Film & Theatre: Cads, saints and fans in the limelight

Stockings are out for most performance books this Christmas, and people thinking of giving Taschen's Ingmar Bergman Archives or Stanley Kubrick Archives might find even a pillowcase inadequate. They will need deep pockets, too, since, at £120 and £39.99 respectively, the books don't come cheap. But it's hard to imagine a film-lover who would not be thrilled by these exhaustive explorations of two masters of the medium.

100 All-Time Favourite Movies (Taschen, £29.99) is a richly illustrated mixture of American and European classics, Hollywood blockbusters and independent art movies. David Thomson's Have You Seen...? (Allen Lane, £22) ditches illustrations in favour of idiosyncratic, hyperbolic, astute, often contentious views on 1,001 films, from Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein to Zabriskie Point.

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Stefan Kramer's Somebody (Faber, £20 is the latest Marlon Brando biography. Despite a subtitle heralding the actor's "reckless life and remarkable career", it focuses on the latter, offering fascinating insights into both Brando's methods and The Method.

British film stars feature in affectionate but not uncritical tributes: Graham McCann's Bounder (Aurum, £16.99) and Richard Webber's 50 Years of Carry On (Century, £18.99). The Bounder is Terry-Thomas, who took his gap-toothed grin and dandyish persona from Finchley to Hollywood, becoming the archetypal cad. For the Carry On films, Webber's blend of reminiscence, anecdote and social history will delight fans. Richard Attenborough, with his long-term collaborator Diana Hawkins, has written a highly entertaining memoir, Entirely Up To You, Darling (Hutchinson, £20). Despite its self-mocking title, it offers an insightful account of professional triumphs and personal tragedy.

Ever Dirk (Weidenfeld, £20), John Coldstream's edition of Bogarde's correspondence, completes the portrait of this alternatively acute and acid, generous and cantankerous man that Coldstream began in his biography.

The nature of film fandom itself is anatomised and celebrated in My Judy Garland Life by Susie Boyt (Virago, £15.99). Boyt, a great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, is both analyst and analysand as she relates her fraught childhood, frustrated ambitions and salvation through Judy Garland, displaying an emotional openness and vulnerability worthy of her heroine.

Michael Holroyd's A Strange Eventful History (Chatto, £25) offers two for the price of one in its account of the personal and professional relationship of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving. Holroyd broadens his canvas into a portrait of an era. Terry's spiritual successor is the subject of Jonathan Croall's Sybil Thorndike (Haus £25). Shaw's Saint Joan, Thorndike shines through as a force for good, campaigning for socialism and pacifism. Her generosity is recalled in Peter Gill's Apprenticeship (Oberon, £8.99), a charming account of the writer/director's early days, and a heartfelt credo for a serious and humanist theatre.