Iron Monkey is a thrilling 1993 adventure directed by Yuen Woo-Ping, now better known as the action director of The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Audiences who approach Iron Monkey after seeing the latter two Hollywood-produced hit movies will not be disappointed here, either by the physical prowess of the stars or the astonishing action set-pieces (especially an interlude atop a set of "Chinese poles"), which are staged for maximum dynamism. The story concerns the real-life Cantonese patriot Wong Fei-Hung, who is first introduced as an earnest boy travelling with his upright pugilist father (Donnie Yen) and drawing inspiration from the activities of the benevolent masked bandit known as the Iron Monkey (Yu Rong-Guang), a sort of Oriental Robin Hood. Ever since the late 1800s Wong Fei-Hung has evolved into an icon of Chinese pop culture and he's been a central figure in Hong Kong cinema since the 1950s, notably in Tsui Hark's Once Upon a Time in China series. Yuen Woo-Ping's fight sequences for his version of the legend are a powerful combination of the older, Baltic style of kung fu action and the newer body-slamming style pioneered by Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung. If you thought you were allergic to martial arts but loved Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, this is the perfect picture to continue your exploration of the genre. -David Chute, Amazon. com.

By the time Alfred Hitchcock's second-to-last picture came out in 1972, the censorship restrictions under which he had laboured during his long career had eased up. Now he could give full sway to his lurid fantasies, and that may explain why Frenzy is the director's most violent movie by far-outstripping even Psycho for sheer brutality. Adapted by playwright Anthony Shaffer, the story concerns a series of rape-murders committed by suave fruit-merchant Bob Rusk (Barry Foster), who gets his kicks from throttling women with a necktie. This being a Hitchcock thriller, suspicion naturally falls on the wrong man-ill-tempered publican Richard Blaney (Jon Finch). Enter Inspector Oxford from New Scotland Yard (Alex McCowan), who thrashes out the finer points of the case with his wife (Vivian Merchant), whose tireless enthusiasm for indigestible delicacies like quail with grapes supplies a classic running gag. Frenzy was the first film Hitchcock had shot entirely in his native Britain since Jamaica Inn (1939), and many contemporary critics used that fact to account for what seemed to them a glorious return to form after a string of Hollywood duds (Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz). Hitchcock specialists are often less wild about it, judging the detective plot mechanical and the oh-so-English tone insufferable. But at least three sequences rank among the most skin-crawling the maestro ever put on celluloid. There is an astonishing moment when the camera backs away from a room in which a murder is occurring, down the stairs, through the front door and then across the street to join the crowd milling indifferently on the pavement. There is also the killer's nerve-wracking attempt to retrieve his tiepin from a corpse stuffed into a sack of potatoes. [+]

Vincente Minnelli's 1958 adaptation of Colette's story about a girl (Leslie Caron) groomed as a courtesan-but desired as a wife by a Parisian playboy (Louis Jordan)-won a lot of Oscars, but it also has the unusual distinction of being an MGM musical shot on location in the City of Lights. What a musical it is (by Lerner and Loewe): Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold crooning "Ah, Yes, I Remember It Well", plus the songs "Thank Heaven for Little Girls", "Gigi", "I'm a Bore", and "She's Not Thinking of Me". Director Vincente Minnelli (Some Came Running, Meet Me in St Louis) makes a sumptuous, dreamy, almost laid-back affair of it all and the indispensable cast is forever etched into memory. Hollywood's long-running infatuation with continental grace and manners, the memory of a much earlier time imported to American movies through such immigrant directors as Ernst Lubitsch, may have finally come to a gentle end with this film. -Tom Keogh Gigi, Vincente Minnelli's 1958 adaptation of Colette's story about a girl (Leslie Caron) groomed as a courtesan but desired as a wife by a Parisian playboy (Louis Jordan), won a lot of Oscars, but it also has the unusual distinction of being an MGM musical shot on location in the City of Lights. What a musical it is (by Lerner and Loewe): Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold crooning "Ah, Yes, I Remember It Well", plus the songs "Thank Heaven for Little Girls", "Gigi", "I'm a Bore", and "She's Not Thinking of Me". Director Minnelli makes a sumptuous, dreamy, almost laid-back affair of it all and the indispensable cast is forever etched into memory. Hollywood's long-running infatuation with continental grace and manners, the memory of a much earlier time imported to American movies through such immigrant directors as Ernst Lubitsch, may have finally come to a gentle end with this film. -Tom Keogh.

