MICHAEL DWYERand DONALD CLARKEreview this week's DVD releases

HUNGER ★★★★★
Directed by Steve McQueen. Starring Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham I

Winner of the Camera d'Or at Cannes, McQueen's thoughtful, harrowing dramatisation of the 1981 IRA hunger strike in Long Kesh features Fassbender in an astonishing performance of powerful expressiveness as Bobby Sands. This haunting, boldly unconventional film has been achieved with a concern for the human cost on both sides of the political divide. The DVD includes a making-of documentary. MD

THE VISITOR ★★★★
Directed by Tom McCarthy. Starring Richard Jenkins, Hiam Abbass, Haaz Sleiman, PG cert

Subtly expressive character actor Jenkins finally gets a leading role worthy of his talent – and an Oscar nomination – in this captivating, perfectly understated drama. He plays a lonely college lecturer who finds a Muslim couple in his New York apartment and allows them to stay. In addressing the fate of undocumented immigrants in post-9/11 US, writer-director McCarthy captures their plight with depth and compassion. MD

CHARLIE BARTLETT ★★★★
Directed by Jon Poll. Starring Anton Yelchin, Hope Davis, Robert Downey Jr, Kat Dennings 18 cert

Yelchin is charismatic as a precocious student sent to a public school, where he taps into the anxieties of his fellow teens by dispensing amateur therapy – and drugs. Downey Jr plays the alcoholic headmaster in a movie that blends knockabout comedy with darker humour, and proves as risk-taking and irresistible as its protagonist. MD

GHOST TOWN ★
Directed by David Koepp. Starring Ricky Gervais, Greg Kinnear, Téa Leoni, Kristen Wiig, Dana Ivey, Billy Campbell 12 cert

Gervais is on auto-pilot as a curmudgeonly Manhattan dentist who, after a near-death experience, becomes a reluctant conduit for troubled ghosts with unfinished business. This flat, tedious effort is such formulaic fodder that it turns all gooey and sentimental as it stumbles towards its moralising resolution. MD

THEN SHE FOUND ME ★
Directed by Helen Hunt. Starring Helen Hunt, Colin Firth, Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler 15 cert

In Hunt's inauspicious feature film debut as writer-director, she plays a 39-year-old New York teacher whose marriage breaks up shortly before she meets her birth mother (Midler) and an English single parent (Firth). What follows is glibly scripted, manipulatively directed melodrama. MD

88 MINUTES ★
Directed by John Avnet. Starring Al Pacino, Alicia Witt, Leelee Sobieski, Amy Brennema, William Forsythe 16 cert

Dr Pacino, a forensic psychiatrist, investigates a series of murders that mirror those committed by one of his old foes. Pacino is, perversely, relatively restrained, but the film – absurd, offensive, ugly, deranged – is still among the very worst of his fitful career. DC