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 "A Couple of Song and Dance Men" is a 45-minute conversation between author-historian Ken Barnes and Ava Astaire McKenzie, Fred's daughter, recapping the careers of Astaire and Crosby. It's a bit wooden, but not without charm, and has some interesting early footage, chiefly of Crosby (presumably because of studio rights issues). There's also a seven-minute discussion of how sound has been recorded for movie musicals, and specifically how it was done for Holiday Inn's "I'll Capture Her Heart. " Barnes's commentary track offers bits of trivia (they had originally wanted Ginger Rogers for one of the roles, and yes, the title inspired the hotel chain) and incorporates some archival quotes by Astaire and Crosby. The remastered picture is a noticeable improvement over the earlier double-feature DVD, which paired Holiday Inn with Crosby's Going My Way. -David Horiuchi.

MGM/UA Home Video

Fred Astaire dances on the ceiling in this 1951 Alan Jay Lerner musical for MGM, directed by Stanley Donen (Singin' in the Rain). The appealing story finds Astaire as part of a brother-and-sister act (along with Jane Powell) that travels to London at the time of Queen Elizabeth II's wedding. Astaire and Powell each find romances that threaten to break up the act, but that's mostly fun window dressing in a movie better known for some truly creative sequences made vivid by Donen, including Astaire's famous dance with a hat rack and his duet with Powell, "How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You (When You Know I've Been a Liar All My Life)?" -Tom Keogh, Amazon. com.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Anita Loos' old story from the 1920s about a pair of single women in search of husbands, gets a makeover in Howard Hawks' 1953 musical. The remake stars Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe as two friends who go to Paris looking for mates. The film is charged by Hawks's stylish snap, a famous set piece or two (Monroe descending that staircase while singing "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend"), Russell's wit and songs by Leo Robin and Jule Styne. The film may largely be a fluff project best remembered as a showcase for its leading actresses, but then Monroe and Russell rarely got such extended opportunities to prove that they were more than cinematic icons. -Tom Keogh, Amazon. com.

A Hard Day's Night may have been The Beatles' first big-screen experience but, as they had become the biggest band in the world by the time of its production, the Moptops were able to ensure it was a bit different from the band-movie norm. "We'd made it clear that we weren't interested in being stuck in one of those nobody-understands-our-music plots," John Lennon would later recall. "The kind of thing where we'd just pop up a couple of times between the action, all smiles and clean shirts, to sing our latest record. Never mind all your pals, how could we have faced each other if we had allowed ourselves to be involved in that kind of movie?" Instead the quartet recruited a young director named Richard Lester-who had previously worked with the Fab Four's beloved Goons-to make a movie that followed them as they enjoyed and endured the phenomenon that was Beatlemania. "The film wrote itself right in front of our eyes," says Lester. "We just took the dirty bits and cut them out. " The result is a frenetic hour and a half inside The Beatles' personal space as they engage in all manner of surreal hi-jinks-more often than not involving Paul's "grandfather" (played by Steptoe and Son's Wilfrid Brambell) while dodging the ever-present horde of screaming fans. Although the result now seems a little dated, there remains an almost heart-breakingly good-natured aura around the foursome's naïve performances while few could argue about the quality of a soundtrack that includes "Can't Buy Me Love", "And I Love Her" and "A Hard Day's Night" itself, to name but a few. Whether the film would have been quite so successful if Lester had followed McCartney's suggestion and called it "Oh, What A Lovely Wart!" will, sadly, never be known. -Clark Collis A Hard Day's Night may have been the Beatles' first big-screen experience but, as they had become the biggest band in the world by the time of its production, the Moptops were able to ensure it was a bit different from the band-movie norm. [+]