Pretty boy Billy (Jude Law) is an amoral rebel without a cause. His anarchic response to a bleak London existence is to steal cars and drive them through shop windows: "crash and carry," as one fellow "shopper" terms it. But he and his tough, video-game obsessed gal-pal Jo (Sadie Frost) are no Bonnie and Clyde. Their shopping trips are merely a pretext for the adrenaline rush of destruction and the thrill of playing high-speed tag with the cops, a game that starts to wear thin on Jo. "Why don't you grow up, eh?" she finally asks. "And do what?" he helplessly replies. The feature debut of Brit stylist Paul Anderson (Event Horizon) is a sleek film of misty alleys, blue-lit underground garages, and slick city streets. It's a dystopian London of the near future through the lens of Blade Runner driven almost single-handedly by Law's reckless charm and wild energy. It's hard to tell if the film is about the nihilism of sensation-hunting lost youth or simply a sensational melodrama of aimless rebellion, but there's nonetheless something irresponsibly appealing in Billy's anti-establishment rampage. -Sean Axmaker.

Xena-you gotta love her. After all, she could snap your neck just by straightening her knees. She sprang fully armed from producer Sam Raimi's head in March 1995 to flesh out an otherwise routine episode of the television series Hercules: a 5' 10" high-kicking, horse-riding, chakram-throwing ancient-Greek-warrior princess, who mustered armies the way some women shop for shoes, turning heroes against one another as gleefuly as she laid waste to sweet little villages. Except that somewhere beneath that straight dark fringe and hard-boiled leather breastplate lurk doubts, feelings, even a soul. She was so popular on Hercules that her spin-off was an instant certainty-and pretty soon the subtext of her own series was unfolding. Xena is on journey from evil to good, but this can only be enabled the companionship of bossy redhead scribe/bard, Gabrielle, her constant companion. Set in a lush New Zealand doubling for the pagan Mediterranean, as misruled by Ares, Aphrodite, Poseidon and the rest of the Mount Olympus gang, Xena: Warrior Princess recounts these exploits as the duo confront gods, monsters, warlords, idiots and anachronisms, as well as their own flaws and desires, at the hilarious and sometimes unsettling mythological crossroads where touchy-feely Californian feminism meets high-camp chop-socky pantheism seasoned with the Way of Peplum Tao. -Honey Glass.

Since its release in 1998, Steven Spielberg's D-Day drama Saving Private Ryan has become hugely influential: everything from the opening sequence of Gladiator ("Saving Marcus Aurelius") to the marvellous 10-hour TV series Band of Brothers has been made in its shadow. There have been many previous attempts to recreate the D-Day landings on screen (notably, the epic The Longest Day), but thanks to Spielberg's freewheeling hand-held camerawork, Ryan was the first time an audience really felt like they were there, storming up Omaha Beach in the face of withering enemy fire. After the indelible opening sequence, however, the film is not without problems. The story, though based on an American Civil War incident, feels like it was concocted simply to fuel Spielberg's sentimental streak. In standard Hollywood fashion the Germans remain a faceless foe (with the exception of one charmless character who turns out to be both a coward and a turncoat); and the platoon, led by Tom Hanks, consists of far too many stereotypes: the doughty sergeant; the thick-necked private; the southern-man religious sniper; the cowardly corporal. Matt Damon seems improbably clean cut as the titular private in need of rescue (though that may well be the point); and why do they all run straight up that hill towards an enemy machine-gun post anyway? Some non-US critics have complained that Ryan portrays only the American D-Day experience, but it is an American film made and financed by Americans after all. Accepting both its relatively narrow remit and its lachrymose inclinations, Saving Private Ryan deserves its place in the pantheon of great war pictures. On the DVD: This DTS edition of Saving Private Ryan presents the movie with astonishingly vivid surround sound that is audibly superior to the standard Dolby Digital version. With a wider dynamic range and a more spacious soundfield, the battles really do spill over into your living room. There are new animated menus but because the DTS data stream requires greater space on the disc, the 30-minute behind-the-scenes documentary included on the previous release is omitted. [+]

Cockney boys Tom, Soap, Eddie and Bacon are in a bind; they owe seedy criminal and porn king "Hatchet" Harry a sizeable amount of cash after Eddie loses half a million in a rigged game of poker. Hot on their tails is a thug named Big Chris who intends to send them all to the hospital if they don't come up with the cash in the allotted time. Add into the mix an incompetent set of ganja cultivators, two dimwitted robbers, a "madman" with an afro, and a ruthless band of drug dealers and you have an astonishing movie called Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Before the boys can blink, they are caught up in a labyrinth of double-crosses that lead to a multitude of dead bodies, copious amounts of drugs, and two antique rifles. Written and directed by talented newcomer Guy Ritchie, this is one of those movies that was destined to become an instant cult classic à la Reservoir Dogs. Although some comparisons were drawn between Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino, it would be unfair to discount the brilliant wit of the story and the innovative camerawork that the director brings to his debut feature. Not since The Krays has there been such an accurate depiction of the East End and its more colourful characters. Indicative of the social stratosphere in London, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is a hilarious and at times touching account of friendships and loyalty. The director and his mates (who make up most of the cast) clearly are enjoying themselves here. This comes across in some shining performances, in particular from ex-footballer Vinnie Jones (Big Chris) and an over-the-top Vas Blackwood (as Rory Breaker), who very nearly steals the show. [+]

