Holiday Inn is a perennial, Christmas-season favourite from 1942 teamed Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire as entertainers (and rival suitors of Marjorie Reynolds) running an inn that is only open on holidays. It's a great excuse for lots of singing and dancing, seamlessly wrapped in a catchy story, and Astaire's frequent director Mark Sandrich (Top Hat, Shall We Dance?) doesn't let us down. The Irving Berlin numbers (each one connected to a different holiday) are winners. Crosby's warm performance of "White Christmas" is a movie touchstone. -Tom Keogh Holiday Inn is the perennial Christmas-season favourite from 1942 that teams Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire as entertainers (and rival suitors of Marjorie Reynolds) running an inn that is only open on holidays. It's a great excuse for lots of singing and dancing, seamlessly wrapped in a catchy story, and Astaire's frequent director Mark Sandrich (Top Hat, Shall We Dance) doesn't let us down. The Irving Berlin numbers (each one connected to a different holiday) are winners, with Crosby's warm performance of "White Christmas" a movie touchstone. -Tom Keogh.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, starring MGM soprano Jane Powell and handsome baritone Howard Keel, has retained a remarkably loyal following among fans of the musical film ever since its release in 1954. Although it was filmed in state-of-the-art CinemaScope, Stanley Donen was obliged to direct much of the film on Metro's sound stages, where the artificial sets and painted backdrops don't inevitably live up to the scenes shot on location in Oregon. Viewers coming fresh to the picture may find this visual discrepancy jarring and some too may find Miss Powell's singing a shade plummy. The screenplay, by husband and wife team Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich with Dorothy Kingsley, tells the story of seven brothers living in the Oregon hills and their adventures to find themselves wives. The casting of each brother with his rugged, masculine looks and ability to dance with grace and athleticism, presided over by an authoritative Howard Keel, gives the film a dynamic impetus second to none in an MGM musical. The lengthy barn-raising episode under choreographer Michael Kidd's intrepid direction, where the music and the incredibly agile and energetic male and female dance ensemble unite as one, produces a square dance without parallel. The music and lyrics by Gene De Paul and Johnny Mercer-including the mating chorus, "Spring, Spring, Spring", the rollicking "Bless You're Beautiful Hide", the rousing "Sobbin' Women" and the visually enchanting "June Bride"-are both tuneful and mindful of the plot's exposition. Adolph Deutsch and Saul Chaplin won the Academy Award in 1954 for their arrangements and conducting. On the DVD: The digital remastering has created a clearer picture of what had been a faintly muddy Ansco colour system on the original print while the polish and attack with which the MGM Studio Orchestra play the music on this full-bodied stereophonic soundtrack remains a thing of wonder. Howard Keel, standing tall and erect in his 80s, hosts the "making of" documentary. [+]

David Lean's wintry adaptation of Boris Pasternak's melodramatic Russian Revolution romance, Doctor Zhivago, is a masterpiece of epic filmmaking, but one that risks leaving the viewer cold. Though none of the film was shot in the then USSR, Lean's assured technique nevertheless illuminates the breathtaking backgrounds magnificently: from the snowy wastes of the Urals to the strife-torn streets of Moscow, Lean stages a series of wonderful set-pieces showing war, revolution and its terrible aftermath. The problem lies in the foreground. Omar Sharif's entirely passive Zhivago is, we are told, a romantic poet of great sensitivity who internalises all his emotions and expresses them in verse. The trouble is the audience never gets to see a line of his poems, not even the centrally important "Lara" cycle. Thus Zhivago at the end of the picture is as much an emotional blank to us as he was at the beginning. His affair with the idealised beauty that is Julie Christie's Lara is also taken for granted by the filmmakers rather than set up in any convincing way, their mutual attraction remaining a mystery that creates a vacuum at the core of the picture. Given that none of the central characters with the exception of Rod Steiger's fire-breathing lecher Komarovsky ever give way to strong emotions, the romantic heart of the film remains oddly frigid. Matters are not helped by composer Maurice Jarre's incessant "Lara's Theme", which many will find teeth-grindingly irritating. Still, any David Lean epic, even a flawed one, is always going to be a first-class cinematic experience, and Zhivago is assuredly that. [+]

