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Review Warner Home Video / Friends - Series 5 - Episodes 1-4 [1995]
Actors & Directors
  • Kevin Bright
  • Jennifer Aniston
  • Shelley Jensen
  • Matt Le Blanc
  • David Schwimmer
  • Lisa Kudrow
  • Matthew Perry
Release date: 2003-10-27
Run time: 85 min.
RRP: £15.99
Price: £0.94

Review Friends - Series 5 - Episodes 1-4 [1995] / Warner Home Video:

Season 5: Divorce number two is immediately on the cards as the year opens with "T. O. After Ross Says Rachel". As of this point, Ross' character undergoes some extreme personality changes (which apparently lost Schwimmer many female fans). His incessant whining drives all the Friends to distraction, especially in "T. O. W. Ross Moves In" with Chandler and Joey. Later things get uncomfortable both at work and at home when he goes through a period of rage ("T. O. [+]
W. Ross' Sandwich"). While all this downplays his failed relationship with Rachel, the real idea is to allow focus on the secret pairing of Chandler and Monica after a night of passion in London. This made for a return to the show's appealingly silly atmosphere as poor Joey is made piggy-in-the-middle of everyone's secrets. Building to "T. O. W. Everybody Finds Out", the silliness pauses for some genuinely touching interplay between Perry and Cox. The previous year's semi-serious thread about Phoebe's birth gets forgotten fast: to distract the viewer she's introduced to Gary (Michael Rapaport) in "T. O. W. The Cop". This leads to some hilarious parodying with Phoebe interrogated about apartment hunting, and the guys excited and then scared in "T. O. W. The Ride Along". She's more than over him by the time of the two-part finale "T. O. W. In Vegas" though, especially since she missed out on London. Just in case fans thought Chandler and Monica had permanently stolen the spotlight, a cliffhanger shocks expectation again with Ross and Rachel bursting out of a chapel. -Paul Tonks.

Review Paramount Home Entertainment / Eddie Murphy - Delirious [1983]
Actors & Directors
  • Bruce Gowers
  • Eddie Murphy
  • Brian O'Neal
  • Kevin O'Neal (II)
  • Gus Loundermon
  • Clint Smith
Run time: 70 min.
Price: £10.99

Review Eddie Murphy - Delirious [1983] / Paramount Home Entertainment:


Review Universal Pictures UK / Silence of the Hams [1996]
Actors & Directors
  • Billy Zane
  • Joanna Pacula
  • Ezio Greggio
  • Shelley Winters
  • Ezio Greggio
  • Dom DeLuise
Release date: 1998-01-19
Run time: 78 min.
RRP: £10.99
Price: £22.95

Review Silence of the Hams [1996] / Universal Pictures UK:


Review Arrow Films / Scoundrel (Les Mariés de l'an II)
Actors & Directors
  • Stanley Ridges
  • Charles MacArthur
  • Noel Coward
  • Julie Haydon
  • Hope Williams (II)
  • Ben Hecht
  • Martha Sleeper
Release date: 1995-09-25
Run time: 109 min.
RRP: £15.99
Price: £12.94

Review Scoundrel (Les Mariés de l'an II) / Arrow Films:


Review 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment / She's The One [1997]
Actors & Directors
  • Cameron Diaz
  • Edward Burns
  • Jennifer Aniston
  • Maxine Bahns
  • John Mahoney
  • Edward Burns
Release date: 1998-08-03
Run time: 92 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £1.99

Review She's The One [1997] / 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment:

