A heart-warming film that demonstrates how good, hard-working people can become homeless almost overnight, The Pursuit of Happyness is a tour de force showcase for Will Smith, who convincingly portrays a down and out dad trying to better his family's life. Smith, who is usually cast in effortlessly boyish roles (Men in Black, Independence Day), is wonderful in the film-even in the scenes that shamelessly tug at viewers' heart-strings. Based on the true-life story of Chris Gardner, a San Francisco salesman forced at times to shelter his young son (played by Smith's adorable look-alike offspring Jaden Smith) in a men's room, there is little suspense to the film in terms of Chris's outcome. (His story and eventual success as a prosperous Chicago businessman was well-publicised on the news magazine show 20/20. ) And let's face it, Hollywood's not too keen on making feel-good movies with unhappy endings. The beauty (and suspense, to a certain extent) of The Pursuit of Happyness is in the way the story is told. Though he is constantly rushing around to get to appointments and pick up his child, things do not happen quickly for Chris. When he accepts an internship with a prestigious stock brokerage firm, there's a catch: The position is unpaid, suitable more for trust-fund children than single parents with no other source of income. In many scenes, the viewer panics along with Chris, wondering how he's going to feed his child. While Smith and his son, Jaden, share many tender moments together, Thandie Newton (Crash) has the thankless role of playing Chris' shrill wife, who deserts her family early in the film. [+]

Featuring the third incarnation of the Doctor-Jon Pertwee's patriarchal renaissance man-The Green Death is a solid addition to the Doctor Who canon. Originally broadcast in May 1973, it may now have dated a little, with its vegetarian hippies and "boyo" Welshmen, but it has all the elements of classic Who, the Doctor encountering green-glowing dead bodies, a shadowy mastermind, a global conspiracy, brainwashing, a megalomaniacal supercomputer and, of course, giant maggots. This story, the final sequence of Pertwee's penultimate season, reached the TV ratings Top 10, and fittingly, met high production standards. The environmental message, while facilitating Who's ongoing individual-freedom motif, also proved prophetic in its warnings of globalisation and pollution. The special effects, though admittedly dated now, were good for their time and budget-the stop-motion photography of the maggots and the front-axial projection used for the pulsating green skin are particularly effective. The well-crafted script manages to combine monsters, punch-ups and cliffhanger endings with cerebral concepts, human drama and erudite references to Beethoven and Oscar Wilde-the single tear of the reformed villain as he destroys his paymaster is just one of the subtle touches distinguishing this work. The Green Death's six filler-free episodes belong to the Golden Age of Doctor Who, and their denouement is one of the most poignant in the series' long history. On the DVD: the Beeb, as always, have gone to town on the picture, with the images and colours scrubbing up nicely for their age. Sadly there are none of the usual nostalgia-inducing contemporaneous news features, but there is an amusing mockumentary starring The League of Gentlemen's Mark Gatiss. The interviews with writer Robert Sloman and actor Stewart Bevan will also give fans some extra insights-particularly Bevan's revelation that the actors were discouraged from rehearsing the final scene so as to give it genuine emotional intensity. [+]

This tearjerker by Australian filmmaker Scott Hicks is a surprising story about real-life classical pianist David Helfgott, an Australian who rose to international prominence at a very young age in the 1950s and 1960s, and suffered a psychological collapse after enduring years of abuse from his father (Armin Mueller-Stahl). Hicks has three very fine actors portraying Helfgott at different stages of his life, including the adorably wry and goofy Noah Taylor (Flirting), who takes up the character's teen years, and Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush, giving a great performance playing the musician as a schizophrenic adult. Despite the Helfgotts' compromised psychological health, Shine is hardly a depressing experience. If anything, the story is really about how long one person's life can take to make glorious sense of itself. Sir John Gielgud, in golden form, plays Helfgott's teacher. -Tom Keogh, Amazon. com.

