Heady mix of song and dance.(Entertainment)

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Happy Feet. Directed by George Miller, with the voices of Elijah Wood, Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, Brittany Murphy Robin Williams and Hugo Weaving.

Thoroughly enjoyable family fare, the Oscar-winning animated feature Happy Feet sees tone deaf Emperor Penguin Mumbles (Wood), shunned by his peers because he can’t sing.

Mumbles, you see, is a natural-born tap dancer who’s looking for love. Mumbles inadvertently finds himself far from home, and befriends a colony of Adelie penguins who embrace his flipper-tapping ways, until disaster strikes, and the colony blames him for the lack of fish in their waters. At great risk, and against all odds, the heroic little penguin then sets off to uncover the source of the famine.

With Happy Feet, director George Miller – who cut his cinematic teeth as the writer and director of the Mad Max films, and later moved on to gentler fare with Babe and its sequel – delivers a heady mix of catchy show tunes, striking animation, and a cautionary environmental tale worked in that’s impossible to dislike.

DVD extras include two new animated sequences, dance lesson with Savion Glover, music videos and a classic cartoon, I Love to Singa. The soundtrack (available separately), feature’s Prince’s Golden Globe winning Song of the Heart, and several jukebox musical tracks – popular songs sung by the cast, and somewhat modified to fit the movie – including an unexpected mash of Prince’s Kiss and Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel, performed by Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman.

– Dennis Cavernelis

HHHH Dr Who (Season 1, volume 2). Directed by Keith Boak and Joe Ahearne, with Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper.

Listed in the Guiness Book of Records as the longest-running TV series in the world, the BBC sci-fi series Dr Who originally aired in the UK from 1963 to 1989, before being resurrected as a TV movie in 1996, and relaunched in 2005, with Christopher Eccleston as the ninth actor to play the time travelling title character.

I vaguely recall the 1996 TV movie being screened on M-Net a few years back, and I have an even more vague recollection that some of the 1960s-1980s episodes may have been available on video in the 1980s, but I’m pretty sure Dr Who was never on TV in South Africa.

The doctor is an eccentric alien traveller who battles injustice and various villains, while exploring time and space in an unreliable time machine called the Tardis, which looks like a 1950s-style UK police box, and is much larger on the inside than on the outside.

The three episodes on this DVD – Aliens of London, World War Three and Dalek – are considered by fans to be the best of the relaunched series, and while they’re quite enjoyable on their own, it’d be a good idea to get your hands on volume 1, just to settle into it a bit more comfortably.

– DC

HHHH HARD CANDY. Directed by David Slade, with Ellen Page and Patrick Wilson.

It’s every parent’s nightmare. Your teenage daughter chats to a stranger on the internet, who is actually a thirtysomething paedophile. She unsuspectingly agrees to meet. And then she goes home with him.

Hard Candy plays into a universal fear of predatory adults with an opening sequence to make the most hardened heart sink. Fourteen-year-old Hayley (Ellen Page) is flattered by the e-mail attention of 32-year-old Jeff (Patrick Wilson), and they get together for coffee. When he entices her with a bootleg recording of Goldfrapp – which he has at his large, remote house – she willingly jumps into his car. Hayley’s family is unaware of where she’s gone, and there are no witnesses to her departure. And that’s when things start to go badly wrong. Hard Candy becomes a horror story of unexpected proportions, its violence all the more effective for its understatement.

Essentially a two-hander in the style of Stephen King’s Misery, or Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, Hard Candy relies on the interplay of its two lead characters, who both turn in taut, terrifying performances.

Suffice it to say that the film grips like a vice. Funnily enough, some reckon it has a happy ending. But it all depends on your viewpoint. Hard Candy had a very short run on the circuit, so finding it on DVD is a real treat.

– Karen Rutter