She's the One is actor-writer-director Edward Burns' second film, following the widely acclaimed The Brothers McMullen. Given a slightly larger budget to play with ($3m as against his debut project's $25,000), Burns revisits much the same territory-love and sibling rivalry within a New York Irish-American family-but rather more expansively. This time, too, he can run to a few stars-in-the-making (Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Aniston, and John Mahoney from Frasier) to jazz up his cast of relative unknowns. Burns himself plays Mickey, a cab-driver in the Big Apple, with Mike McGlone as his yuppie stockbroker brother, and Maxine Bahns as Hope, the girl Mickey falls for and impulsively marries, much to the romantic delight of Francis' neglected wife Renee (Aniston). Francis, meanwhile, is having a clandestine affair with Heather (Diaz), Mike's former girlfriend-something Mike has yet to learn. Dispensing flawed wisdom and generally muddying the waters yet further is the lads' blunt-spoken father (Mahoney). Plotwise that's about it. Burns relies on his appealing cast and some amiably barbed repartee to hold our interest in what's essentially a dialogue-driven movie. He makes shrewd and sometimes unexpected use of his New York locations, too-it's a fair bet most people's mental image of Brooklyn wouldn't include a waterfront fishing community. This is a good-natured, slightly old-fashioned movie whose benevolent view of the battle of the sexes (where the women are invariably smarter than the men) never digs too deep or hits too hard. [+]
On the DVD: She's the One is presented on disc in its original widescreen ratio (1. 85:1) and Dolby 4. 0 sound that does the movie fair justice. Along with the original trailer, we get a seven-minute "making-of" featurette and a music video of the title song "Walls" from Tom Petty, who composed the film's score. Burns provides an unpretentious voice-over commentary, dealing mainly with matters of casting and the problems of shooting on location. -Philip Kemp.

Review Esquire Films / Up Your Alley (Video Tape/PAL) 1988
Actors & Directors
  • Murray Langston
  • Ruth Buzzie
  • Johnny Dark
  • Bob Zany
  • Linda Blair
  • Bob Logan
Run time: 90 min.

Review Up Your Alley (Video Tape/PAL) 1988 / Esquire Films:

Vickie Adderly (Linda Blair) is an enterprising young newspaper reporter looking for that big story to boost her career. A chance encounter with an adventurous drifter (Murray Langston) leads her into a world she never imagined. on the streets of L. A. Suddenly, her days are filled with a cast of colorful characters, including Marilyn (Ruth Buzzi), an eccentric femme fatale, and a bewildered Russian (Yakov Smirnoff). Add the attentions of a handsome admirer and it's easy to see how Vickie gets her story and a whole lot more in this charming romantic fable.

Actors & Directors
  • Craig Charles
  • Robert Llewellyn
  • Grant Naylor
  • Hattie Hayridge
  • Juliet May
  • Chris Barrie
  • Danny John-Jules
Release date: 1994-08-01
Run time: 83 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £4.98

Review Red Dwarf V - Quarantine / 2 Entertain Video:


Actors & Directors
  • Frankie Dettori
Release date: 1998-11-09
Run time: 54 min.
RRP: £13.99
Price: £1.60

Review Frankie Dettori - Horsing Around / 2 Entertain Video:


Review ITV DVD / Jasper Carrott - Canned Carrott - More Of The Best Bits [1993]
Actors & Directors
  • Jasper Carrott
  • Robert Powell
Release date: 1993-10-25
Run time: 64 min.
RRP: £10.99
Price: £19.99

Review Jasper Carrott - Canned Carrott - More Of The Best Bits [1993] / ITV DVD:


Review 2 Entertain Video / Only Fools And Horses - Fatal Extraction [1981]
Actors & Directors
  • Roger Liddement
  • Patrick McManus
  • Pete Chesterfield
  • Grant Stevens
  • Mandie Fletcher
Release date: 1999-06-07
Run time: 83 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £0.19

Review Only Fools And Horses - Fatal Extraction [1981] / 2 Entertain Video:


Review Walt Disney Home Video / The Lizzie McGuire Movie [2003]
Actors & Directors
  • Jake Thomas
  • Hilary Duff
  • Jim Fall
  • Adam Lamberg
  • Hallie Todd
  • Robert Carradine
Release date: 2004-02-02
Run time: 90 min.
RRP: £14.99
Price: £0.57

Review The Lizzie McGuire Movie [2003] / Walt Disney Home Video:

The Lizzie McGuire Movie spins around the axis of Disney Channel starlet Hilary Duff, whose glossy good looks and rather mature figure are balanced by a sweetly bashful persona and an endearing klutziness. On a school trip to Rome, Lizzie is discovered to be the virtual twin of an Italian pop star named Isabella-and her dreamy former partner wants Lizzie to take Isabella's place at an award show to avoid a lawsuit. Only Lizzie's loyal best friend Gordo (Adam Lamberg) suspects that Paolo may not be all that he seems. The Lizzie McGuire Movie is competent fluff, with the most fun to be had coming from Lizzie's pesky little brother (Jake Thomas) and his Machiavellian friend Melina (Carly Schroeder), who plot to humiliate Lizzie for fun and personal gain. It also features Alex Borstein as Lizzie's tyrannical principal and chaperone. -Bret Fetzer.