For people who've discovered Jackie Chan through his American hit Rush Hour and want to learn what his Hong Kong movies are like, Project A is an excellent place to start. Chan plays a sailor in 19th-century Hong Kong; pirates have been terrorizing the seas for months and all efforts to combat them have been sabotaged by the corrupt chief of police and a criminal gang, who are in cahoots with the pirates. But the plot is hardly the point-a Jackie Chan movie is about astonishingly acrobatic action sequences and breathtaking stunts, and Project A has plenty. Of particular interest is a bicycle chase that is more suspenseful than any car chase you've ever seen. Chan is joined by Sammo Hung (star of the US TV series Martial Law) as a shifty con man who comes through when the chips are down. Project A also features Yuen Biao, a frequent co-star in Chan's movies, who's yet another astounding martial artist. But what separates Jackie Chan movies from other kung fu flicks is his sense of humour; every fight scene is punctuated by something-a clever use of a prop or sudden reversal of your expectations-that will make you bark with laughter. Sometimes it's just so exquisitely choreographed that the entire movie seems to float on a cloud of giddy delight. Jackie Chan is often compared to the classic silent comedians for his grace and timing-he lives up to it. -Bret Fetzer.

The Deer Hunter is an expansive portrait of friendship in a Pennsylvania steel town, and of the effects of the Vietnam War. Led by the trio of Robert De Niro, John Savage and Christopher Walken (who won a supporting actor Oscar), the first hour is dominated by an engrossing Russian Orthodox wedding and reception. When the drama moves overseas it switches from anthropologically realistic documentation of a community's rituals to highly controversial and still shocking Russian Roulette scenes, symbolising the random horror of war. Unforgettable as they are, the Vietnam sequences occupy less than a third of the three-hour running time; defying movie convention The Deer Hunter is fundamentally a before-and-after ensemble character study anchored by De Niro's great performance. Although it was the first serious Hollywood feature to address the Vietnam War, the plausibility of some of the later plot developments raises awkward questions. But the film remains powerfully effective, its deliberate pace, naturalistic overlapping dialogue and unflinching seriousness marking it very much a product of the 1970s. With nine Oscar nominations and five wins, including Best Picture and Director, it's a cinematic landmark that stands the test time, almost incidentally setting Meryl Streep on the road to superstardom in her first leading role. On the DVD: The Deer Hunter: Special Edition has the film on the first disc with a serious yet amiable Region 2 exclusive discussion track between director Michael Cimino and critic SX Finnie. The picture is anamorphically enhanced at 2. 35:1, and perfectly reproduces Vilmos Zsigmond's deliberately desaturated, necessarily grainy cinematography. [+]

Perhaps the most easily parodied action series of its era, The Professionals was the one about the gruff but fatherly counter-terrorist top cop Cowley (Gordon Jackson) and his favourite surrogate sons, the curly haired ex-copper Ray Doyle (Martin Shaw) and taciturn-but-pouting ex-mercenary William Bodie (Lewis Collins). As set out by series creator Brian Clemens (veteran of the more fantastical Avengers) their job was to stop threats to the government, visiting dignitaries or the general public "by any means necessary". What this boiled down to was dashing about, leaping out of cars, getting into thump-happy fistfights, leering at every "bird" who passed by as if they were trying to prove something, wearing eye-abusing late-70s leisure wear well beyond the sell-by date, potting baddies with guns hauled out of their smart shoulder holsters, and occasionally choking back manly tears when another of the trio was wounded. The show was at once laughably solemn and deliriously stuck on its hairy homoerotic subtext (B&D, which also stands for bondage and discipline, are essentially married), but it could also be strong drama, occasionally tackling serious issues well ahead of news shows (one episode, "In the Public Interest", is about a provincial police chief whose zero tolerance methods have turned to vigilantism-it's also the one where B&D go undercover by running a gay youth group). All three leads were professionals of another stripe-the sort of actors who could soar with a good script and do their best to sell a weak one-and they were generally set against a parade of top-flight British character acting talent along with sundry sit-com/pin-up refugee disposable girlfriends and suspects. One strange, if understandable, element of the premise is that CI5 tackle all manner of Greek, Middle Eastern, Soviet and radical nutcase groups-with the odd racist Klansman, corrupt civil servant and dubious big business tycoon thrown in to prove they aren't fascists-but almost never have anything to do with the Irish terrorist groups who were the main focus of the organisation's real-life counterparts from 1977 to 1983. -Kim Newman.

Inspector Gadget 2 sees the unlikely detective with higher-tech gadgets and more special effects. French Stewart (from TV's Third Rock from the Sun) replaces Matthew Broderick as the bumbling detective in a plot that revolves around the glitch-ridden Gadget being replaced by a completely robotised female. Parent Trap's Elaine Hendrix does what little she can with the one-dimensional role of "G2". Still, Gadget falls for his rival and the pair team up with his smart-as-a-whip niece Penny and her brainy beagle for a showdown with Claw. Where Broderick struggled to humanise the caricature of an inept detective in the 1999 original, Stewart doesn't even try. Instead he plays Gadget as a cartoon with endless over-the-top theatrics. The enhanced special effects may placate young viewers, but without the comedy of the original, that's small comfort. -Kimberly Heinrichs.