Eden (15)

Metrodome, £12.99

Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve and based in part on the experiences of her DJ brother Sven, Eden tells the story of the French house music scene which exploded into life in the early 1990s and gave birth to the country's only bona fide global superstars: Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, aka reclusive electro pioneers Daft Punk.

Played by Vincente Lacoste and Arnaud Azoulay, they make only sporadic appearances here, however. We first meet them at a suburban railway station en route to a rave in the early 1990s, see them DJing at a party a couple of years later and watch with amusement as they return from LA in 2013 to be knocked back by a club bouncer – an exact repeat of a scene which took place over a decade earlier.

Instead, Hansen-Løve's central character is Paul Vallée (Félix de Givry), who forms his own duo with a friend and gives it the epically bad name of Cheers. Over the course of the next 21 years we see him rise through the ranks, travel to America to DJ in New York and Chicago, develop a drug habit and eventually crash out of the scene as younger DJs take to the stage and his own beloved garage music starts to become an outdated niche genre.

If you know the oeuvre, you'll know there was a sort of ironic blankness to much of the French music of the era. In what is Eden's most sophisticated touch, Hansen-Løve brings some of this same glossy deadness to the film itself. It's no surprise, then, that she's sometimes compared to Sophia Coppola, whose 2010 drama Somewhere cast Stephen Dorff as a bored Hollywood action star holed up in LA's Chateau Marmont hotel.

If you don't know the oeuvre, however, you'll struggle, in much the same way as Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People will mean little to anyone who hasn't heard of Factory Records. Also Eden's mixture of fictitious characters (Paul and his friends), real-life house greats playing themselves (Tony Humphries among others), and actors playing real-life house greats (Lacoste and Azoulay as Daft Punk) makes it hard to know how much Eden is an impressionistic, inspired-by fabrication and how much an attempt to forensically catalogue a critical decade in French musical history. From Hansen-Løve's own interviews - “I realised nobody had really taken it [the era] seriously, or even looked at it realistically,” she told Sight And Sound - it's clear she's trying the latter. It's a brave attempt but, at 130 minutes, a slightly tedious one.

Red Army (15)

Curzon Artificial Eye, £15.99

Whether you've ever watched an ice hockey match or not, Gabe Polsky's acclaimed 2014 documentary presents a story you can't fail to be gripped by: how the Soviet army put together a team which revolutionised the way the game is played and how their success brought Cold War enmities into the sporting arena with spectacular and (for the Americans and Canadians) embarrassing results.

Polsky, a Chicago-born, Yale-educated ice hockey nut of Russian extraction, describes as “a religious experience” the experience of seeing the Soviet team of the 1980s and it's this side he focusses on. His primary interviewee is the charismatic Slava Fetisov, captain of the Soviet side and subsequently a huge star in North America's National Hockey League, where he led the Detroit Red Wings to back-to-back victories in the coveted Stanley Cup. Fetisov is so famous that he's had an asteroid named after him and it was his bullish refusal to be cowed by the Soviet authorities which opened the way for Russian players to be employed by the top American teams. He's now close to Vladimir Putin, and carving out a political career for himself.

Polsky's film comes with plenty of archive footage of Fetisov and his fellow Russians in action, which is thrilling enough. But the director's quirky editing and Louis Theroux-style interviewing technique give the film added oomph. For instance when an interview with a former KGB officer is interrupted by the man's grand-daughter complaining about him wearing sunglasses, Polsky leaves the section in, and to great effect. Likewise, when he persists with questions to Fetisov as his subject is trying to make a business call, he's given the middle finger in response. Again, it stays in. In fact, it opens the film. It's no surprise, then, that the executive producer is cinematic iconoclast Werner Herzog. Extras include Polsky commentating on a selection of game highlights: his enthusiasm is as infectious as his film is absorbing.

North V South (18)

Metrodome, £14.99

I confess I walked out of this stylised British gangster flick when it screened at the 2015 Edinburgh International Film Festival. Having now watched it all the way through I can report that (a) I left on the 53 minute mark and (b) nothing in the remaining 39 minutes makes me regret my action. Despite a fairly stellar cast - Stephen Berkoff, Bernard Hill, Keith Allen, Freema Agyeman, Greta Scaachi, Geoff Bell (who should have known better) and Brad Moore (the best thing in it) - Steve Nesbit's film falls flat on its boat race as cockney and northern crime lords (Berkoff and Hill respectively) face off against each other in an increasingly hard to follow plot. Throw in a Romeo and Juliet-style romance, exposition-dump voiceovers and a cross-dressing French hitman who travels everywhere by microlight, and you have one of the stupidest films of the year. Avoid.