RRP: £9.99
Price: £3.84

Review Look Who's Talking 1&2:


Actors & Directors
  • Courteney Cox
  • Matthew Perry
  • Lisa Kudrow
  • Jennifer Aniston
  • David Schwimmer
Release date: 2004-06-07
Run time: 88 min.
RRP: £13.99
Price: £4.50

Review Friends - Series 10 - Vol. 4 (Episodes 13-16) [1995] / Warner Home Video:


Actors & Directors
  • Bruce Willis
  • Meryl Streep
  • Isabella Rossellini
  • Robert Zemeckis
  • Ian Ogilvy
  • Goldie Hawn
RRP: £5.99
Price: £3.99

Review Death Becomes Her [1992] / Paramount:

If Robert Zemeckis's mega-hit Forrest Gump was too sweet for your taste, you may enjoy the undiluted bitterness of his previous movie, a cynical black comedy that was ahead of its time. Death Becomes Her, an outlandish parable about America's obsession with youth and vanity, exposes the corrosive side of Zemeckis's comic sensibility, the sort of scathing satirical edge he gleefully flourished in his overlooked 1980 Used Cars, which has developed a cult following. Meryl Streep has a ball as the deliciously vicious Madeline Ashton, a flamboyantly mannered actress who makes Bette Davis's formidable Margo Channing in All About Eve look like a wallflower. Goldie Hawn is also in razor-sharp comedic form as Madeline's long-time "best friend," Helen. Sensing a bargain she just can't resist, Madeline steals Helen's meek, plastic-surgeon husband Ernest (Bruce Willis) for her own convenience, and the two women become sworn enemies. But the real complications arise when the two are introduced to a secret anti-aging formula by a mysterious and exotic woman (Isabella Rossellini, delightfully ridiculous) that not only smoothes away wrinkles but actually guarantees immortality. As their undying bodies are twisted and mutilated by violent attacks on each other, both women grow increasingly dependent on Ernest for cosmetic repair. The pioneering digital effects inflicted on Streep and Hawn are as grotesque as they are imaginative and hilarious. Like James Cameron (The Abyss, Titanic), Zemeckis loves a technical challenge, and the new visual tools developed for this movie made his later work (in Forrest Gump and Contact) possible. The digital video disc includes a short feature on the movie's production. [+]
-Jim Emerson, Amazon. com.

Review Warner Home Video / Charlie Chaplin - The Great Dictator [1940]
Actors & Directors
  • Henry Daniell
  • Charlie Chaplin
  • Reginald Gardiner
  • Jack Oakie
  • Charlie Chaplin
  • Paulette Goddard
Release date: 2003-09-22
Run time: 126 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £22.45

Review Charlie Chaplin - The Great Dictator [1940] / Warner Home Video:

