Five Cary Grant "signature" movies are featured in a new DVD set. Gannett News Service

This screwball comedy, remade in 1963 with James Garner and Doris Day as "Move Over, Darling," is as tailor-made for the actor as his Savile Row suits.

Next in line is 1948's "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House," the best in what would become a comedy sub-genre about construction gone hilariously wrong, with Grant as an ad exec who designs his own suburban home and spends the rest of the film in comic frustration as the project goes awry. Myrna Loy is at the top of her game as Grant's loving wife who never met a room color she couldn't describe in indelible detail.

The other films are all worth a repeat viewing. From 1943, "Destination Tokyo" is no "Das Boot," but it's a suspenseful, men-under-pressure drama, with Grant as commander of a World War II sub infiltrating Japanese waters. John Garfield and a very young John Forsythe are along for the ride.

From 1947, "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer" won an Academy Award for Sidney Sheldon's quick-witted screenplay about a painter, who, through a ridiculous set of circumstances, finds himself pretending to return the affections of crushing teen Shirley Temple, all the time having his twinkling eye on her older sister, a judge played by Myrna Loy.

And while 1946's "Night and Day," which puts Grant in tuxedo and penthouse to play songwriter Cole Porter, was widely ridiculed for its pretense that the songwriter was straight, there are those songs, after all.

'Monster' maven

Charlize Theron won the best-actress Oscar this year for her portrayal of Aileen Wuornos in "Monster"

(Columbia-Tri-star), a sober account of how the drug-addicted highway hooker turned into a notorious serial killer. The film avoids judgments but speculates that Wuornos' murder spree began as a response to a brutal beating and rape and was perpetuated by her love for a waifish partner, played by Christina Ricci, who passively manipulated her.

Theron was praised for how she subjugated her natural beauty to play the overweight, skin-blotched Wuornos. If you want to see how impressive her performance truly is, however, you should compare it with the real thing in "Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer" (Columbia-Tristar), Nick Broomfield's follow-up to his documentary "The Selling of a Serial Killer." Broomfield's interviews in that earlier film were used as evidence in Wuornos' trial, and the latter film is an engrossing and often chilling look at an enigma in a severe state of denial. If you aren't hip to Broomfield's style, which has him becoming part of every story he covers, you may be put off by his self-aggrandizement.

'Whale Rider' no fluke

Even an Academy Award nomination for its young star, Keisha Castle-Hughes, who had never acted before, failed to turn "Whale Rider" (Columbia-Tristar) into the crossover family smash many had predicted it would become. But the DVD release will almost certainly win a larger audience for this beautifully told and acted story about a young Maori girl whose tribal-leader grandfather refuses to even consider the idea that she or any female should succeed him.

Director Niki Caro does a commentary for the film and for eight scenes that were deleted.

The release of Robert Altman's "The Company" (Columbia-Tristar) was timed for Oscar consideration, but this lightly fictionalized and mostly plotless backstage look at Chicago's Joffrey Ballet, with Neve Campbell (who co-wrote the script, based in part on her experiences, and produced it) as an aspiring member of the company and Malcolm McDowell as its flamboyant director, was met with mixed reviews and audience indifference.

The dance community, however, embraced it for its authenticity. Altman ranks it with the best movies he has made, and there are some fine stand-alone scenes, most notably a rain-soaked finale. The extras include a feature that allows you to isolate the dance sequences.

Alas, no Oscars were in the cards for "Eurotrip" (Dreamworks), a follow-up of sorts to the funnier "Road Trip," this time sending its horny teens overseas for the usual sexual misadventures and confusion — gee, I wonder could a bidet somehow be involved? If you aren't offended by cultural stereotypes (Oh, those snobby French! Those uptight Germans! Those flaming Italians?) or bored with smutty teenage comedies, you will find something to laugh about in this unrated edition, which reinserts two minutes of raunch excised for the censors, and includes a featurette about the shooting of the scene in which the guys head to a nude beach, only to discover — it's gay! All naked men! Crazy!

'Trainspotting' and others

Miramax has a collectors' series, and released two of its most enduring cult classics, and another one that should be. From 1996, "Trainspotting" is a hilarious, harrowing and completely invigorating adaptation of the Irvine Welsh novel about young junkies on the loose in Scotland. Here it is presented in the slightly longer version shown in Europe, with a vast array of extras.

From 1997, "Cop Land" boasts a fine performance by Sylvester Stallone as a small-town New Jersey sheriff who discovers that the New York City cops who have taken up residence there — and whom he so admires — are up to some nasty and illegal business. Director James Mangold also wrote the twisty script, and adeptly handles a cast that includes Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta and Harvey Keitel. One of the best but overlooked films of the '90s, it is even better here with a version 11 minutes longer than the original.

"Flirting With Disaster," whose director, David O. Russell, would go on to make "Three Kings" and the much-anticipated "I Love Huckabees," has also achieved something like cult status since it was released in 1996, and it pretty much established the neurotic archetype for Ben Stiller. In this film he plays a recently married man searching for his birth mother. I remain resistant to its charms despite some awkwardly hilarious bits. There are admittedly fine performances from Alan Alda, Lily Tomlin, Mary Tyler Moore and Téa Leoni as the adoption counselor Stiller enlists to help him.

I also remain ambivalent about "Pitch Black," a low-budget sci-fi thriller from 2000 that strands the passengers of a spaceship on a seemingly deserted planet and that made a star of Vin Diesel. The director's cut, released to capitalize on the far-bigger-budgeted sequel, "The Chronicles of Riddick," opening June 11, reminded me how much writer-turned-director David Twohy did with very little. Still, it didn't change my original opinion that this was little more than an "Alien" derivative.