DVDs of the week

TERMINAL (CERT 15) £15.99 L’AMANT DOUBLE (CERT 18) £15.99

Annie (Margot Robbie) is a waitress in a railway station diner, which customers refer to affectionately as the End of the Line. She keeps a close eye on her clientele, including an English professor called Bill (Simon Pegg), who intends to end his life by throwing himself under a train as soon as services resume. Away from the diner, Annie moonlights as a stripper called Bunny in the local club, but she is keen to prove her credentials as a hitwoman to a local kingpin called Mr Franklin. This mysterious puppet-master has already hired two hapless goons, Alfred (Max Irons) and Vince (Dexter Fletcher), to stake out a hotel room and shoot anyone who checks in. Annie vows to prove her sharpshooting skills by targeting Alfred and Vince, and any other assassins who stand in her way.

French enfant terrible Francois Ozon returns to the sexually charged delights of his earlier films for this heated psychological thriller, torn from the pages of Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Lives of Twins, which she penned under the pseudonym Rosamund Smith. Deception and illusion are key themes of L’Amant Double, which centres on a former model called Chloe (Marine Vacth), who lives alone with her cat in Paris and has been struck down with crippling stomach pains. She seeks answers from a gynaecologist, who refers Chloe to a handsome therapist called Paul (Jeremie Renier).

Sparks of attraction between healer and patient compromise the effectiveness of the session and Chloe quickly moves into Paul’s apartment to begin a passionate, full-blown romance. However, he remains an enigma and she discovers that her mysterious beau has a doppelganger, a twin brother he refuses to talk about called Dr Louis Delord (Renier again). Unlike his sibling, Louis is fully in touch with his sexual desires and he inspires Chloe to embark on an orgasmic journey of self-satisfaction that forces her to choose between the brothers.

STUDIO 54 (CERT 15) £19.99

Famous New York hotspot Studio 54 – located on West 54th Street between Eighth Avenue and Broadway – opened on April 26, 1977, and quickly became the most fashionable haunt of the rich and fabulous in Manhattan. Created by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, the club wooed the most flamboyant and extrovert crowd on the east coast and regularly welcomed celebrities through its doors to a glittering palace of sex, drugs and decadence. Less than three years after it opened, Studio 54 in its original guise was gone, after the founders faced charges of tax evasion. Matt Tyrnauer’s film is a revealing documentary about the rise and fall of Rubell and Schrager, and the legacy they created with a venue that warmly embraced the blossoming gay counterculture of the late 1970s.