Duchess and her three kittens are enjoying the high life with their devoted human mistress until the wicked butler Edgar, with his eyes on a big inheritance, decides to dope them and get them out of the picture. How can these fragile creatures cope in the unfamiliar countryside and the meaner streets of Paris? Only by meeting the irrepressible alley cat O'Malley, a rough diamond with romance in his heart. After they get a taste of the wide dangerous world, he guides them home, and Edgar gets his just desserts at the wrong end of a horse. As always, it's really the voices rather than the animation that are the heart of the Disney magic: Phil Harris is brilliant as O'Malley, Eva Gabor as Duchess is ... well ... Eva Gabor; but perhaps the most memorable turns are by Pat Buttram and George Lindsay, who turn the old hounds Napoleon and Lafayette into a couple of bumbling Southern-fried rednecks. Their scenes with Edgar, and the musical numbers with Scat Cat and his cool-dude band, are classic. Most striking about seeing The Aristocats now is how deeply Disney's style of animation has changed since this was at the cutting edge in 1970. Perhaps the nostalgic, dated feel are just a result of being plonked down in Belle Epoque Paris, but the illustrations are fussier (a pity) and the animation and overall pace much less frenetic (sometimes a relief) than in more recent efforts such as Aladdin. --Richard Farr

A documentary film by Bruno Monsaingeon devoted to the 20th century's greatest violinists, The Art of Violin really cannot be faulted. The same, incidentally, can also be said of the similar volumes which cover the piano and singing, so there's never been a better time to collect a personal audio-visual archive of some wonderful historical performers. The added dimension provided by the painstakingly collected film material (here featuring no fewer than 20 outstanding soloists) is of course of exceptional value when observing violin technique, and the diversity of approaches presented here in loving detail is in itself a subject for endless comparison. The material mixes archive performance footage, much of which one might never have dreamed existed, with interviews and documentary commentary. However, rather than turn the project into a museum piece, Monsaingeon includes contributions from contemporary figures such as Perlman and, shrewdly, Hilary Hahn--not that there'd be any doubt of the huge relevance of the material to any contemporary player or lover of the repertoire. An absolute must. --Roger Thomas

Poorly received on its theatrical release, The Art of War is a film which deserves a second look. Plot-wise it's a routinely complicated thriller full of double-crosses and sudden shifts of perspective, as Wesley Snipes, secret fixer for the UN, tries to find out who killed the Chinese Ambassador to stop a trade pact and what it is that interpreter Marie Matiko knows that means people are trying to kill her. There are good performances here--Donald Sutherland as a Secretary General who takes good care not to know what is done in the name of peace, Anne Archer as Snipes' power-dressed controller, and Maury Chaykin as a world-weary FBI man who finds himself dragged around New York in Snipes' high-speed wake--but what is memorable is the look of the film. Presenting a New York of building sites and mirrored apartment buildings and rain on glass in twilight, contemporary techno-noir has never been quite so coherently imagined and set.

On the DVD: This is a film which comes into its own in widescreen and on DVD simply because its visual aspect is most of the point. This disc is not generous with features, simply providing scene access and the theatrical trailer, which makes rather more reference to Sun Tzu's classic of military strategy than the film ever bothers to. However, its combination of Dolby Sound and 2.35:1 widescreen ratio plays to the movie's strengths. --Roz Kaveney