From Here to Eternity offers a much more heartfelt interpretation of the event that propelled the United States into World War II than any film made in recent years. Here there are no angst-ridden scenes where "true love" returns from the dead, no costly CGI and definitely no Hallmark happy ending. This is a film about illicit sex, military machismo and tragic loss of love, friendship and ultimately life. The filmmakers did, however, have to make some compromises when adapting James Jones's novel: Alma becomes a "hostess" rather than a prostitute and the very downbeat ending, where Captain Holmes is essentially rewarded for his brutality by the military, was replaced with the morally acceptable punishment of his actions by a more self-aware army. Although Private Robert E Lee Pruitt's story provides the meat of the film, there are other subplots woven into the narrative, including a couple of doomed love affairs, which explore themes of adultery and social acceptance. Sergeant Warden (Burt Lancaster) begins a torrid affair with the commander's wife Karen (Deborah Kerr) leading to one of the most famous moments in movie history-the "clinch in the surf". From then on everything is challenged. Love, honour and eventually whether you should conform or stand up for what you believe in. At the end the couples are left wondering about the future of their relationship, but fate decides for them as the Japanese launch their attack on Pearl Harbor, leaving us with one of the most dramatic and moving endings of any war film. On the DVD: The black and white film is not anamorphically enhanced but presented full frame in its original aspect ratio of 1. [+]

One of the cinema's great disappearing acts came to a close with the release of The Thin Red Line in late 1998. Terrence Malick, the cryptic recluse who withdrew from Hollywood visibility after the release of his visually enthralling masterpiece Days of Heaven (1978), returned to the director's chair after a 20-year coffee break. Malick's comeback vehicle is a fascinating choice: a wide-ranging adaptation of a World War II novel (filmed once before, in 1964) by James Jones. The battle for Guadalcanal Island gives Malick an opportunity to explore nothing less than the nature of life, death, God, and courage. Let that be a warning to anyone expecting a conventional war flick; Malick proves himself quite capable of mounting an exciting action sequence, but he's just as likely to meander into pure philosophical noodling-or simply let the camera contemplate the first steps of a newly born tropical bird or the sinister skulk of a crocodile. This is not especially an actors' movie-some faces go by so quickly they barely register-but the standouts are bold: Nick Nolte as a career-minded colonel, Elias Koteas as a deeply spiritual captain who tries to protect his men, Ben Chaplin as a G. I. haunted by lyrical memories of his wife. The backbone of the film is the ongoing discussion between a wry sergeant (Sean Penn) and an ethereal, almost holy private newcomer (Jim Caviezel). The picture's sprawl may be a result of Malick's method of "finding" a film during shooting and editing, and in some ways The Thin Red Line seems vaguely, intriguingly incomplete. [+]

Dreamlike and nightmarishly surreal, Vertigo is Hitchcock's most personal film because it confronts many of the convoluted psychological issues that haunted and fascinated the director. The psychological complexity and the stark truthfulness of their rampant emotions keeps these strangely obsessive characters alive on screen, and Hitchcock understood better than most their barely repressed sexual compulsions, their fascination with death and their almost overwhelming desire for transcendent love. James Stewart finds profound and disturbing new depths in his psyche as Scotty, the tortured acrophobic detective on the trail of a suicidal woman apparently possessed by the ghost of someone long dead. Kim Novak is the classical Hitchcockian blonde whose icy exterior conceals a churning, volcanic emotional core. The agonised romance of Bernard Herrmann's score accompanies the two actors as a third and vitally important character, moving the film along to its culmination in an ecstasy of Wagnerian tragedy. Of course Hitch lavished especial care on every aspect of the production, from designer Edith Head's costumes (he, like Scotty, was most insistent on the grey dress), to the specific colour scheme of each location, to the famous reverse zoom "Vertigo" effect (much imitated, never bettered). The result is Hitch's greatest work and an undisputed landmark of cinema history. On the DVD: This disc presents the superb restored print of this film in a wonderful widescreen (1. 85:1) anamorphic transfer, with remastered Dolby digital soundtrack. There's a half-hour documentary made in 1996 about the painstaking two-year restoration process, plus an informative commentary from the restorers Robert Harris and James Katz, who are joined by original producer Herbert Coleman. [+]

The chemistry between Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers was still going strong in their seventh spin around the dance floor, Shall We Dance? And this time-amid the usual improbable plot confusions and on-again, off-again flirting between the two, they were backed up by a song score provided by the matchless George and Ira Gershwin. Among the highlights are "They All Laughed", "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off", and the Oscar-nominated "They Can't Take That Away from Me". Director Mark Sandrich, the most frequent helmer of the Astaire-Rogers pictures (including Top Hat), creates a gleaming showcase for his stars. He also brings back two devilish character actors, Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore, to repeat their support from previous outings. Ginger is kicky and fun; she was one of the few partners who didn't look intimidated onscreen by Astaire's incomparable dancing skills. Fred is in great form himself-so good you almost believe it when he pretends to be a Russian. -Robert Horton, Amazon. com.

In the entire history of American movies, The Night of the Hunter stands out as the rarest and most exotic of specimens. It is, to say the least, a masterpiece-and not just because it was the only movie directed by flamboyant actor Charles Laughton or the only produced solo screenplay by the legendary critic James Agee (who also co-wrote The African Queen). The truth is, nobody has ever made anything approaching its phantasmagoric, overheated style in which German expressionism, religious hysteria, fairy-tale fantasy (of the Grimm-est variety), and stalker movie are brought together in a furious boil. Like a nightmarish premonition of stalker movies to come, Night of the Hunter tells the suspenseful tale of a demented preacher (Robert Mitchum, in a performance that prefigures his memorable villain in Cape Fear), who torments a boy and his little sister-even marries their mixed-up mother (Shelley Winters)-because he's certain the kids know where their late bank-robber father hid a stash of stolen money. So dramatic, primal, and unforgettable are its images-the preacher's shadow looming over the children in their bedroom, the magical boat ride down a river whose banks teem with fantastic wildlife, those tattoos of LOVE and HATE on the unholy man's knuckles, the golden locks of a drowned woman waving in the current along with the indigenous plant life in her watery grave-that they're still haunting audiences (and filmmakers) today. -Jim Emerson, Amazon. com.

