The latest releases reviewed

As Christie continues to demonstrate her depth and range in Away from Herthis four-film set features memorable performances from early in her career. John Schlesinger's Billy Liar!(1963) featured the 22-year-old Christie in her first major role, as the friend of the eponymous fantasist played by Tom Courtenay.

Two years later, Schlesinger's Darling, one of the definitive Swinging Sixties movies, cast Christie as an ambitious, amoral model, a striking performance which won her the best actress Oscar. In Schlesinger's Thomas Hardy adaptation, Far from the Madding Crowd(1967), handsomely photographed by Nicolas Roeg, Christie is radiant as Bathsheba Everdene, who is torn between three men played by Alan Bates, Terence Stamp and Peter Finch.

Finally, Joseph Losey's enthralling, emotionally charged 1971 film of LP Hartley's The Go-Betweenis set in 1910s England, with Christie as the upper-class woman engaged to be married but involved in a secret affair with a farmer (Alan Bates). MD

Field follows In the Bedroomwith another incisive and riveting US suburban drama. Wilson and Winslet capture all the passion of married parents drawn into an adulterous affair with each other, and the Oscar-nominated Haley is quietly powerful as a paroled sex offender whose return home sparks tensions in the area. This is thoughtful, insightful and challenging cinema. MD

Altman's swansong is an uncharacteristically affectionate and optimistic picture that proves irresistibly appealing in its elegy for the end of an era (the last broadcast of Garrison Keillor's live radio show), although it now serves the same poignant function for Altman's life and work. MD

After 20 years working on Hollywood blockbusters (including RoboCopand Basic Instinct), Dutch director Verhoeven returned home for a wartime thriller set in 1944-45, when a resourceful young Jewish woman will do anything to survive. While unusually complex for its genre, this is primarily an eventful and expertly paced action adventure. MD

Tykwer, director of Run Lola Run, belatedly delivers an adaptation of Patrick Süskind's novel concerning a murderous lunatic - possessor of the most sensitive nose in 18th-century France - who sets out to capture the olfactory essence of humanity. Whishaw is compelling in the lead role and the production is certainly lavish. But cinema is the wrong medium for an investigation of scent. The two-disc DVD adds little of interest. DC

Set over 24 eventful hours, Williams's gripping debut film employs a time-shifting structure to unravel a corrosive drama rooted in exploitation, fear and danger. It follows the ordeal of a 25-year-old prostitute (Stanley) and a young girl (Groome) on the run from the lackeys of a paedophile gangster. MD