Best known for Deliverance (1972), John Boorman produced what is arguably his greatest film with Point Blank (1967). In that ambiguous gangster flick, set in a pastel L. A. wasteland, Lee Marvin may or may not be a walking dead man, animated by the desire to avenge his fatal betrayal by the woman he loved and his best friend. Many of Boorman's films take the form of quests, fuelled by some dream of utopia; on some level, Point Blank is the tragedy of a just man, appalled and ultimately defeated by the complexity of his world's corruption. The General begins with the death of Martin Cahill-celebrated Dublin gangster who stole millions during the 1980s-then literally reverses the approach and assault of his IRA assassin, flashing back in time, back through Cahill's colorful, criminal quest for his kind of ideal community. Boorman says his Cahill is a throwback to those Celtic chieftains of old who ruled by thievery and violence; as an anachronism, this charming, brutal bear of a man (perfectly incarnated by Brendan Gleeson) is undeniably reprehensible, but he stands in deliberate contrast to the institutionalised hypocrisy and corruption of church, state, and IRA alike. Brazenly hanging out in police HQ to establish an alibi; manoeuvring gracefully through perfectly choreographed heists; dispensing affection to his wife, and her sister; nailing the hands of a suspected cheat to a pool table; handing out food to women whose husbands are out of work-Gleeson's bluff, often comic gangster is always bigger than life, an eruption of unsocialized energy through the layers-deep sediment of socially acceptable sin. (In real life as in the film, Cahill always hid his face under a sweatshirt hood, or behind his spread fingers-he looks like some mischievous, giant-child. ) Shot by the great Seamus Deasey in colour, then transferred to black-and-white stock, The General is visually voluptuous, the anatomy of a charismatic monster's soul expressed in lustrous light, silken shades of gray, and ebony shadows. [+]

Stanley Kubrick's 1961 version of Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's notorious 1953 novel, prompted a scandal in its day: even to address the issue of paedophilia on screen was deemed to be as perverted as the hapless protagonist Humbert Humbert. James Mason plays Humbert, the suave English Professor whose gentlemanly exterior peels away as quickly as his scruples once exposed to Sue Lyons' well-developed teenage beauty. In order to be close to her, he marries her mother, the lonely and pathetically pretentious Charlotte (Shelley Winters) only for her to expire conveniently, leaving Humbert free to embark on a motel-to-motel trek across America with Lolita in tow, evading suspicions that theirs is more than a father-daughter relationship. Peter Sellers, meanwhile, gives a Dr Strangelove-type tour de force performance as Clare Quilty, a TV writer also in pursuit of Lolita, who harasses Humbert under several guises, including a psychiatrist. As a movie, Lolita is flawed, albeit interestingly so. The sexual innuendo (a summer camp called Camp Climax, for example) seems jarring and pointless, while Sellers' comic turn detracts from any sense of guilt, tension or tragedy. It's as if the real purpose of the film is to offer a sort of silent, mocking laughter at the wretched Humbert and systematically divest him of his dignity. By the end, he is a babbling wretch while Sue Lyons' Lolita is pragmatic and self-possessed. It's Mason and Lyons' performances, which lift the film from its mess of structural difficulties. Decades on, their central relationship still makes for pitifully compulsive viewing. [+]

In Frank Capra's bright, funny and beautifully paced satire Mr Smith Goes to Washington political heavyweights decide that Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), an obscure scoutmaster in a small town, would be the perfect dupe to fill a vacant US Senate chair. Surely this naïve bumpkin can be easily controlled by the senior senator (Claude Rains) from his state, a respectable yet corrupted career politician. Capra fills the film with Smith's wide-eyed wonder at the glories of Washington, all of which ring false for his cynical secretary (Jean Arthur) who doesn't believe for a minute this rube could be for real. But he is. Capra was repeating the formula of a previous film, Mr Deeds Goes to Town, but this one is even sharper. Stewart and Arthur are brilliant, and the former cowboy-star Harry Carey lends a warm presence to the role of the vice-president. Mr Smith Goes to Washington is Capra's ode to the power of innocence-an idea so potent that present-day audiences may find themselves wishing for a new Mr Smith in the halls of power. The 1939 US Congress was none too thrilled about the film's depiction of their august body, denouncing it as a caricature; but even today, Capra's jibes about vested interests and political machines look as accurate as ever. -Robert Horton, Amazon. com.

The second series of the new Doctor Who disappears with a bang, thanks to an excellent two-parter that throws in the Doctors' old foes with the departure of companion Rose Tyler. Yet this final disc of the series two collection actually kicks off with "Fear Her", a decent enough way to spend three quarters of an hour, but far from the series highlight, and not the reason most people will buy this disc. It's a breezy tale of a little girl whose disturbing drawings come to life, a premise admittedly with some promise. The execution though is fairly middle of the road, and save for some fun moments along the way, it's fairly forgettable, if entertaining, stuff. The closing two parter though is terrific. It kicks of with "Army Of Ghosts", which finds the residents of Earth being visited by strange ghostly shapes, believed to be assorted relatives who have long since died. Predictably, that's not the case, and much to the shock of Torchwood, an Earth-based organisation investigating alien technology, the world promptly finds itself pretty much invaded. And there's still room for things to get worse in "Doomsday", with more than one major villain from the Doctor's past arriving on Earth, prompting a major battle, the return of faces from earlier in the series and a farewell to Rose Tyler. It all wraps up another hugely successful series of Doctor Who, and once again does it with a considerably strong pair of final episodes. We've said it before and we'll say it again-we can't wait to see how they'll top it next time around… -Simon Brew.