The 1944 musical Cover Girl charts the story of a Brooklyn chorus girl (Rita Hayworth) who becomes a big star when she is put on a magazine cover. She is torn between a glittering Broadway career under the aegis of elderly sugar-daddy tycoon (Otto Kruger) and real life with the roughneck he-man choreographer (Gene Kelly) she really loves. Columbia were so intent on showing off their prime asset in this vehicle that Hayworth is sometimes in danger of being swamped by sheer production values and Charles Vidor's ever-so-slightly stuffy direction. However, gorgeous Technicolor and the even more gorgeous Rita make the creaking plot not only bearable but also sparkling. There are oddly unsentimental and unsettling flashbacks with Hayworth playing her character's turn-of-the-century grandmother offering a cut-down of the main story and energetic comedy support performances from Phil Silvers (who proves himself an unexpectedly adept dancer) and the fabulously hated cynic Eve Arden (not to mention the wonderfully-named Jinx Falkenberg). One stand-out performance is the Jerome Kern-Ira Gershwin duet ("Long Ago and Far Away") enlivening an otherwise so-so score (other tunes: "Make Way for Tomorrow", "Put Me to the Test", "Sure Thing", "That's the Best of All", "The Show Must Go On", "Who's Complaining?" and "Poor John"). Of course, the film becomes magical in its dance sequences, with the young Kelly staging and performing several wonderful routines-including the famous "Alter Ego" turn, in which he dances with his own reflection-and finding, in the trim Rita, one of his most perfect partners: although Martha Mears dubbed Rita's singing voice, she impressively delivers all her own dance moves. -Kim Newman.

Vincente Minnelli's 1958 adaptation of Colette's story about a girl (Leslie Caron) groomed as a courtesan-but desired as a wife by a Parisian playboy (Louis Jordan)-won a lot of Oscars, but it also has the unusual distinction of being an MGM musical shot on location in the City of Lights. What a musical it is (by Lerner and Loewe): Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold crooning "Ah, Yes, I Remember It Well", plus the songs "Thank Heaven for Little Girls", "Gigi", "I'm a Bore", and "She's Not Thinking of Me". Director Vincente Minnelli (Some Came Running, Meet Me in St Louis) makes a sumptuous, dreamy, almost laid-back affair of it all and the indispensable cast is forever etched into memory. Hollywood's long-running infatuation with continental grace and manners, the memory of a much earlier time imported to American movies through such immigrant directors as Ernst Lubitsch, may have finally come to a gentle end with this film. -Tom Keogh Gigi, Vincente Minnelli's 1958 adaptation of Colette's story about a girl (Leslie Caron) groomed as a courtesan but desired as a wife by a Parisian playboy (Louis Jordan), won a lot of Oscars, but it also has the unusual distinction of being an MGM musical shot on location in the City of Lights. What a musical it is (by Lerner and Loewe): Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold crooning "Ah, Yes, I Remember It Well", plus the songs "Thank Heaven for Little Girls", "Gigi", "I'm a Bore", and "She's Not Thinking of Me". Director Minnelli makes a sumptuous, dreamy, almost laid-back affair of it all and the indispensable cast is forever etched into memory. Hollywood's long-running infatuation with continental grace and manners, the memory of a much earlier time imported to American movies through such immigrant directors as Ernst Lubitsch, may have finally come to a gentle end with this film. -Tom Keogh.

Hands down, Only Angels Have Wings is one of the most buoyantly entertaining movies in the American cinema. It is also a razor-sharp example of the action-oriented films of Howard Hawks, the wide-ranging auteur who would go on to make To Have and Have Not and Red River. This one is set in Barranca, a South American port city swathed in perpetual night fog, where a band of mail pilots struggle daily to get their planes through a treacherous mountain pass. They don't care about the mail so much as they live by the rules of adventure, professionalism and friendly rivalry. Cary Grant is the leader of this daredevil group, a man who won't be pinned down to anything except his own code of stoicism. ("I don't believe in laying in a supply of anything" he says, which may be why he's always asking people for matches to light his cigarettes. ) His cool style is tested by the arrival of a wisecracking blonde (Jean Arthur) and an ex-mistress (Rita Hayworth); Rita's now married to a pilot (Richard Barthelmess), disgraced by a single act of cowardice. Hawks always got great mileage from throwing a bunch of colourful characters together in an enclosed space, where death could strike in a moment. The great secret about Hawks is that although his feel for action was crackling, he was really more interested in the way people exchanged sidelong glances or lit each other's cigarettes-there's a lot of both in Only Angels Have Wings. -Robert Horton.

You Can't Take It With You, Frank Capra's 1938 populist spin on the George S Kaufman and Moss Hart play about a family of happy eccentrics, is a great deal of fun, though it significantly rewrites the original work and doesn't represent Capra (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) at his best. Jean Arthur plays a member of the blissful Vanderhof househ old who falls in love with a rich man's son (James Stewart) and brings him into her nutty home. Lionel Barrymore, who played such a bad guy eight years later in Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, is the wonderful Grandpa Vanderhof, who addresses God during the dinner prayer as "sir" and speaks plainly and beautifully of why it's good to be alive. Capra took this opportunity to rail against big business and champion the common man, but the overall tone of the film-typical for the director's comedies-is buoyant and snappy. -Tom Keogh, Amazon. com.

