Teaserama (Nucleus Films/ 15) and Varietease (Nucleus Films/ 18) both £12.99

Bettie Page: Bondage Queen (Digital Classics/ 15) £15.99

The last few years have seen an explosion in the popularity of burlesque, the sassy, saucy performance that has done more for sales of big knickers and corselettes than M&S has managed in 125 years. With more and more girls picking up the nipple tassels, this release, the first time vintage films Varietease and Teaserama have been put to DVD, is a timely reminder of where it all came from.

Directed by notorious smut-monger Irving Klaw, the two shows mix routines by temptresses such as Tempest Storm, Lili St Cyr and Bettie Page with “variety” acts: contortionist Twinnie Wallen, baffling 1950s humourists and female impersonator Vickie Lynn, plus a host who makes Bruce Forsyth look cutting edge.

For those used to the polished routines of the Noughties, the girls’ acts have a charming make-it-up-as-you-go-along amateurism: Bettie’s dancing is gauchely jerky despite her winning Coca-Cola-red smile, while Tempest folds away her sofa bed before pouring herself into shoulder-length gloves and skin-tight blue frock. The films are a curio piece, essential for modern burlesquers wanting to know their heritage, and also to pick up make-up and hair tips – these gals are nothing if not immaculate.

The extras are good too – voiceover versions of the films, trailers and rare bits of footage including a rather touching black and white arcade film of Bettie accompanied by the rattle of the camera and a warning flashing up to remind viewers to “deposit another coin for the next part”. There are also featurettes interviewing today’s stars of burlesque.

Also out now is Bettie Page: Bondage Queen, a selection of films from the naughtier end of Klaw's repertoire, in which Bettie and a series of lovelies are subjected to kinkier and kinkier exploits – although there is still something affecting about the bored-looking girls teetering gamely in uber-high-heels and tying each other up with the efficiency of Girl Guides practicing their knots. But while the “spanking” is more pantomime than true S&M, and the inexplicably twangy soundtrack does its best to erode the sexiness, this footage is far darker than the vaudeville acts.

Klaw increasingly subjects the women to “devices lovingly crafted by leather craftsmen in Italy” as the voiceover informs us. God only knows what the craftsmen thought as in “Pony Girl”, a girl’s head is encased in leather straps with a bit, before she is pulled around on a lead, and in another film a lady is buckled into a gimp mask.

In the “biggest seller”, Bettie is strung up with ropes and pulleys. Whatever floats your boat – but despite all the gadgetry and the flickery black-and-white, it is Bettie’s brilliant smile and innocent charm that shine, and remind you why she is still the greatest burlesque star of all.
Katie Allen

The seven films Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich made together are like intoxicating fleurs du mal : erotic, dark, witty, sublime, and modern. Together they honed Dietrich's complex, sultry and feline persona and brought a whiff of genuine Weimar decadence to mainstream Hollywood. After their personal and professional relationship imploded with The Devil is a Woman in 1935 Dietrich went on to work with major directors like Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock and tour her acclaimed one-woman cabaret show around the world well into her 70s. For von Sternberg - who'd antagonised a lot of people in his 1930s heyday with his volatile tyrannical temperament - his post-Dietrich career was one long, humiliating decline.

1941's Shanghai Gesture represents one of von Sternberg's last gasps before losing creative autonomy (During the filming of 1952's Macao , he'd be sacked midway through production and replaced by Nicholas Ray). A torrid and baroque study in vengeance and corruption, the film sees Von Sternberg re-visiting the locale of Shanghai Express , his 1932 triumph with Dietrich. Sir Guy Charteris (Walter Huston), a rich white industrialist with a murky past, is seeking to gentrify Shanghai (he calls it "the cesspool of the Far East"). When gorgon-like dragon lady Mother Gin Sling (Ona Munson) learns he intends to close her gambling den she starts plotting her revenge. Meanwhile, slumming rich girl Poppy (the exquisite Gene Tierney) becomes ensnared by the toxic allure of the casino ("It smells so incredibly evil ..."), addicted both to gambling and the heavy-lidded charms of Dr Omar (a torpid Victor Mature in a burnoose and fez).

