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Nothing says wooing like a martyred priest. Saturday is (Saint) Valentine's Day, and the DVD shelves beckon with promises of romance, love, flirtation and sex.

If it's romance you want, four dependable outings have been reissued under the shrinking-violet title Turner Classic Movies Greatest Classic Films Collection: Romantic Comedies. That all four movies star Katharine Hepburn is continued vindication of Hepburn, who by the late 1930s had been written off as “box-office poison” in a survey of American theatre owners. She pulled her career out of the fire by starring in the stage version, and then the movie, of The Philadelphia Story (1940), as a socialite who on the eve of a second marriage has her flame rekindled by her first husband (Cary Grant), even as she dallies with a journalist (James Stewart). Hepburn wanted Spencer Tracy for Stewart's role and was overruled, but with 1942's Woman of the Year she and Tracy began a regular romantic pairing on screen as well as off. In that film, she's a pundit and he's a sports reporter. In Adam's Rib (1949), they play opposing lawyers who happen to be husband and wife.

Then there's Bringing Up Baby (1938), which mined perfect screwball comedy from a loopy plot in which a paleontologist (Grant) is stalked by an heiress (Hepburn) who owns a pet leopard that gets loose, except there's another leopard on the loose, and he's vicious, and complications ensue. Director Howard Hawks groused that there wasn't one sane character with whom the audience could identify. (The film flopped; see “box-office poison.”)

Nights in Rodanthe (2008) is based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks, author of The Notebook. Richard Gere plays a self-absorbed surgeon who makes an off-season trip to a strikingly designed inn temporarily run by Diane Lane on North Carolina's Outer Banks. Two wounded people in an isolated paradise with hurricane weather – well, you sense sparks will fly, even if the first half of the film works better than the second.

It's rare that one can describe a film as charming when the two main characters spend most of their time fully naked, engaging in tantric and other varieties of sex, but there really is a sweet, often melancholic tone to the Argentine film Don't Look Down (2008), from distributor Mongrel Media's new Mo' imprint. Eloy (Leandro Stivelman) is a 19-year-old sleepwalker who tumbles through an open skylight and lands next to Elvira (Antonella Costa), whose grandmother reads auras and says, “I wonder why God has sent you.” Well, three guesses. There's a magic-realistic cast to the film – the dignified dead at the local cemetery are imagined sitting comfortably on deck chairs on the sidewalk – but that's unlikely to be the part viewers will remember most.

In Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008), two friends (Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks) find true togetherness when, strapped for cash, they try to live up to the film's title. The Stewardesses, a 1969 sexploitation flick with bad acting by men and women who regularly doff their clothes, was a box-office hit in part because it was in 3-D. The two-disc DVD includes 3-D versions in colour and in black and white (glasses included) and a flat version in colour. In the extras, actress Christina Hart embraces the truth: “I really did not expect to be in a film … that would be this bad.” Viva (2008), with Anna Biller producing, directing, starring and designing the sets and costumes, is a friendly parody of such skin flicks set in 1972, though even a parody of bad acting and stilted dialogue comes across as, well, bad acting and stilted dialogue.

The romance is off-kilter and considerably more chaste in Yentl (1983). Barbra Streisand plays a Jewish twentysomething in 1904 Poland who, denied the chance to study the Torah because she's a woman, disguises herself as a lad named Anshel and is accepted into religious school alongside Avigdor (Mandy Patinkin). Yentl is smitten with Avigdor, who loves Hadass (Amy Irving), who develops feelings for Anshel. Streisand directed the film and wrote the screenplay from a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, who attacked the result in The New York Times. “I must say that Miss Streisand [as director] is exceedingly kind to herself,” he wrote. “The result is that Miss Streisand is always present, while Yentl is absent.”

Yet it's clear from the two-disc “extended director's edition” (137 minutes instead of the theatrical 133; both versions are included) that there is much here to like. Shot in what was then Czechoslovakia, the movie is a visual treat. As a director, Streisand tells the story inventively, if slowly. She and the other actors are fine. The trouble is with the music. In the DVD's extras, Streisand says the only way she could get financing was to promise to make the film a musical. So the movie stops every so often to let Yentl sing her thoughts, composed by Michel Legrand with lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman (“there's no flame and yet I burn”). Nobody else can join in – not even Patinkin, an accomplished singer. Streisand is in fine voice, but the interludes may try the patience of all but her diehard fans.

In the animated sequel to Madagascar, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008), the zoo animals leave Madagascar (just as well, given the political turmoil there now) and arrive in mainland Africa. In a picture-in-picture Blu-ray commentary, four directors and producers identify the beat-driven tune I Like to Move It (Move It), which featured in both films, as “the song that drove parents crazy” because kids wouldn't stop singing it. Ah yes, kids – the side effect of romance, love, flirtation and sex.

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As George W. Bush's disastrous spell as U.S. president neared an end, few people were keen to spend two hours with him, even in a critical biopic. So Oliver Stone's W. (2008), with Josh Brolin performing a masterly impression of Dubya, was an exercise closer to foolhardy than to brave. But Stone always gives good value as a DVD commentator. Here, he compares the scenes of Bush's inner council to the jury drama 12 Angry Men and reflects on Bush's ability to play people “like a fiddle. George is a good fiddler – like Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned.”

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Being There (1979), Hal Ashby's film of Jerzy Kosinski's fable, wields a satirical scalpel to expose the limitless capacity of people to hear what they want to hear. Time and again, the rich and powerful read metaphorical wisdom into the commonplace utterances of the mentally slow Chance the Gardener (Peter Sellers). On the Blu-ray disc, actress Illeana Douglas reminisces about her grandfather Melvyn Douglas, who won an Oscar for playing the power broker who befriends Chance. The elder Douglas had co-starred with such legends as Greta Garbo, but all that impressed the young Illeana was that her granddad breathed the same air as Sellers – Inspector Clouseau!