A hugely enjoyable Doctor Who adventure from the very infancy of the show, The War Machines finds William Hartnell in charge of the Tardis, and naturally enough there's an impending crisis facing the Earth. Set in the era in which the story was made, The War Machines sees the Doctor and Dodo heading off to the Post Office Tower, where they find out all about Professor Brett's new computer, WONTAN. And setting the scene for many science fiction films and television shows that would explore similar themes, WONTAN soon becomes a computer that believes machines should be in charge, and hence introduces the war machines of the story's title. Really well realised, and making the most of the resources at its disposal, The War Machines is visually impressive, but also a well-constructed story. It clearly works within many of the television conventions of the time, but Hartnell was always a strong Doctor, and the story explores its themes confidently too. It's good to have it on disc. Backed up by a substantive extras list, with a healthy slice of archive material, The War Games is a welcome DVD release, and a very good story from the archives of Doctor Who. -Jon Foster.

The winner of 10 Academy Awards, this 1961 musical by choreographer Jerome Robbins and director Robert Wise (The Sound of Music) remains irresistible. Based on a smash Broadway play updating Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to the 1950s era of juvenile delinquency, West Side Story stars Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer as the star-crossed lovers from different neighbourhoods-and ethnicities. The film's real selling points, however, are the highly charged and inventive song-and-dance numbers, the passionate ballads, the moody sets, colourful support from Rita Moreno, and the sheer accomplishment of Hollywood talent and technology producing a film so stirring. Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim wrote the score. -Tom Keogh West Side Story marked a small revolution in the history of the Hollywood musical when it was released in 1961. Enriched by Leonard Bernstein's marvellously brassy, challenging score-as redolent of the place as anything Gershwin ever wrote-the location shooting and aerial views of the Manhattan grid made New York a gritty backdrop to this modern interpretation of Romeo and Juliet. The film rightly became an instant classic which won ten Oscars and brought some of the greatest numbers in the era of the modern musical to a global audience. Everything gels, from Jerome Robbins' superlative choreography (he retains a director's credit with Robert Wise, although anxious studio bosses removed him from the film when costs started to mount), to Ernest Lehman's taught screenplay, some of Sondheim's most accessible early lyrics, and passionate, raw performances from the gang members and the lovers. For many of the cast, including Richard Beymer as Tony and Natalie Wood as Maria, the film represents a creative climax which wouldn't be surpassed during the remainder of their distinguished careers. Rita Moreno is an outstanding Anita, even with her songs disappointingly dubbed, and George Chakiris' sinewy, arrogant Bernardo is magnetic. [+]

Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was unique in its day for casting kids in the play's pivotal roles of, well, kids. Seventeen-year-old Leonard Whiting and 15-year-old Olivia Hussey play the titular pair, the Bard's star-crossed lovers who defy a running feud between their families in order to be together in love. Typically played on stage and in previous film productions by adult actors, the innocent look and rawness of Whiting and Hussey resonated at the time with a burgeoning youth movement from San Francisco to Prague. The tragic romance at the centre of the story also clicked with anti-authority sentiments, but even without that, Zeffirelli scores points by validating the ideals and passions of strong-willed adolescents. Less successful are scenes requiring the actors to have a fuller grasp of the text, though the best thing going remains the unambiguous duel between Romeo and Tybalt (Michael York). Lavishly photographed by Pasquale de Santis on location in Italy, this Romeo and Juliet brought a different tone and dimension to a story that had become tiresome in reverential presentations. -Tom Keogh.

