Hobson's Choice (1953) and The Sound Barrier (1952) is a double bill of cleverly juxtaposed films from David Lean's early canon, demonstrating that even without the landmark epics to come, British cinema would have been an infinitely poorer place without his tremendous contribution. Both films reflect his endlessly penetrating view of human behaviour and its perseverance through obstacles great and small. And both are effectively prisms that reflect all the aspects of that view, keeping the audience's sympathies constantly on the move.

Hobson's Choice, based on Harold Brighouse's eternally popular 1916 comedy, boasts fine turns from Charles Laughton--at his brilliant, physical best--as the boot-shop owner with three troublesome daughters, and John Mills as the lowly boot maker, elevated and improved by the eldest daughter Maggie in a neat inversion of the Pygmalion fable. But both are kept in their place by Brenda de Banzie's portrayal of Maggie, a performance that glows with intelligence, truth and increasing warmth.

The Sound Barrier is a drama about the race for a supersonic aeroplane. Superficially, its setting is quintessential post-World War II Britain: stiff upper lips, twin beds and clipped Rattigan dialogue. But it's prescient stuff. Ralph Richardson's aircraft manufacturer, sinister in his obsession, is an ominously skilful film performance. And Lean's take on the unthinkable cost of human achievement, interwoven with some spectacular cinematography, absorbs and unsettles. It's especially poignant now that the supersonic age has been summarily ended by Concorde's retirement.

On the DVD: Hobson's Choice and The Sound Barrier are both black-and-white films presented in 4:3 picture format, from reasonable prints, and with a mono soundtrack of suitably robust quality for Malcolm Arnold's inventive scores. There are no extras, apart from scene indexes. --Piers Ford

This big, fat theatrical bomb has a lot going for it. There's the three leads, Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker, playing three resurrected witches who wreak havoc on Salem, Massachusetts, 300 hundred years after they were hung. There's music, special effects, and magic. There's a surprisingly horror-filled plot. Whoops, hold up on that last one. It's probably the extremes that this film goes to (displaying a Disney label), such as the witches sucking the life out of a little girl in the first five minutes, that put the brakes on any success for Hocus Pocus. Older children, however, in the 8 and up range should get a kick out of all the weird goings-on. It's a good measure of Halloween thrills and chills. --Keith Simanton

Hoffman is an odd cross between There's a Girl in My Soup and The Collector and is clearly one of the few film projects Peter Sellers took seriously enough to work hard on, rather than one of the many he breezed through on a talent for funny voices and unleashed chaos. The set-up is that secretary Miss Smith (Sinead Cusack) is blackmailed by meek, middle-aged Mr Hoffman (Sellers) into spending a week of domesticity with him in his flat, while she tells her fiance (Jeremy "Boba Fett" Bulloch) that she's with her gran in Scarborough. At first, the tone is creepy as Cusack dreads the terrors of sharing a bed with Sellers and he mutters darkly about an absent wife in terms that recall Crippen and the brides-in-the-bath murderer, but it becomes more poignant as both characters learn to see each other as people.

The worst Sellers does in bed is snore loudly, while the unattainably glamorous young woman suffers from minor ailments like a bruised heel and night-time constipation, and the at-first simple relationship between them deepens as the girl comes to understand the half-life Hoffman has been leading. The script gives Sellers a lot of funny business, acid lines and whimsical turns, but he plays Hoffman as a repressed soul half-ashamed of his attempts to be funny, telling genuinely good jokes as if he expects no one will laugh. Cusack, more interesting than the expected dolly bird, keeps up with her co-star, and almost makes the strangely upbeat last reel believable.

On the DVD: Hoffman comes to disc in a nice widescreen print. Otherwise, nada. The film is also available as part of the four-disc Peter Sellers Collection.--Kim Newman