The Easter holidays are here with two action-packed 3-D spectaculars to entice the family audience and a familiar, surefire classic rereleased. The classic is Lionel Jeffries's adaptation of E Nesbit's great children's novel, The Railway Children, an artless labour of love shot in glowing Technicolor in 1970. Dinah Sheridan plays a graceful Edwardian mother enduring genteel poverty in rural exile in Yorkshire after her loving husband is incarcerated on trumped-up charges of espionage. Jenny Agutter, Sally Thomsett and Gary Warren are the most uncloyingly endearing children and a credit to their inherited middle-class fortitude.

Of the new films, by far the better is DreamWorks' animated How to Train Your Dragon in which a physically slight but stout-hearted Viking lad called Hiccup forms a friendship with a young black dragon of the supposedly deadly Night Fury species. As a result, a new friendship is established between the village warriors (most of them sporting Scottish accents) and their ancient enemies, the Vikings, but not before much havoc has been wrought. It's charming, funny and a lot like Avatar, though less solemn and an hour shorter.

The climax of How to Train Your Dragon involves the awakening of something like the Kraken in the Atlantic. The Kraken, hiding in Aegean waters, provides the special effects finale to the attempts in Clash of the Titans of the demigod Perseus (Sam Worthington) to bring a satisfactory end to the dispute between his decent father, Zeus (Liam Neeson), and his wicked uncle, Hades (Ralph Fiennes). It's a muddled, muddy-looking, over-active affair, though no worse than the lumbering 1981 version starring Laurence Olivier as Zeus. The 3-D of How to Train Your Dragon is sculptural and far superior to Titans.