Soft-porn impresario Zalman King's Wild Orchid is supposed to be an "erotic drama", but it fails because there isn't the faintest semblance of chemistry between the three main players. "From the creators of 9 ½ Weeks comes the most eagerly awaited film of the year", trumpets the voice-over on the trailer, but therein lies the problem: in 9 ½ Weeks Mickey Rourke smouldered with Kim Basinger. In Wild Orchid, things have wilted before he even gets on screen. There is a vague semblance of plot: young, naïve, beautiful multilingual lawyer Emily (Carré Otis) is hired to help the obnoxious Claudia (Jacqueline Bisset), a big-time developer, to close a major property deal in Rio. Wheeler (Mickey Rourke) is the poor kid made good who proves the fly in the ointment. Bisset is supposed to have developed an obsession with the emotionally constipated Rourke after he rejected her. And Otis is supposed to be the one who eventually gets under his skin. But child-model turned actress Otis seems to be having trouble getting her swollen lips round a whole sentence at a time, let alone acting. The film dates from 1990 yet seems firmly stuck in the 1980s, from the obsession with all things commercial to the ludicrous fashion-sense (Rourke: big jacket, no shirt, lots of gold jewellery; Otis: virginal flowing dresses and tresses to match). And the sex scene, when it finally arrives in the dying moments, is brief and entirely unerotic. [+]

This Nicholas Nickleby is not one of Hollywood's condensed versions, it's the Royal Shakespeare Company's epic eight-and-a-half-hour adaptation of the life and times of the eponymous school-teacher. The 1982 production (originally staged in two parts) won worldwide acclaim and was such a success that Britain's then-newest TV station, Channel 4, launched a joint venture with independent production company Primetime to bring Nicholas Nickleby to a television audience. The result is this wonderfully theatrical version, filmed at the Old Vic and starring much of the original stage cast. It manages to stay true to Trevor Nunn's original artistic vision of Dickens's damning incitement of England's educational system. The ensemble cast are superb: Roger Rees as Nicholas is a bright-eyed idealist, every inch the young romantic hero whose principles are often his downfall, but ultimately his salvation; Fulton Mackay's twisted, embittered Squeers is every inch the Dickensian villain; and David Threlfall is transformed as Smike, Squeers' piteously subjugated, crippled servant and gives the most moving performances of his career. This enthralling TV adaptation recreates the magic of the stage version for all those who were unable to catch it on its pitifully short run. It doesn't pull any punches as the humour and inspiring storyline are tempered with real dark and tragic episodes. Forget the Hollywood fluff, this is the version you should watch if you want a faithful retelling of Dickens's story. -Kristen Bowditch.

Hard to imagine now but long before Richard Attenborough became Lord Dickie, benevolent patriarch of British moviedom, he specialised in playing weaselly little thugs and punks. Brighton Rock, adapted from Graham Greene's classic novel, offered him one of his best early roles as Pinkie, juvenile leader of a seedy gang of racetrack crooks in the Sussex seaside town. When it seems an innocent young waitress may know too much about one of their killings, Pinkie decides to keep her quiet by marrying her. But in Greene's world of guilt-ridden Catholicism and inexorable doom, it was never going to be that easy. Is the famous twist ending a cop-out? That depends just how much irony you read into it. But the Brighton atmosphere, all tawdry gaiety shot through with a crackling undercurrent of fear, is so vivid you can smell it. Made with a cool, dispassionate eye by the Boulting Brothers (before they turned jokey with the likes of I'm Alright Jack, for instance) and superbly shot by Harry Waxman, this is one of Britain's few great contributions to the noir thriller cycle. Young Dickie, twitchy, vicious and terrified, is a revelation-and don't miss William Hartnell, the original Dr Who, as his cynical sidekick. -Philip Kemp Rightly regarded as a genuine classic of British cinema, Brighton Rock has stood the test of time remarkably well to emerge as a tense, original thriller. Although there is much that is old-fashioned here (particularly the less than convincing East End accents), the tale of feuding gangster factions holds up favourably compared to modern-day efforts. [+]

Elias Koteas, Chloe Sevigny, Mark Ruffalo, Brian Cox, John Carroll Lynch