Metropolis (PG)

Eureka Video, £17.99

THIS feature-length Japanese animé takes its title and some of its storyline from Fritz Lang's famous 1927 film but borrows too from a 1949 manga comic of the same name by Osamu Tezuka, the so-called godfather of the manga form. Tezuka's work was also loosely based on Lang's film, though the cartoonist claimed to have only ever seen one still image from it.

Directed by Rintaro (aka Shigeyuki Hayashi, who worked with Tezuka on his acclaimed 1963 TV series Astro Boy), Metropolis has a screenplay by Katsuhiro Otomo, creator of the equally venerated manga series Akira, and was released just six months before the 9/11 attacks brought down the World Trade Centre in 2001. There's an uneasy foreshadowing of that in the film's apocalyptic closing scenes while viewers can find expression of its other major themes - the ease with which fascism can grip a society, the creation of a disaffected human underclass whose jobs have been taken by robots - in more recent political and economic events.

A work with depth, then, though its surface is pretty impressive too. It's rightly regarded as one of the most accomplished animés ever made, a riot of colour and bravura visuals with an evocative soundtrack of sombre Dixieland jazz which culminates in an extraordinary sequence featuring Ray Charles singing I Can't Stop Loving You as the city explodes around main characters Ken-ichi, a private investigator who feels like he's been freighted in from a Tin Tin story, and Tima, the super-robot he's in love with and who thinks she's human.

Darkness By Day (15)

Matchbox Films, £12.99

WELL-made, if slight, this offering from Argentine director Martin De Salvo incorporates flavours of everything from Claire Denis's arthouse horror Trouble Every Day to Tomas Alfredson's Let The Right One In and Jose Ramon Larraz's cult 1974 British psycho-thriller Symptoms. Which is to say it places two young women in a remote country house, adds a lesbian frisson, rumours of a mysterious, rabies-like illness and an oblique, dialogue-light approach to plotting, and creates out of those components a chilly, atmospheric sort-of vampire story with a less-is-more ethos that's all too rare in the horror genre these days.

The two women are Virginia (Mora Recalde), who lives with her doctor father in a massive finca on some rugged Argentine coast, and her cousin Ana (Romina Paula), who turns up asleep in a taxi one day and has to be carried indoors. By this point Virginia's father has left to treat his ailing niece Julia, Ana's sister.

We're never told why Ana has turned up, or who sent her, or when she and Ana last saw each other. But the two women bond slowly, drifting into a dream-like existence punctuated by Ana's nocturnal outings into the woods and a series of disturbing visions for Virginia, whose daily routine involves reading, listening to old records and popping pills (again, we're never told why). Wise local shopkeeper Lidia (Marta Lubos) is suspicious of the new arrival, however. She sneaks up to the house to a hide rabbit's foot in a tree and later gives Virginia an amulet to ward off evil. When the girls' fathers turn up armed with shotguns telling them that Julia has died and been cremated, you expect some kind of resolution. But a mysterious if intriguing final scene asks more questions than it provides answers. An intense and watchable film, though at 70 minutes it feels more like an appetiser than a main course.

The Glass Shield (12)

BFI, £19.99

ACCLAIMED African-American director Charles Burnett's 1994 film is based in part on a true event from the 1970s, but its release just three years after the notorious Rodney King case – the black taxi driver who was filmed being beaten by white policemen in Los Angeles – gave it a strong contemporary resonance. With the Black Lives Matter movement now making a political issue of the same old story, namely police attitudes to and behaviour towards the black community, the film's arrival on Blu-ray as part of the BFI's Black Star season is equally timely.

Michael Boatman plays John "JJ" Johnson, first black police recruit in a notoriously corrupt Los Angeles precinct currently embroiled in a death-in-detention case. Tank Girl's Lori Petty plays fellow cop Deborah Fields, the only woman in the precinct and a natural ally, while rapper Ice Cube plays Teddy Woods, a petty criminal who's picked up for the crime of being black and then fitted up for the murder of a rich white woman. What follows for JJ is a tortuous journey through his own conscience as he first falls into line with the cover-up and then breaks ranks to help Woods win his case.

As a simple thriller The Glass Shield effective, if a little uneven, and the extravagantly lurid, neon-drenched cinematography seems at odds with the film's emphasis on procedure and realism. But its provenance – Burnett is one of the most venerated black American directors, thanks in large part to his extraordinary 1978 debut Killer Of Sheep – and the vital themes it explores make it a work with real heft.