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Do you prefer your fantasies with dragons, talking swords and reluctant heroes, or with supernatural powers and people propelled backward through plate-glass windows? Either way, you've come to the right place.

The dragons are accounted for in The Colour of Magic (or Color, as the North American DVD package has it), a 197-minute 2008 movie made for British television from the first two novels in Terry Pratchett's hugely popular Discworld series. Pratchett had a hand in the film - his credit says "mucked about by Terry Pratchett" - and this outing, like the 2006 Discworld-based TV movie Hogfather, revels in Pratchett's fondness for jokes and puns. Consider this throwaway line from Rincewind, the worst wizard in the world (David Jason, better known to mystery fans as TV's Inspector Frost), who lies flat on his back after a fall and hears the whisper of a magic sword. "Psst," says the sword. Jason mumbles, "No, just dazed, really."

Pratchett created Discworld in 1983 and built its mythology book by book. Located in "a distant and second-hand set of dimensions," the world is flat. It sits on the shoulders of four giant elephants, which stand on the back of a giant turtle. The world's scientists don't know the turtle's sex, and one of many plot strands has volunteers being lowered from the world's edge to determine the point.

Other strands include the machinations of the wizard Trymon (Tim Curry), who seeks advancement in the Unseen University of wizards by bumping off his superiors. A book of magic chained in the basement grows increasingly obstreperous. Then there is Twoflower (Sean Astin, Frodo's companion in the Lord of the Rings trilogy), a naive tourist from another continent, who arrives with an ambulatory and fiercely faithful chest of gold and immediately hires the cowardly Rincewind as his guide. The Patrician (Jeremy Irons) orders the wizard to take good care of Twoflower, on pain of death. Indeed, Death himself pops up whenever someone is in mortal danger and, ripe with the voice of Christopher Lee, asks politely that the endangered one die quickly so that he, Death, can return to his supper.

The fantasy in the contemporary action film Push (2009) is less magical and more single-minded. A U.S. agency called the Division is tracking down people who have psychic powers. "Movers" can move things with their minds, "pushers" can plant thoughts in people's heads, "watchers" can see the future, "stitchers" can heal people, and so forth. An adult mover named Nick (Chris Evans) and a young watcher named Cassie (Dakota Fanning) are supposed to find a pusher (Camilla Belle) who knows the whereabouts in Hong Kong of a syringe filled with a liquid that an agent from the Division (Djimon Hounsou) and a competing Chinese gang want to find at any cost. Cue the chases, the convenient alliances, the misunderstandings and, yes, a great many computer-assisted stunts and killings.

What makes this more than the usual kinetic time-waster is the buddy chemistry between Nick and Cassie, and a script that, even at a rip-snorting pace, doesn't sacrifice the characters to the special effects. In a commentary shared with Evans and Fanning, director Paul McGuigan remarks that one plot strand remains untied. "I smell a sequel coming on." Is he being a watcher or a pusher?

wclements@globeandmail.com

*****

MOVIES

Two Lovers (2008)

If you're still haunted by Joaquin Phoenix's sullen mountain-man act on David Letterman's talk show, here's a chance to remember how good he can be as an actor. A troubled soul (Phoenix) is obsessed with a risky neighbour (Gwyneth Paltrow) even as Miss Right (Vinessa Shaw) knocks on his door. Writer-director James Gray says it's difficult to "treat love with a kind of seriousness," as he does here. "It's usually treated in a romantic-comedy format because the state of being in love is almost preposterous."

Che Part One: The Argentine (2008)

Steven Soderbergh's linked movies about the revolutionary Ernesto (Che) Guevara (Benicio del Toro), based on Che's memoirs, are more for those who want a history lesson from the revolutionary perspective than for those seeking narrative thrills. This is the one where Che meets Castro and slips into Cuba with him in 1956 to overthrow the corrupt regime of Fulgencio Batista. Part Two, in which Guevara attempts a similar revolution in Bolivia with less luck, arrives on DVD soon.

W.C.

TV

Grey Gardens (2009)

The aunt and first cousin of Jackie Kennedy Onassis passed their days in poverty in a mansion on New York's Long Island, but they had better luck in the movies made about them than Jackie, who was lumbered with the 1978 turkey The Greek Tycoon. David and Albert Maysles made the fascinating 1976 documentary Grey Gardens about Big Edie and her daughter Little Edie (both named Edith Bouvier Beale). Now there's this successful HBO drama of the same name, starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore.

Bewitched: The Complete Eighth and Final Season (1971-72)

Samantha the witch (Elizabeth Montgomery) is still married to Darrin the ad man, and hasn't yet noticed that in 1969 the actor playing Darrin changed from Dick York to Dick Sargent. Some magic powers! But then, Sam was the one everyone tuned in for, with her charming nose-twitching. By now the writers are getting a trifle desperate; the family (including daughter Tabitha) is whisked off to Pisa, Loch Ness and London, where Sam meets Henry VIII.

W.C.

BLU-RAY

The Towering Inferno (1974)

This is the star-studded disaster film that paired superstars Paul Newman (as a San Francisco skyscraper's architect) and Steve McQueen (as a fire chief). Bet your friends on whether William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire, Richard Chamberlain and others will survive the fire or perish, but whatever your antipathy toward O.J. Simpson (who plays a small role as a security officer), don't bet on him to die. He saves a cat from the fire, so that nets him a get-to-the-end-in-one-piece pass.

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998)

Actually, by this point it was really two summers ago, but who's counting? The sequel to the 1997 film I Know What You Did Last Summer, in which young characters were bloodily dispatched by a killer with a hook, moves Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt), Karla (Brandy) and friends to a Caribbean island. The killer is there, and the murders resume. It's a by-the-numbers slasher flick with little to redeem it. Freddie Prinze Jr., is in it, too, biding his time until Scooby-Doo.

W.C.