To buy

Pat Comer's fly-on-the-dressing-room-wall account of the progress of the Galway football team to All-Ireland success last summer is a sheer delight. Beautifully shot and impeccably paced, it succeeds in giving a real flavour of the tension and excitement of the championship, while conveying both the individual dramas and social context of the story. A perfect Christmas present for fans, but it's also much more than that - it's probably the best film ever made about sport in Ireland.

To rent

"Sliding Doors" (15)

Sporting a convincing Estuary accent, Gwyneth Paltrow plays a young Londoner with serious romantic problems, who finds that she has been fired and, on her way home, misses her train by a millisecond. Or does she? Writer/director Peter Howitt's engaging, undemanding debut splits in two, following the very different consequences of missing or catching that train. It's a neat idea, the sort of what-if cinematic trick that works well for romantic comedy, with good supporting performances from John Lynch, Jeanne Tripplehorne and John Hannah.

"Western" (15)

Manuel Poirier's picaresque road movie is an engagingly offbeat meditation on the human need for affection and companionship, with Sergi Lopez as a suave Spanish salesman and Sacha Bourdo a diminutive Russian vagrant, who form an unlikely alliance and set off on a meandering hitchhiking journey around Brittany, getting drunk and propositioning women along the way. Poirier's affectionate, apparently ramshackle style is in sympathy with his off-beat perceptiveness about human nature.