teen witch

WITHOUT A TRACE It's a mini-Star Trek convention in "Fade-Away," which guest-stars Connor Trinneer (Star Trek: Enterprise) as a high school basketball coach and Marina Sirtis ( Star Trek: The Next Generation) as the mother of the missing person du jour �a teen hoop star who disappears right after scoring the basket that puts his team in the championships. (CC/HDTV/TVPG) (1 hr.) (7 p.m. Ch. 11)


RETURN TO HALLOWEENTOWN Debbie Reynolds returns to the role of good witch Aggie Cromwell in this third sequel to 1998's spooky but kid-friendly Halloweentown. Her granddaughter Marnie, now played by Sara Paxton, is all grown up and pursuing her studies at Witch U., when Halloweentown is once again threatened by a villain. (TVG) (1 hr. 40 mins.) (8 p.m. DIS)


HAPPY FEET Also known as the movie that beat James Bond ( Casino Royale, specifically) at the American box office, this joyous animated treat from director George Miller follows the odyssey of a penguin (voice of Elijah Wood) who can't carry a tune like so many of his peers � but he sure can dance, thanks to the computer-applied moves of Savion Glover. (CC/HDTV) (2 hrs.) (7 p.m. HBO)


OCEAN'S ELEVEN George Clooney and company put a modern sheen on the original Rat Pack gathering in director Steven Soderbergh's flashy 2001 update. Mr. Clooney plays Danny Ocean, a just-paroled thief who wastes no time organizing a Las Vegas heist, which happens to target his ex-wife's (Julia Roberts) casino-owning beau (Andy Garcia). (CC/HDTV) (2 hrs. 40 min.) (7 p.m. TBS)


CANDY Heath Ledger knows a thing or two about quitting � specifically, the inability to do so. This 2006 drama from Australia casts the Brokeback Mountain star as a poet whose love affair with a painter (Abbie Cornish) goes from ecstasy to agony thanks to their mutual love affair with heroin. (2 hrs.) (8 p.m. SHOW)
As the treats and pumpkins of Hallowe'en creep towards us again, it's tempting to turn off the lights, ignore the ringing doorbell, and immerse oneself in some classic horror. It doesn't come more classic than Benjamin Christiansen's 1922 H?xan ("The Witch"), priggishly subtitled "A Presentation from a Cultural and Historical Point of View in Seven Chapters of Moving Pictures", but in fact a heady brew of documentary and dramatic recreations of Satanic ceremonies and witch-trials.

In this extraordinarily beautiful and grotesque cult film, including scenes of Swedish nudity and hideous torture, Christiansen himself plays Satan. Tartan's disc offers two prints and several trippy soundtracks ― including 1968's cut-down English-language version, Witchcraft Through the Ages, jazz-scored and narrated by William S Burroughs (from inside a tomb, by the sound of it).

A little less weird � but no less wonderful � is German émigré Edgar G Ulmer' s 1934 The Black Cat, which has not much to do with Poe's original story, just as the non-Ulmer 1935 follow-up The Raven has little to do with Poe's poem. Both films pair Karloff and Lugosi � "A good cast is worth repeating", as Universal used to declare � but the first one casts the intenser spell. It's witty and deliciously played, yet has some magically chilling moments. Amid magnificent modernist sets, high priest Karloff intones some Latin mumbo-jumbo beginning "Cum grano salis…" ("With a grain of salt…"), and you know anything can happen.

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As it can in the stunning neglected movie The Shout from 1978, by Polish émigré director Jerzy (Deep End) Skolimowski. It's an imaginative foreigner's skewed, terrifically atmospheric vision of English life and overwhelming outside forces. Based on a Robert Graves story about an Australian aboriginal "death-shout", this elliptical, deeply disorientating puzzle of a film takes us on a mesmerising journey into cricket, madness and the supernatural.

It's shot on some wild North Devon coast, with great performances from Alan Bates as the terrifying stranger, John Hurt, Susannah York, even a young Jim Broadbent ― and is worth the detour.

More conventional horror "classics" are also emerging from the vaults. The innumerable extra features on Halloween: 25 Years of Terror tell you all too much about the franchise that milked the life out of John Carpenter' s original 1978 masterpiece, but, fortunately, also gives it to you in digitally remastered form.

Tobe Hooper scores twice � first with The Funhouse, his cunning, pretty scary 1981 teen slasher, with its overt nods to Halloween and Psycho � and then with a special edition of his Spielberg collaboration Poltergeist, with its careful build-up to full panic ("They're here… The TV people").

And finally, the elaborate, stylishly self-conscious George A Romero/Stephen King 1982 horror-comic portmanteau Creepshow receives regal two-disc treatment. Philip Horne

My Way Home
12, Second Run, ￡12.99

The enduring regard in which the likes of Antonioni, Godard and Pasolini are held has meant that Eastern European auteurs of the 1960s have struggled to maintain the audiences and critical fervour they once enjoyed. Credit then to the enterprising Second Run label for highlighting the treasures that once flowed liberally from Czech and Polish directors such as Andrzej Munk and Juraj Herz.

Hungarian Miklós Jancsó also deserves to be celebrated. His My Way Home (1964) is a remarkable film about a young Hungarian trying to return home at the tail-end of the Second World War. He moves through achingly wide open spaces, endless lanes and misted lakes, a landscape from which Cossack soldiers, naked women and surly Hungarians emerge with seemingly magical speed. His is a journey, at once epic and random, full of beauty and of harsh encounters.

The sound design is striking, the black-and-white photography richly expressive, and the fluid camerawork, punctuated by startling aerial shots, recalls that of Sergei (The Cranes Are Flying) Urusevsky. The transfer to DVD is excellent, while extras include Jancsó's rarely-seen doc, Message of Stones. Sukhdev Sandhu

Water
12, Metrodome, 2 discs, ￡19.99

Water is a hard-hitting film. Set in India in the 1930s, it tackles the plight of widows who, robbed of their husbands and therefore, according to Hindu tradition, of their status as whole people, face a lifetime of penury and self-denial.

Chuyia is a girl who finds herself widowed at seven and consigned to this shadowy life in an ashram. Her arrival shakes things up: clever, mischievous, curious, she brings laughter, life, and even some forbidden fried food into the little community. She also bites the head of the ashram.

And she facilitates an unexpected and scandalous love affair between a widow (Lisa Ray) and a Gandhi-following Brahmin lawyer (John Abraham) from the outside, after which events turn very dark, and another widow, the devout Shakuntala (a smouldering, brilliant performance by Seema Biswas), finds her faith tested.

Hindu extremists tried to stop Water from being made; their threats eventually forced director Deepa Mehta to move her production from India to Sri Lanka. And yet for all the controversy it created, for all the issues it confronts, there is not a moment when it feels preachy or didactic. This compelling story unfolds steadily, subtly, beautifully, musically, and with great dignity. David Cheal