Based on Robert Harling's play and directed by Herbert Ross, Steel Magnolias is a comedy-drama that follows several years in the lives of women who regularly see one another at a beauty shop in their small Louisiana hometown. The story deepens as Julia Roberts, playing a serious diabetic and the daughter of Sally Field, goes downhill healthwise. But as an ensemble piece, this is one of those enjoyably lumpy tearjerkers with many years' worth of stored truths suddenly being shared between the characters, lots of grievances aired, that sort of thing. Daryl Hannah and Shirley MacLaine assume the most eccentric roles, Dolly Parton the most fun and Olympia Dukakis the most dignified, while Sally Field essentially provides the moral and emotional centre of the movie. -Tom Keogh, Amazon. com.

Perhaps the highest compliment you can pay to Edward Norton is that his Oscar-nominated performance in American History X nearly convinces you that there is a shred of logic in the tenets of white supremacy. If that statement doesn't horrify you, it should; Norton is so fully immersed in his role as a neo-Nazi skinhead that his character's eloquent defense of racism is disturbingly persuasive-at least on the surface. Looking lean and mean with a swastika tattoo and a mind full of hate, Derek Vinyard (Norton) has inherited racism from his father, and that learning has been intensified through his service to Cameron (Stacy Keach), a grown-up thug playing tyrant and teacher to a growing band of disenfranchised teens from Venice Beach, California, all hungry for an ideology that fuels their brooding alienation. The film's basic message-that hate is learned and can be unlearned-is expressed through Derek's kid brother, Danny (Edward Furlong), whose sibling hero-worship increases after Derek is imprisoned (or, in Danny's mind, martyred) for the killing of two black men. Lacking Derek's gift of rebel rhetoric, Danny is easily swayed into the violent, hateful lifestyle that Derek disowns during his thoughtful time in prison. Once released, Derek struggles to save his brother from a violent fate, and American History X partially suffers from a mix of intense emotions, awkward sentiment and predictably inevitable plotting. And yet British director Tony Kaye (who would later protest against Norton's creative intervention during post-production) manages to juggle these qualities-and a compelling clash of visual styles-to considerable effect. No matter how strained their collaboration may have been, both Kaye and Norton can be proud to have created a film that addresses the issue of racism with dramatically forceful impact. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. com.

The latest in a long line of successful US police dramas, the forensic cop show Crime Scene Investigation varies the formula by focusing on a team of civilian scientists who work the night shift in Las Vegas, poring over crime scenes for fingerprints, blood spatters, DNA-laced mucus and (especially) maggots. Star William Petersen plays a variation of his role from Manhunter, the cool puzzle-solving genius who can rattle off mystifying speeches with aplomb, while his contrasting partner is Marg Helgenberger, cast as a single mother/ex-stripper who is as concerned with the emotional as well as the physical mess left by crime. While most US cop shows (witness NYPD Blue) tend towards soap, neglecting the cases in favour of personal crises, CSI gives its regulars enough life to make them human but is essentially puzzle-based, with individual episodes following two or three cases à la Homicide: Life on the Street. The occasional special focuses on a major job with the team investigating the slaughter of a whole family ("Blood Drops") or a death in first class on a plane over Vegas ("Unfriendly Skies"). A few continuing threads are laid down, with a recurrent villain who gets away, but will inevitably return, but on the whole these shows play pretty well as one-offs. Very high-tech in style, with lots of zooms into microscopic examinations of hair follicles or stomach contents and distinctive visualisations of the different stories told by witnesses and evidence, this is one of the best shows currently airing. On the DVD: CSI's first DVD box set contains the show's first 12 episodes: the pilot followed by "Cool Change", "Crate & Burial", "Pledging Mr Johnson"; "Friends and Lovers", "Who Are You?", "Blood Drops"; "Anonymous", "Unfriendly Skies", "Sex Lies and Larvae"; "The I-15 Murders" and "Fahrenheit 932". In addition to inventive menus, the three-disc set offers character profiles, a trailer, some B-roll on-set footage, a subtitle option, and snippet-like interviews with the cast and creatives. -Kim Newman.

The film that effectively launched the star careers of Robert Carlyle, Ewan McGregor and Jonny Lee Miller is a hard, barbed picaresque, culled from the bestseller by Irvine Welsh and thrown down against the heroin hinterlands of Edinburgh. Directed with abandon by Danny Boyle, Trainspotting conspires to be at once a hip youth flick and a grim cautionary fable. Released on an unsuspecting public in 1996, the picture struck a chord with audiences worldwide and became adopted as an instant symbol of a booming British rave culture (an irony, given the characters' main drug of choice is heroin not ecstasy). McGregor, Lee Miller and Ewen Bremner play a slouching trio of Scottish junkies; Carlyle their narcotic-eschewing but hard-drinking and generally psychotic mate Begbie. In Boyle's hands, their lives unfold in a rush of euphoric highs, blow-out overdoses and agonising withdrawals (all cued to a voguish pop soundtrack). Throughout it all, John Hodge's screenplay strikes a delicate balance between acknowledging the inherent pleasures of drug use and spotlighting its eventual consequences. In Trainspotting's world view, it all comes down to a question of choices-between the dangerous Day-Glo highs of the addict and the grey, grinding consumerism of the everyday Joe. "Choose life", quips the film's narrator (McGregor) in a monologue that was to become a mantra. "Choose a job, choose a starter home. [+]