A Hard Day’s Night (87 mins) This is not the moment for ponderous blockbuster cinema: concentration spans, we are told, are plummeting in the Covid era. So if you’re fretting at home, here is a film that will take your mind off things: the Beatles’ super-entertaining feature from 1964, which showcased their ease and humour in front of the camera as well as director Richard Lester’s gift for experimentation. A blast. Digital platforms (£) Elephant (39 mins) If you are feeling strong minded, then try this still-staggering piece by Alan Clarke from 1989: a horribly brutal, near-wordless study of a string of sectarian killings during the Troubles in Northern Ireland (and the inspiration for Gus Van Sant’s 2003 film). A reminder of what will be lost if the Good Friday agreement is undermined. Available on DVD The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (74 mins) Silent films could get pretty baggy: Metropolis is over two hours, and Greed supposedly ran for nine in its original form. By comparison, this 1920 expressionist fever dream is a wisp: a creepy, hyper-designed fable of a hypnotist who kills via his subject. The somnambulist provided an early role for Conrad Veidt, the German officer in Casablanca. The Jungle Book (78 mins) Cartoons, for obvious reasons, tend to come in short, and none of the golden-age Disneys – with the exception of Fantasia – break the 90-minute mark. For its sheer effervescence, the 1967 adaptation of Kipling’s The Jungle Book still rules the roost: those amazing Sherman Brothers numbers could lift any lockdown blues. The Gleaners & I (82 mins) Agnès Varda’s wistful 2000 essay-film is an excellent introduction to her work, as well as a window into a social interaction that Covid has threatened. Varda reflects on the practice of gleaning – picking up what others leave behind – as an end in itself, and as a reflection of her own artistic practice. Digital platforms (£) Fruitvale Station (85 mins) A short, sharp explosion of rage from 2013, coinciding with the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. The real-life killing of 22-year-old Oscar Grant by a cop on a station platform in Oakland, California, became the directorial debut for Ryan Coogler, and made the name of actor Michael B Jordan. Netflix Killer of Sheep (80 mins) Something of a forgotten masterpiece, this: a super-low-budget product of the 1970s LA Rebellion film movement from 1978, which was only properly released in 2007 because of music rights issues. It is an amazing patchwork of African-American life in early-70s Los Angeles, revolving round Stan (Henry G Sanders), who works in a slaughterhouse. The Evil Dead (85 mins) Turn the lights out for a hand-grenade of 1980s shock: the first in Sam Raimi’s series of demon-infested horrors, which blended nerve-shredding nastiness and snappy funnies (some scenes are now problematic, if we are being honest). The follow-ups, Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness, are slicker and whip by at 84 mins and 88 mins respectively. Digital platforms (£) Ida (82 mins) Director and co-writer Paweł Pawlikowski won the best foreign language film Oscar with this perfectly polished 2013 miniature, a black-and-white study of a nun’s spiritual crisis that also takes in a reckoning with Poland’s wartime and communist-era past. It is beautifully shot, too, with the idiosyncratic framing creating a sense of genuine religious awe. Digital platforms (£) Gun Crazy (87 mins) If you want lean and mean, classic film noir is where you want to be. Intended mostly as B-movies, they don’t mess about. Gun Crazy, directed in 1950 by Joseph H Lewis, features Peggy Cummins and John Dall as a heist-pulling couple with an intense, violence-infected relationship. Radical for its time, it still looks astonishing.