Frank Capra's work should need no introducton: simply on of the best directors of all time and here are three classic Oscar-winning movies from the master, on two top-quality tapes.

Decades before the Hollywood film industry became famous for megabudget disaster and science fiction spectaculars, the studios of Southern California (and particularly Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) were renowned for a uniquely American (and nearly extinct) kind of picture known as The Musical. Indeed, when Sight & Sound conducts its international critics poll in the second year of every decade, this 1952 MGM picture is the American musical that consistently ranks among the 10 best movies ever made. It's not only a great song-and-dance piece starring Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, and a sprightly Debbie Reynolds; it's also an affectionately funny insider spoof about the film industry's uneasy transition from silent pictures to "talkies". Kelly plays debonair star Don Lockwood, whose leading lady Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) has a screechy voice hilariously ill-suited to the new technology (and her glamorous screen image). Among the musical highlights: O'Connor's knockout "Make 'Em Laugh"; the big "Broadway Melody" production number; and, best of all, that charming little title ditty in which Kelly makes movie magic on a drenched set with nothing but a few puddles, a lamppost, and an umbrella. -Jim Emerson Singin' in the Rain is probably the most treasured musical in the history of cinema. It is essentially a satire on the dawning age of talking pictures, but that description doesn't begin to describe its importance in the hearts of film lovers, even those who can't otherwise stand musicals. Given its origins-producer Arthur Freed wanted a framework on which to hang a selection of the hits he'd written in the early part of his career with Nacio Herb Brown, many of which had themselves featured in early talkies-it should have been a mongrel of a picture. But somehow, with its combination of endearing performances, the razor-sharp script of Adolph Green and Betty Comden, instinctive direction from Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen and those delightful songs, it is triumphantly greater than the sum of its parts. Kelly's dance sequence, conceived for the title song, is an undiluted joy and remains an iconic cinema moment. [+]

Vincente Minnelli's 1958 adaptation of Colette's story about a girl (Leslie Caron) groomed as a courtesan-but desired as a wife by a Parisian playboy (Louis Jordan)-won a lot of Oscars, but it also has the unusual distinction of being an MGM musical shot on location in the City of Lights. What a musical it is (by Lerner and Loewe): Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold crooning "Ah, Yes, I Remember It Well", plus the songs "Thank Heaven for Little Girls", "Gigi", "I'm a Bore", and "She's Not Thinking of Me". Director Vincente Minnelli (Some Came Running, Meet Me in St Louis) makes a sumptuous, dreamy, almost laid-back affair of it all and the indispensable cast is forever etched into memory. Hollywood's long-running infatuation with continental grace and manners, the memory of a much earlier time imported to American movies through such immigrant directors as Ernst Lubitsch, may have finally come to a gentle end with this film. -Tom Keogh Gigi, Vincente Minnelli's 1958 adaptation of Colette's story about a girl (Leslie Caron) groomed as a courtesan but desired as a wife by a Parisian playboy (Louis Jordan), won a lot of Oscars, but it also has the unusual distinction of being an MGM musical shot on location in the City of Lights. What a musical it is (by Lerner and Loewe): Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold crooning "Ah, Yes, I Remember It Well", plus the songs "Thank Heaven for Little Girls", "Gigi", "I'm a Bore", and "She's Not Thinking of Me". Director Minnelli makes a sumptuous, dreamy, almost laid-back affair of it all and the indispensable cast is forever etched into memory. Hollywood's long-running infatuation with continental grace and manners, the memory of a much earlier time imported to American movies through such immigrant directors as Ernst Lubitsch, may have finally come to a gentle end with this film. -Tom Keogh.

Consciously crafted by director George Stevens as a piece of American myth making, Shane is on nearly everyone's shortlist of great movie Westerns. A buckskin knight, Shane (Alan Ladd) rides into the middle of a range war between farmers and cattlemen, quickly siding with the "sod-busters". While helping a kindly farmer (Van Heflin), Shane falls platonically in love with the man's wife (Jean Arthur, in the last screen performance of a marvellous career). Though the showdowns are exciting, and the story simple but involving, what most people will remember about this movie is the friendship between the stoical Shane and the young son of the farmers. The kid is played by Brandon De Wilde, an amazing child performer; his parting scene with Shane is guaranteed to draw tears from even the most stony-hearted moviegoer. And speaking of stony hearts, Jack Palance made a sensational impression as the evil gunslinger sent to clean house-he has fewer lines of dialogue than he has lines in his magnificently craggy face, but he makes them count. The photography, highlighting the landscape near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, won an Oscar. -Robert Horton.