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You never know about a director's first feature film. Orson Welles hit a career high with Citizen Kane , but few would have predicted Francis Ford Coppola's future based on 1962's obscure Tonight for Sure . Sometimes you reach a peak; sometimes you settle for a stepping stone.

Next Tuesday brings the Blu-ray release of two first films that worked. The determinedly lower-case sex, lies and videotape (1989) even won Steven Soderbergh the Palme d'or at the Cannes Film Festival, which must have compensated for a few years of dashed hopes and stalled projects, including a 1987 screenplay for a self-described “slapdash comedy” called Dead from the Neck Up .

Sex, lies and videotape was anything but slapdash, a comic-dramatic reflection on the lies people live with. A mysterious stranger rides into town and changes the lives of those he meets. Graham (James Spader) has been invited to stay with an old classmate, a slick lawyer named John (Peter Gallagher), who hasn't bothered to ask his wife Annie (Andie MacDowell) whether she would mind having a house guest. But then, John doesn't care much about Annie, since he has been sleeping with her live-wire sister Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo). Annie indicates something is amiss in an early session with her therapist. “How are things with John?” “Fine, I guess. Except right now I'm going through this [phase] where I don't want him to touch me.”

Graham soon lets it be known that he is impotent and compensates by videotaping women as they describe their sexual experiences. His honesty hits the others like a thunderbolt, and Spader's disarming delivery prompted Cannes to vote him best actor, even if critic Monica Sullivan complained that he “basically has three expressions: asleep, constipated and adorable.”

The other first feature is Kevin Smith's Clerks (1994), which is an odd choice for Blu-ray, since high definition can't add much to the film's grainy black-and-white look. But Clerks announced Smith as an original voice. His characters traffic in guy talk riddled with obscenities and pop-cultural references, elevated to rewarding banter by wits undimmed by underemployment. Convenience-store clerk Dante (Brian O'Halloran) and video-store clerk Randal (Jeff Anderson) are slackers in dead-end jobs, but look positively responsible next to the foul-mouthed layabout Jay (Jason Mewes) and his non-speaking companion Silent Bob, played by Smith himself. Smith originally planned to play Randal, and later said, “That's why Randal has all the best lines.” An early cut killed off a main character, but preview audiences were so unhappy that Smith rewrote the ending.

Smith's subsequent films (including Clerks II ) have seldom strayed far from his chief strength, the dialogue of quick-witted characters. Soderbergh's career has ranged from the uncommercial lows of The Underneath to the artistic highs of Out of Sight , The Limey and The Girlfriend Experience and the commercial highs of Erin Brockovich and Ocean's Eleven . For both men, it started here.

10 more minutes owed to The Dead

Two weeks ago, I heralded the arrival of The Dead , John Huston's lovely final film. The Lions Gate/Maple Pictures DVD arrived in stores, and looked good, but turned out to be missing an entire 10-minute section – a point signalled by the cover, which gave the length as 73 minutes instead of the proper 83. Maple says that there was an error in the master, that it is being fixed and that, according to Lions Gate, the correct version should be ready in two to three weeks. At which point Huston can stop revolving in his grave.