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Few actors could deliver a line with as much gusto as Charles Laughton. Whether he was playing Henry VIII or the English barrister in Witness for the Prosecution, his whole being would shake with merriment or indignation as he elongated syllables and jumped from bravado to wheedle in midsentence. He's in great form in Hobson's Choice (1954), a beautifully restored black-and-white British comedy based on a much-staged 1915 American play.

Henry Hobson (Laughton), widower and owner of a boot shop circa 1900 in Manchester, England, has three daughters whom he treats as indentured servants. When he makes the mistake of proclaiming that his eldest (Brenda De Banzie) will never wed, as nobody would have her at her advanced age of 30, she immediately bullies a young, self-effacing bootmaker (John Mills, in a role first offered to an ailing Robert Donat) into marrying her. The war of wills between father and daughter escalates, and it's clear early on that, for all his bluster and self-righteous anger (“There's been a general increase of uppishness toward me”), Hobson is not the odds-on favourite to win. Even his place of refuge, the Moonrakers Inn, pales when he starts getting unwanted advice from his drinking buddies.

Director David Lean gives Laughton room to chew the scenery, in an outsized performance that was attacked by some critics at the time as hammy but stands as a tour de force. Bonus features on the Criterion DVD include a 1978 BBC documentary on Laughton; Christopher Isherwood reflects on the actor's homosexuality, while Laughton's widow, Elsa Lanchester, speaks movingly of the accommodations she chose to make in their marriage. Fans of the TV series Fawlty Towers will spot Prunella Scales, who played Basil Fawlty's wife, as Hobson's youngest daughter.

The bluster is malevolent in the Spanish-language Alice in Wondertown, Daniel Diaz Torres's 1991 Cuban satire of bureaucracy and authoritarianism. Like Alice entering Wonderland, drama teacher Alicia Diaz (Thais Valdes) arrives in the town of Maravillas to find chaos, inefficiency, intimidation and a populace without the will or energy to leave the place. The transfer to the First Run Features DVD has a couple of wrinkles – a slight fog behind the subtitles, wavy lines when the camera pans – but they are minor, and the dream/nightmare logic of the film permits some great absurdist touches. Alice's medicine cabinet opens onto someone else's hotel room, and sure enough, at one point she passes through this “looking glass.” Four days after it opened in Cuba, the movie was banned for insulting the state.

In Kim Nguyen's French-language Truffle (2008), a straight-faced sci-fi horror comedy from Quebec with a touch of David Lynchian creepiness, global warming has made Montreal the world's source of truffles (the fungi, not the chocolate treats), but the market is slack. Why? Thereby hangs a bizarre tale, with diner operator Alice (Céline Bonnier) investigating why husband Charles (Roy Dupuis) isn't allowed to come home from his new job. It has something to do with robots, fur collars with teeth and salesmen tied to refrigerators. Beyond that, I'm not breathing a word. Oddly, while the film is 73 minutes long (not the advertised 78), the “unedited” director's cut, also included here, is 59 minutes.

Just as those in Maravillas and those tied to refrigerators can't escape, so the bourgeois guests at a dinner party in Luis Bunuel's black-and-white allegory The Exterminating Angel (1962) discover that they can't leave the drawing room of the mansion in which they have just eaten. There are no physical barriers; their plight is not explained; a sheep and a bear wander by. It's Bunuel's way of mocking the ineffectual bourgeoisie, a target the Spanish director never tired of tweaking. The movie is clever and memorable, but the extras on the two-disc Criterion DVD make it clear Bunuel regretted the compromises he had to make – inferior supporting cast, cheap costumes – because he had to shoot in Mexico rather than in Spain. The Spanish dictatorship of Francisco Franco had banned his previous film, Viridiana, for sacrilege.

Yet Bunuel's mocking of religion pales beside Religulous (2008), in which political comedian Bill Maher collars devout Christians and others and asks why they insist on believing in imaginary friends. “It worries me,” he says about one U.S. senator, “that people are running this country who believe in a talking snake.” Directed by Larry Charles in the same gonzo style as his earlier film Borat, the movie bounces between cogent and facile, though Charles notes in a commentary with Maher that “I had many more cheap shots in the earlier cuts, and you [Maher] didn't want the cheap cuts, and we lost most of those kinds of things.”

Joanne Woodward plays a put-upon 35-year-old in Rachel, Rachel (1968), directed by Woodward's husband, Paul Newman, and based on Margaret Laurence's novel A Jest of God. Rachel Cameron, a New England schoolteacher, fears growing old without having taken a chance on love, and decides to act. In a 1969 print interview, Newman said he shot the film in Connecticut “because I very much wanted to contrast the schoolteacher's rather arid, dry existence with the lush, verdant spring background.” Woodward and the film were nominated for Oscars, but lost to Katharine Hepburn (for The Lion in Winter) and Oliver!

Also out: Flash of Genius, with Greg Kinnear suing for recognition as the inventor of intermittent windshield wipers; How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, based on the real experiences of author-actor Toby Young at the magazine Vanity Fair, with Simon Pegg playing a version of Young; Changeling, Clint Eastwood's drama about a mother (Angelina Jolie) whose son vanishes and reappears, or so the authorities say; and Frozen River, with Melissa Leo driven by poverty to smuggle migrants across the Canada-U.S. border. Both Jolie and Leo are in the running for the best-actress Oscar.

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In Ridley Scott's Body of Lies (2008), Leonardo DiCaprio plays a Central Intelligence Agency operative torn between his Washington overseer (Russell Crowe) and imperatives on the ground in Iraq. Scott shares a commentary with screenwriter William Monahan and David Ignatius, author of the source novel, who passes along a tip from a CIA operations officer he met in Iraq. If you're in disguise and the enemy tries to search you, “you're not going to bargain … you're just going to shoot your way out. And in most cases, he told me, that's enough to scare people away. They run.” You're welcome. W.C.

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Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, also wrote a darkly comic novel which, as The Globe's Rick Groen observed, has been turned by director-screenwriter Clark Gregg into a film with suffocating narrative clutter. Choke (2008) stars Sam Rockwell as a member of a sexual-addiction self-help group whose mother (Anjelica Huston), in the throes of dementia, thinks he's a dead lawyer. In the extras, director-screenwriter Clark Gregg wonders whether Palahniuk regrets urging him to be unfaithful to the book. Nah, says Palahniuk. “I wanted to be just as surprised as anybody else seeing it.”