The latest releases reviewed.

By now everyone is pretty much aware of the lifestyle changes of Essex boys Depeche Mode. They started off in the early 1980s as clean-cut boys-next-door types and departed the late 1990s as drug-addled, fetish- fixated harbingers of doom, gloom, moan and groan. While the early videos here (including Just Can't Enough) highlight the calm before the storm, there's no getting away from the visual panache of the later Anton Corbijn-directed works (including A Question of Time, Strangelove, Never Let Me Down Again, Enjoy the Silence, Barrel of a Gun and Suffer Well), which serves the band extremely well in terms of their latter-day iconic/outsider status. Extras include a documentary, The Best of Depeche Mode - A Short Film. www.depechemode.com    TONY CLAYTON-LEA

Craig Armstrong's strung-out orchestrations have worked wonders for Massive Attack, Madonna and U2, while his pleasantly plush and majestically overwrought score for Baz Luhrmann's Romeo & Juliet remains a joy. This DVD was initially intended to accompany his 2004 Piano Works album of spacey, widescreen and dramatically ethereal solo piano versions of his greatest hits. Given that there's little visual excitement to be had watching a pianist at work for an hour, the footage of Armstrong performing at Studio Éclair in Paris is interspersed with shots of the streetscapes beyond the studio windows. While this may sound like a series of postcard images, there are times when the combination of his playing against the stately city buildings and parks produces some truly striking moments. www.craigarmstrong.com     JIM CARROLL