost visibly into an icon: modern music's equivalent of E Annie Proulx, perhaps. She is an engaging and unique figure, and the scenes with her parents are very touching.