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It was a marriage made in exploitation heaven. Roman Polanski, fresh from the love triangle of his first full-length feature, 1962's Polish-language Knife in the Water, was keen to make an English-language movie about the descent into madness of a young woman in London. Producers Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser, who specialized in soft-porn movies, figured it might be good for their credibility to finance a horror movie by a legit, up-and-coming director. They gave him the biggest budget they had ever given a filmmaker, and argued with him throughout the production about how many takes he could shoot of each scene, and how many arms he could have sticking out from the walls of a hallway. Polanski, they found, was a director who wanted what he wanted and didn't easily accept contradiction. But he created a minor classic, and it made money, and everyone was happy.

The movie, Repulsion (1965), starred Catherine Deneuve, who wasn't really famous yet and was happy to take Polanski's direction, though she insisted on wearing panties under the translucent nightgown she wore for most of the film. Don't expect much of a plot. An 18-year-old manicurist named Carol (Deneuve), who is withdrawn except with her roommate, older sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux), is far more disturbed than those around her realize. She has a pathological fear-hatred of men, and an intense desire to be alone. When the sister and her married boyfriend (Ian Hendry) go off on a two-week vacation, leaving Carol in the apartment, she goes to pieces - as, with her unbidden help, do a couple of people foolish enough to walk through the door.

What elevates the film is its atmosphere and invention. Cinematographer Gilbert Taylor (who later photographed The Omen and Star Wars) shot the movie in black and white with a keen eye for light and shadow. And Polanski constantly throws the viewer off guard, as do Carol's hallucinations of widening cracks in the walls, a man pawing her in bed and those arms grabbing her in the hallway. Polanski never tells us why she is the way she is. A photograph of Carol as a child standing apart from her family might suggest abuse, but in a 2003 documentary included on next week's Criterion DVD, Polanski deflects a question about whether the audience should assume that. "You can do what you want. It's a free country. But don't ever ask me to explain any of my pictures."

His desire for realism was such that he wanted to use a real skinned rabbit for the film. But the flies and the smell were so dire, Taylor recalls, that "I said, 'We can infect the whole of Twickenham with some terrible disease from these flies.' " They substituted a fake rabbit from the props department. Taylor also had a spy keep an eye on Hendry, who had a habit of taking a few drinks with his lunch and would return to the set with a puffier face than he'd had in the morning. The spy was instructed to moderate Hendry's intake.

In the documentary and in a 1994 commentary shared with a separately recorded Deneuve, Polanski regrets making a few technical compromises because of a "cheapo-cheapo budget." But he also notes that, when shooting began, he was already over budget and behind schedule. Polanski wants what he wants.

MOVIES

Gomorrah (2008)

Films about the mob don't get much rawer than this fact-based Italian drama about the Camorra ("system" or "racket"), which keeps Naples under its thumb. Youths without hope join the gang; others try to stay on its good side. Director and co-writer Matteo Garrone follows several characters who either try to escape the mob's reach or dream of diving into the well-paid work of extortion, gun-running and murder. The Globe gave the film four stars. The DVD has English and French subtitles, but no bonus features.

Mon Petit Doigt M'a Dit (2005)

The English title is By the Pricking of My Thumbs, which fans of Agatha Christie will recognize as one of her mysteries with Tommy and Tuppence. In this amusing, well-subtitled French adaptation by Pascal Thomas, they are named Bélisaire (André Dussollier) and Prudence (Catherine Frot), live on a lovely estate and trade banter reminiscent of The Thin Man's Nick and Nora Charles. Prudence takes the lead in investigating the disappearance from a retirement home of a very odd lady, played by Geneviève Bujold.

TV

Life on Mars

Series 1 (2006-07)

This is a smart, gritty police procedural with a real fish out of water: Sam Tyler (John Simm), an officer who is hit by a car in today's Britain and wakes up in 1973, assigned to a police force whose 1970s cop-show ethos of hitting suspects and planting evidence runs counter to Sam's determination to read people their rights. Or is this all a figment of his imagination while he lies in a coma, and is that why he keeps hearing the voices of doctors and nurses? Named after the David Bowie song ("take a look at the lawman...").

The Middleman:

The Complete Series (2008)

Javier Grillo-Marxuach, from whose graphic novels this show was drawn, provides the best description: "a nesting doll of influences, references and inside jokes wrapped in plots satirizing the slot so often present in broadcast sci-fi." In 12 episodes, a superhero called the Middleman (Matt Keeslar), with a deadpan manner reminiscent of The Tick, another superhero show, takes an art-school graduate as his protégé in the war against bizarre crime. Too aware of itself, but entertaining.

BLU-RAY

This Is Spinal Tap (1984)

Welcome yet again to Rob Reiner's mock documentary on heavy-metal legends-in-their-own-mind Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), Derek Small (Harry Shearer) and whichever of their drummers hasn't choked or exploded. Most of the best bonuses on next week's two-disc Blu-ray edition are drawn from previous DVDs, in particular an hour of deleted scenes, but this one adds a song from the 2007 Live Earth concert and a Tufnel "interview" about Stonehenge.

Doctor Who:

Planet of the Dead (2009)

In this tale, shot in high definition and marking David Tennant's fourth-to-last outing as the Time Lord, the good Doctor and a handful of passengers aboard a red double-decker bus enter a wormhole in a London tunnel and emerge on a desert planet. That can't be good. The producers carted a real bus into the desert of Dubai because, head writer Russell T. Davies explains, there's "a problem shooting alien planets" in England. "It's either a quarry or it's a beach and it looks like a quarry."