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Tom Timney and Geoffrey Macnab highlight their ten video choices of the month, and overleaf review, respectively, the rest ofthe rental and retail releases

VIDEO CHOICE

The End of St Petersburg/Konyets Sankt Peterhurga

Vsevolod Pudovkin/USSR 1927

Pudovkin's epic account of the Russian Revolution was made to celebrate the tenth anniversary of October 1917. It opens deep in the countryside and follows a young peasant as he trudges to Petersburg in search of work. An ingenuous type, he unthinkingly becomes a strike-breaker. The story of how he learns to love the Bolsheviks is didactic and predictable. Arguably, the real strength of the film lies in its savage satire; for instance Pudovkin's cross-cutting between soldiers knee-deep in mud in First World War trenches and fat businessmen scurrying around the stock exchange, or the brutal lampooning of Kerensky's provisional government - Kerensky and his followers are shown as jaded, decadent aristocrats, playing at politics.

Retail Premiere: Tartan; £15.99; B/W; Certificate PG; 122 mins; Screenplay Nathan Zarkhi; Lead Actors A. Christyakov, Vera Baranovskaya, Sergei Komarov

Saluting the Bolsheviks: Pudovkin's "The End of St Petersburg'

The Century of Cinema: Typically British/Irish Cinema-Ourselves Alone?

Mike DiVb & Stephen Frearsponald Taylor Black/UK 1995/Ireland/UK J995

Frears' idiosyncratic trawl through British cinema touches on the usual bugbears - class-consciousness, sexual repression, an inferiority complex in the face of Hollywood, dotty character actors and too much tea-drinking. Even if Frears didn't set out to make a comprehensive history, some of his oversights are still surprising. He skips over the silent era and does not pay much attention to the avant-garde. But in its own bluff, typically British way, this is informative and entertaining, with contributions from Alexander Mackendrick, Gavin Lambert (who memorably describes Diana Dors as, "the only genuine primitive in British cinema"), Michael Apted and Alan Parker.

Black's documentary on Irish cinema is more conventionally structured, combining archive footage with interviews. Most 'Irish' cinema isn't made by Irish film-makers, but by outsiders (John Ford, John Huston, Carol Reed and so on) with their own, often sentimental notions about how Ireland should be represented. This is the paradox Black explores, yet in doing so, he risks falling between two stools himself.

Retail Premiere: Academy; £15.99; Certificate E; 73 mins/51 mins; Producer Colin MacCabe/Donald Taylor...