BARRY DIDCOCK

Nature Boy (15)

Simply Media, £24.99

Dalkeith-born screenwriter Bryan Elsley is the patron saint of troubled youth. He cut his teeth adapting Iain Bank's The Crow Road for television in 1996 - Joe McFadden played Prentice McHoan - and hit paydirt a decade later with Skins for Channel 4.

In between, in 2000, the BBC aired this, created and written by Elsley and directed by another man-on-the-make, Joe Wright (Atonement, Anna Karenina). It stars Paul McGann alongside a 23-year-old Lee Ingleby as 17-year-old foster child David Witton, the nature boy of the title whose twin concerns are finding solace in the outdoors and tracking down the father (McGann) who walked out on him as a four-year-old.

Revisiting the series 16 years on, two things quickly become apparent: how much slicker TV dramas of this sort are today, and how much more risk averse. Here we have teenagers indulging in casual violence, abusive sexual relationships, drugs, alcohol and arson. We have nudity, hallucinatory visions, out-of-control classrooms, chaotic foster homes and animal cruelty (ever seen a parrot clubbed to death on prime time telly?). We even have a sympathetic paedophile – and all that's just in episode one.

Episode two opens with a wordless eight minute sequence in which David, now a runaway, communes with a fox cub after a shotgun-wielding farmer has sent its mother to join that parrot in the hereafter. Then it gathers pace again as David hides out in the garden of an MP and becomes involved, tangentially, in an environmental campaign. The past is never far away, though. Among the other tyro actors in the cast are future Downton Abbey stars Joanne Froggatt and Raquel Cassidy. But it's Ingleby, looking like a young, spotty Johan Cruyff, who really captivates as gentle man-child David.

The Lesson (15)

New Wave Films, £15.99

Set in a small town in Bulgaria, this tightly-composed domestic drama by directors Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov was much-admired at last year's Edinburgh International Film Festival (by this writer anyway) and has picked up a decent haul of awards since.

It starts small then grows bigger as hard-up teacher Nadezhda (Margita Gosheva) investigates the theft of some money from her purse, then finds that her husband is in debt and the translation company which owes her back wages is going under. She's forced to borrow money from the wrong sort of money lender (though in her world, there is there no right kind) and finds herself drawn deeper and deeper into trouble. Nadezhda's stoicism in the face of mounting despair is what gives this powerful film its emotional energy and, as her desperation pushes her to the edges of legality, she (and we) are taught another sort of lesson: that in times of economic hardship, it's all too easy to step over the line.

When the critics and curatorial elites come to assess how cinema responded to the Eurozone crisis and the Greek financial meltdown, they could do worse than take a look at The Lesson. There are more than a few pointers here.

Ran (12A)

Studio Canal, £12.99

Nearly 30 years after he turned William Shakespeare's Macbeth into Throne Of Blood, Japanese director Akira Kurosawa tackled the playwright's King Lear in his 1985 epic, Ran. It's a fairly loose adaptation, admittedly, though most of the memorable bits remain and the extraordinary 10 minute battle sequence half way through ranks as one of Kurosawa's best. Three decades on again, and with Shakespeare's 400th anniversary upon us, Studio Canal re-release it in this digitally-restored version. Always powerful and stately, it now looks gorgeous too. There's a second disc packed with extras, among them AK, a pretentious, 70 minute French documentary shot on set and showing the director's rigorous and exacting working methods.

Janis Joplin: Little Girl Blue (15)

Dogwoof, £15.99

An Oscar-nominated documentary-maker whose previous films have tackled sex abuse in the Catholic church (Deliver Us From Evil), child exploitation in Hollywood (An Open Secret) and the Mormons (Prophet's Prey), Los Angeles-born Amy Berg here turns her gaze on ill-fated 1960s rock singer Janis Joplin in this 2015 film. Joplin's siblings, Michael and Laura, both feature as talking heads and Berg's use of the singer's many letters home to her family in Texas give real insight into her state of mind from the time she arrived in San Francisco in 1963 to her death from a drug overdose in a Hollywood motel in October 1970 (musician Cat Power reads them). If all you know about Joplin is that she had a great voice, covered Me And Bobby McGee, also sang the song they used in that Mercedes Benz ad and became a founding member of the 27 Club, then Little Girl Blue will fill in a lot of the blanks. Testament to its quality, if not its commercial viability as a stand-alone DVD, the film screened on BBC Four in March though without the wealth of extras included here. Among them are more on Joplin's bisexuality and an amusing anecdote about how she dealt with four armed Hell's Angels who broke into her home and emptied her fridge of food. Suffice to say they came back later and re-stocked it.