Von Sternberg was Hollywood's most seductive visual stylist. Here he evokes a sensual and depraved Shanghai of the imagination, an underworld of opium-scented exotica. Mother Gin Sling's vice palace is a glittering Art Deco inner circle of hell, where the beautiful and the damned drink cocktails of brandy and sulphur and gamble away their souls. A Chinese New Year parade is depicted as a macabre carnival; Mother Gin Sling's climactic New Year's Eve party culminates with the surreal sight of terrified female "white slaves" being hoisted skyward in cages.

The overripe, purple dialogue occasionally threatens to tip the film into kitsch (Dr Omar calls Poppy "my plucked bird of paradise").  But even in a scratchy, muffled DVD transfer, Shanghai Gesture is a hypnotic, shimmering spectacle and its treatment of miscegenation and colonialism is way ahead of its time. And as portrayed by Munson (best-remembered as bordello madam Belle Watling in Gone with the Wind ) with a purring voice, serene mask-like face and Medusa hairstyle, Mother Gin Sling is a mesmerizing villainess
Graham Russell

The Limits of Control
(Revolver Entertainment/ 15)
In UK cinemas from 11 Dec

On its release in the US earlier in the year, eternal hipster Jim Jarmusch's latest film was hailed as a small triumph and "the best film he's made in a decade". All I can say is that maybe I missed something. It's a little unnerving sitting down to write a damning review of a film that I just didn't like, whilst feeling faintly concerned that in the eyes of the wider public that's going to mark me out as a cinematic oaf with no depth who would clearly only be entertained by the kind of action films which feature numerous scenes of people running away quickly from burning cars that are about to explode.

Well, you're going to have to take my word for it that this couldn't be further from the truth, but I was so, so disappointed by this film.
As a longtime fan of Jim Jarmusch's movies perhaps my expectations were a little too high, but it seems I'm not alone: one critic has already dubbed this film "the Limits of Patience" – which is exactly how it made me feel.

Let's begin at the beginning: something that the The Limits of Control may or may not have done. It's a slow, ponderous film with no real plot to speak of. A character that we know only as "Lone Man" (played perfectly by Jarmusch regular Isaach De Bankole ) traverses Spain on a covert and clearly illegal mission. Along the way he has brief encounters with a variety of individuals, all of whom give him a matchbox containing a small piece of paper with symbols on it which he reads and then swallows, washing it down with two single espressos in separate cups. The respective individuals then use him as a sounding board to talk about whatever's preoccupying them while he remains silent.

You effectively have to wait until the end for something of significance to actually happen. But that's not my problem with this film: usually I enjoy the strangeness and disorientation of sitting in a cinema watching a movie which allows itself huge swathes of space and silence. I just found the entire thing totally self conscious and way too obvious.

We'd already been granted an encounter with a beautiful woman who happens to be naked, for no apparent reason, then when she gets dressed, she gets dressed in a transparent raincoat. Classic Jarmusch adolescent fantasy stuff? Tick. But it was the Tilda Swinton – dressed as a strange Spanish cowgirl – encounter that summed up the problem with this film for me. She sits silently then announces that "Movies are like dreams you're never really sure you've had. Sometimes my favourite films are the ones where people sit there and don't say anything." Followed by… yep, you guessed it: both characters sitting there not saying anything.

Having said all of that, it's not without its merits: Christopher Doyle's cinematography is utterly stunning. Unsurprising really from the man also responsible for the cinematography in the perfect In the Mood for Love.  And because of the film's structure – or lack of it – we're given much more space and time that usual to take in some of the world's most beautiful scenery. And some of the encounters are certainly intriguing – John Hurt's eccentric bohemian turn stands out as does Gael Garcia Bernal and his bartering to get his hands on a rare guitar – it's just a shame that I'd ceased to care by then.
Suzy Prince