An experiment gone awry sends the Doctor (Jon Pertwee) to a parallel universe where his friends and companions are members of a fascist regime in this thrilling and popular episode from the long-running science fiction series Doctor Who. Inferno is the name of a project designed to drill into the Earth's core and release a powerful energy source called Stahlman's Gas; what's yielded instead is an insidious substance that transforms men into monsters. The resulting chaos interrupts the Doctor's travel in the TARDIS and knocks him into an alternate Earth run by a military dictatorship, and where Project Inferno's progress threatens to bring about an apocalypse. This seven-part story arc from 1970 is a high-water mark for the already superb Pertwee-era Doctor, a tense, imaginative adventure that evokes the U. K. 's chilling Quatermass TV productions and movies in its mix of science fiction and horror. Fans will particularly appreciate the opportunities afforded to longtime Who supporting players Nicholas Courtney (as the Brigadier) and Caroline John (as the Doctor's companion Liz) to step outside their usual roles and essay memorably villainous turns as their parallel-Earth selves. The double-disc presentation of Inferno offers the by-now-standard wealth of extras, including commentary by Courtney, script editor Terrance Dicks, producer/director Barry Letts, and co-star John Levene (Sgt. Benton) and lengthy featurettes on the making of the story and the UNIT brigade during Pertwee's tenure (the latter featuring interviews with much of the supporting cast and crew). A short deleted scene from the episode (featuring Pertwee in a rare second turn as the voice of a radio announcer), a promo film for the BBC Visual Effects Department (which features clips from the Who stories Ambassadors of Death, Caves of Steel, and a missing episode from Doomwatch), and PDF files of the 1971 Doctor Who Annual and Radio Times round out the supplemental features. [+]

Doctor Who: Earthshock finds Peter Davison's Fifth Doctor nicely settling into the role, initially displaying some crotchety short temper that harks back to William Hartnell's incarnation of the Doctor, effectively setting up the most emotionally powerful finale in the show's 26-year run. In this, the penultimate adventure of Doctor Who's 19th season, a scientific expedition in a cave system on 25th-century Earth is wiped out. An army rescue unit led by Lieutenant Scott (James Warwick) and including the one woman, Professor Kyle (Claire Clifford) who survived the original massacre, goes in to recover the bodies. The scenario deliberately evokes Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), and uncannily foreshadows James Cameron's Aliens (1986), developing into a tense actioner on a space freighter bound for Earth carrying a very deadly cargo of Cybermen. Tightly paced, refreshingly free of the camp humour that sometimes blighted the show in the 1980s, and with a notable guest turn from Beryl Reid as the ship's captain, Earthshock is one of the Doctor's finest adventures. Overlook a few gaping plot holes and by the end they simply won't matter; when the final credits roll in silence the effect is as powerful now as it was shocking to audiences back in 1981. If only Star Trek: The Next Generation had done the same to Wesley Crusher! On the DVD: Doctor Who: Earthshock is presented in the original broadcast 4:3 with a near flawless picture, though the source videotape does show just the occasional sign of damage. The mono sound is excellent. The extras begin with a strong 32-minute documentary, more retrospective than making-of. Then comes the commentary, with Peter Davison, Janet Fielding (Tegan), Sarah Sutton (Nyssa) and Matthew Waterhouse (Adric), which like so many Who commentaries is both informative and wonderful fun. [+]

The final serial in Doctor Who's original run on the BBC (before it was revived in 2005), this three-episode story stars Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor, who brings his companion Ace (Sophie Aldred) back to Earth, only to discover that a race of feline aliens have turned the planet into their private hunting ground. The aliens, called Cheetah People, are traveling between their dying planet and Earth to kidnap humans for food-and lurking behind the whole scheme is none other than the Doctor's arch enemy, the Master (Anthony Ainsley in his final TV performance as the character). Despite the relative lack of quality of its video cinematography, Survival is a sold serial from the McCoy era, with some genuine suspense and an affectionate (if temporary) send-off for the venerable sci-fi hero. The two-disc set of Survival is typical of the impressive presentations that the Doctor's adventures have received on DVD. Two commentary tracks have been recorded-one featuring McCoy, Aldred, and script editor Andrew Cartmel, and the other by the winners of a contest sponsored by Doctor Who magazine (this appears only for episode 3). The hour-long, two-part Cat Flap (one of the original titles for the serial) covers the making of the serial from start to finish, and Endgame is an intriguing look at how the program might've continued after Survival had it not been cancelled in 1989. Little Girl Lost is a 15-minute exploration of Ace's character from her debut story until Survival, and Destiny of the Doctors features footage of Ainley as the Master taken from the 1997 computer game of the same name. The extras are rounded out by several deleted and extended scenes, a round of outtakes, the standard photo gallery, text-only commentary track, Radio Times listings (in DVD-ROM format), and a 20-minute episode of a U. K. educational program called Search Out Science, which features McCoy and Aldred as their characters in a discussion of (what else?) time and space. [+]

This box set contains both versions of The Italian Job-the original 60s classic starring Michael Caine and the 2003 remake, featuring Mark Wahlberg.