This semi-remake of Holiday Inn (the first movie in which Irving Berlin's perennial, Oscar-winning holiday anthem was featured) doesn't have much of a story, but what it does have is choice: Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, an all-Irving Berlin song score, classy direction by Hollywood vet Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, The Adventures of Robin Hood), VistaVision (the very first feature ever shot in that widescreen format), and ultrafestive Technicolor! Crosby and Kaye are song-and-dance men who hook up, romantically and professionally, with a "sister" act (Clooney and Vera-Ellen) to put on a Big Show to benefit the struggling ski-resort lodge run by the beloved old retired general (Dean Jagger) of their WWII Army outfit. Crosby is cool, Clooney is warm, Kaye is goofy, and Vera-Ellen is leggy. Songs include: "Sisters" (Crosby and Kaye do their own drag version, too), "Snow", "We'll Follow the Old Man", "Mandy", "Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep" and more. Christmas would be unthinkable without White Christmas. -Jim Emerson.

MGM's bold idea to remake George Cukor's Oscar-winning upper-class romantic farce, The Philadelphia Story, into a star-studded technicolor musical with Cole Porter tunes somehow works splendidly and remains an underrated gem. Even the plot and character names-and some bits of dialogue-all remain the same as the original. Crooning Bing Crosby replaces Cary Grant as the wealthy ex-husband trying to win back his soon-to-be-remarried ex-wife, spoiled ice queen Tracy Lord (Grace Kelly, stunning and aloof in her last film role, originated in the earlier comedy by Katherine Hepburn). Unlike Grant, however, Crosby has jazz great Louis Armstrong, playing himself, in his corner for quixotic persuasion. Frank Sinatra (cocky in James Stewart's former role) and Celeste Holm add support as the nosy reporters covering, and subsequently complicating, the upcoming wedding. Sure, High Society lacks the original's witty satire, sarcasm and character complexity; but it's assuredly paced and wonderfully acted, and contains enough romantic chemistry to keep the plot engaging. And then there's the music. Unlike the grandiose production numbers of many 40s and 50s musicals, High Society's musical sequences are considerably low-key and intimate, focusing on Porter's lyrical content and the style in which it's delivered by the charismatic performers. Armstrong kicks the film off in telling style: he sings the title track, a calypso tune outlining the plot like a Greek chorus-not as an elaborately choreographed song-and-dance number, but instead stuffed claustrophobically in the back of a limousine with his jazz band. Other musical standouts include Sinatra and Crosby playfully tossing barbs during "Well, Did You Evah?"; Crosby and Armstrong teaming up for an energetic clash of styles in "Now You Has Jazz"; the two soaring, archetypal ballads by the leads-Crosby's "I Love You, Samantha" and Sinatra's superior "You're Sensational"; and, finally, the satirical Sinatra/Holm duet, "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?", the closest High Society ever comes to social or class-commentary. [+]

The second DVD in the collector's edition series features classic cartoons capers from the world's most famous cat and mouse duo, taking us in chronological order up to the 1950s episode entitled 'Safety Second'. This collection also includes the famous Oscar-winning installment 'The Cat Concerto', which sees Tom and Jerry turn a concert performance of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody into a pitched battle on the piano.

Akira Kurosawa's rousing Seven Samurai was a natural for an American remake-after all, the codes and conventions of ancient Japan and the Wild West (at least the mythical movie West) are not so very far apart. Thus The Magnificent Seven effortlessly turns samurai into cowboys (the same trick worked more than once: Kurosawa's Yojimbo became Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars). The beleaguered denizens of a Mexican village, weary of attacks by banditos, hire seven gunslingers to repel the invaders once and for all. The gunmen are cool and capable, with most of the actors playing them just on the cusp of '60s stardom: Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn. The man who brings these warriors together is Yul Brynner, the baddest bald man in the West. There's nothing especially stylish about the approach of veteran director John Sturges (The Great Escape), but the storytelling is clear and strong, and the charisma of the young guns fairly flies off the screen. If that isn't enough to awaken the 12-year-old kid inside anyone, the unforgettable Elmer Bernstein music will do it: bum-bum-ba-bum, bum-ba-bum-ba-bum. Followed by three inferior sequels, Return of the Seven, Guns of the Magnificent Seven, and The Magnificent Seven Ride! -Robert Horton.