An action film with an intensity that sets it apart, Assault on Precinct 13 still shocks. Although expected, its first killing is a “they wouldn’t do that, would they?” moment. No wonder the 2005 remake failed to overshadow the original. John Carpenter’s hard-boiled second feature, a follow-up to Dark Star, was filmed on a budget of $100,000 in less than three weeks in late 1975 and released the following year. He wrote, shot and edited it as well as composing and playing its brilliant soundtrack music (the early Human League took a lot from it).

Sixty-eight tracks into the intriguing Action Time Vision, orthodoxy suddenly gives way to individualism. The two-and-bit discs so far have mostly showcased what passes for notions of punk rock: block-chord guitars, guttersnipe vocals, Ramones-speed rhythms and Clash-style terrace-chant choruses. Suddenly, The Fall’s lurching “Psycho Mafia” suggests the early punk era was not about trying to be same as every other band. Individualism was possible.

New Year’s Eve has its rituals and, in the Russian-speaking world, watching the 1976 film The Irony of Fate is core to ringing out the old and ringing in the new. A television staple, it has the seasonal status of It’s a Wonderful Life, The Little Shop on the Corner and White Christmas. First seen in Russian homes as a three-hour, two-part small-screen production on the first day of 1976, it was subsequently edited and shown in cinemas.

French Pictures in London was a bolt from the blue. Issued in June, four decades after being recorded, it was a previously unknown, unreleased album better than most mid-Seventies rock offerings. It was also better than about 99 percent of albums retrospectively hailed as classics. However, it had escaped attention and its maker was barely heard of.

Not quite three wishes; this film’s Czech title is Tři oříšky pro Popelku, which translates as three nuts. We’ll get to that later. Three Wishes for Cinderella, a Czechoslovak-East German co-production from 1973, is a treat, and still an annual Christmas fixture on Eastern European TV screens.

Director Václav Vorlíček’s source material wasn’t the familiar Cinderella retelling by Charles Perrault, but a darker version written by the 19^th century Czech folklorist  Božena Němcová. There’s no father, only one nasty step-sister and a refreshing lack of flashy magic. In place of a fairy godmother, heroine Popelka has three enchanted walnuts guarded by a benevolent owl, each of which contains a particular outfit to be worn when the plot demands.

Popelku’s ghastly step-mother and half-sister provide some of the giggles

Popelka, winningly played by 19-year-old Libuše Šafránková, is feisty and cheeky, more at home wielding a crossbow on horseback than she is sifting lentils from dust on the kitchen floor. As such, she’s an ideal working-class female role-model. Her confidants are the other low-grade servants and various animals, all of which play key roles as the story unfolds. Crucially, Popelka is unfazed during her first encounter with Pavel Trávníček’s Prince (pictured below right, with Šafránková), and it’s made clear that she pursues and marries him because she loves him, not just because his wealth and status offers her an escape route from domestic drudgery.

This is frequently a very funny film. Popelka's ghastly step-mother and half-sister provide some of the giggles, particularly during a brilliantly choreographed ball scene. Their fate isn’t as gruesome as the one dished out in the Grimm Brothers’ version of the story (see Sondheim’s Into the Woods), but it’s well deserved.

And in this handsomely restored print, everything looks superb, the wintry outdoor locations gleaming thanks to an East German camera crew. Karel Svoboda’s tinkly soundtrack adds to the fun. Subtitles are easy to read, though a newly-dubbed English dialogue track would have made the film more accessible for younger viewers.

As an extra there’s an appreciation by historian Michael Brooke, placing Three Wishes in its proper historical context and noting that the two boom periods for Czech movie fairy tales coincide with the darkest periods in the country’s post-war history. Subtexts aside, this is wonderful seasonal entertainment, a tasty antidote to today’s digitally animated bilge.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Three Wishes for Cinderella

Pictured above is Sweden’s Ralph Lundsten. He might look like a guru or mystic but is actually a multi-disciplinary artist most well-known on his home turf for his pioneering electronic music. His first album, 1966’s Elektronmusikstudion Dokumentation 1 (made with Leo Nilson), was issued by national Swedish radio’s own label and recorded at the station’s electronic music studio. Lundsten (born 1936) began making music for soundtracks in the 1950s and has issued at least 38 albums.

This House arrives in the West End with magic timing - a comedy about the farcical horrors of being a government with a wafer-thin majority, frantically wheeling out dying, suicidal and breastfeeding MPs to vote, horsetrading with "odds and sods" to keep their nails on power.  

In 1970, The Who opened their Live at Leeds album with “Young Man Blues”, a hefty version of a song its composer Mose Allison recorded as “Blues” in 1957. Back then, it was the only vocal track on Back Country Suite, an otherwise instrumental blues-jazz album, the Mississippi-born pianist's debut long player. Allison had moved to New York in 1956 and a string of releases followed. The Who weren’t the only British band cocking an ear: in March 1965 The Yardbirds first recorded Allison's “I’m Not Talking”, plucked by them from 1964’s The Word From Mose.

What to do if you’re a despotic leader with an underperforming film industry? Hiring better directors and actors wasn’t an option for Kim Jong-il in the late 1970s, so he took drastic action: luring South Korea’s biggest female star Choi Eun-hee to Hong Kong on false pretences and having her abducted. Her ex-husband, the South’s leading filmmaker Shin Sang-ok, did the honourable thing and went in search of her, only to suffer the same fate. What happened next is the subject of Rob Cannan and Ross Adam’s engrossing documentary.

Shin was a financially inept directorial maverick, whose production company had been shut down by the restrictive South Korean regime. He and Choi were one of the country’s most famous couples, though his infidelity had recently led to divorce. On arriving in North Korea, Choi was kept in a gilded cage while Shin languished in prison after repeated escape attempts. Shin managed to convince his captors that he was willing to work for the regime and the couple were reunited. They co-directed 17 films over a two-year period, with movie buff Kim Jong-il effectively acting as producer (pictured below right, with Choi and Chin).

It’s an insane, credulity-stretching story, clearly and unfussily told. Interviewees include a spry, elderly Choi, and it’s a neat touch to have some of the more outlandish anecdotes illustrated by clips taken from Chin’s films. Choi managed to obtain a micro-cassette recorder and tape many of the pair’s conversations with the dictator – the cassettes later confirming that they had not willingly defected, as some nay-sayers on both sides of the divide later claimed. Chin’s comment that he hated “everything apart from not having to worry about money” is bitterly apposite; despite his semi-incarceration he was given unprecedented artistic and financial freedom by Kim Jong-il, a tragi-comic figure all too aware of his charisma deficit. Chin and Choi managed to play the game for several years, the pair well aware that they could be discarded in an instant should the Dear Leader fall out of love with them.

How they plotted and pulled off their eventual escape is brilliantly reconstructed, but the triumph was short-lived. Shin’s Hollywood career was limited to producing a series of bad Disney comedies. He returned to Seoul under a cloud in 1994, making few films before his death in 2006. Cannan and Adam make excellent use of archive footage, and it’s to their credit that they’ve managed to persuade so many bit-part players in the story to talk frankly on camera. And how well constructed this film is, its 94 minutes flying by. Image and sound are impeccable, but there are no extras.

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