The Great Dictator was Charles Chaplin's first fully talking picture, a scathing comic assault on Adolf Hitler, which these days will mostly play like brilliant slapstick. But in 1940, with America still neutral, it was the boldest anti-Nazi statement Hollywood had then put on screen. The thin plot doesn't matter, being just a peg for writer-director Chaplin's almost consistently inventive and hilarious set-pieces featuring himself in the duel roles of Adenoid Hynkel, the ludicrous anti-Semitic Dictator of Tomania, and an innocent Jewish barber who happens to be a Tomanian hero of the Great War. In the latter role he affectionately spins a variation on his beloved Tramp character while briefly romancing a lacklustre Paulette Goddard, costar of his equally satirical Modern Times (1936). Yet it's as Hynkel/Hitler that Chaplin really shines, from a side-splitting opening speech to some Duck Soup-style madness with rival leader Napaloni, played with flamboyant swagger by Jack Oakie. While the finale, a clarion call for a brave new world united by science and technological progress that seems to emanate straight from 1936's Things to Come, may jar, the comedic approach to a deadly serious subject has proved lastingly influential, from Dr Strangelove (1964) to Life is Beautiful (1997). On the DVD The Great Dictator is presented in the original 4:3 black and white with strong, clear mono sound and a picture so sharp and detailed that, bar a few very minor instances of damage, the film could have been shot yesterday. Also included are French and Italian dubbed versions and an English Dolby Digital 5. 1 version of the soundtrack, which is best avoided. The disc features multiple subtitle options, including English for hard of hearing. [+]
Disc Two begins with a superb 55-minute documentary, directed by film historian Kevin Brownlow and Michael Kloft, narrated by Kenneth Branagh and coproduced by the BBC. The Tramp and the Dictator goes seriously in-depth to explore the parallels between the world's most loved and hated men, drawing on many interviews and remarkable rare footage, including colour sequences of the making of The Great Dictator shot by Chaplin's brother, Sydney. Next comes the complete 25 minutes of that home-movie footage, including coverage of the original abandoned ending, and a seven-minute deleted scene from Sunnyside (1918), which inspired the barber scene. Finally there is a poster gallery and a scene from Monsieur Verdoux (1947) concerning the rise of Hitler and fascism. Marvellous stuff, though a commentary could have added considerably to the already remarkable silent colour material. -Gary S Dalkin.

Review 2 Entertain Video / Dad's Army Selection Box - All Time Favourite Clips
Actors & Directors
  • James Beck
  • John Le Mesurier
  • Clive Dunn
  • Arthur Lowe
  • John Laurie
Release date: 2001-03-26
Run time: 28 min.
RRP: £9.99
Price: £7.99

Review Dad's Army Selection Box - All Time Favourite Clips / 2 Entertain Video:


Review Entertainment in Video / Boogie Nights [1998]
Actors & Directors
  • Mark Wahlberg
  • Julianne Moore
  • John C. Reilly
  • Paul Thomas Anderson
  • Heather Graham
  • Burt Reynolds
Release date: 1998-11-16
Run time: 149 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £1.48

Review Boogie Nights [1998] / Entertainment in Video:

Even if the notorious 1970s porn-filmmaking milieu doesn't exactly turn you on, don't let it turn you off to this movie's extraordinary virtues, either. Boogie Nights is one of the key movies of the 1990s and among the most ambitious and exuberantly alive American movies in years. It's also the breakthrough for an amazing new director, whose dazzling kaleidoscopic style here recalls the Robert Altman of Nashville and the Martin Scorsese of Good Fellas. Although loosely based on the sleazy life and times of real-life porn legend John Holmes, at heart it's a classic Hollywood rise-and-fall fable: a naive, good-looking young busboy is discovered in a San Fernando Valley disco by a famous motion picture producer, becomes a hotshot movie star, lives the high life and then loses everything when he gets too big for his britches, succumbs to insobriety and is left behind by new times and new technology. Of course, it isn't exactly A Star Is Born or Singin' in the Rain. Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (in only his second feature!) puts his own affectionately sardonic twist on the old showbiz biopic formula: the ambitious upstart changes his name and achieves stardom in porno films as "Dirk Diggler. " Instead of drinking to excess, he snorts cocaine (the classic drug of 70s hedonism); and it's the coming of home video (rather than talkies) that helps to dash his big-screen dreams. As for the britches. [+]
well, the controversial "money shot" explains everything. And the cast is one of the great ensembles of the 90s, including Oscar nominees Burt Reynolds and Julianne Moore, Mark Wahlberg (who really can act-from the waist up, too!), Heather Graham (as Rollergirl), William H. Macy, John C. Reilly and Ricky Jay. -Jim Emerson.

Review Warner Home Video / Friends - Best Of Friends
Actors & Directors
  • David Schwimmer
  • Lisa Kudrow
  • Matthew Perry
  • Jennifer Aniston
  • Courteney Cox
Release date: 2001-10-29
RRP: £19.99
Price: £9.99

Review Friends - Best Of Friends / Warner Home Video:


Review Paramount Home Entertainment / Planes, Trains And Automobiles [1987]
Actors & Directors
  • Laila Robins
  • Steve Martin
  • John Candy
  • Michael McKean
  • John Hughes
  • Kevin Bacon
Release date: 1996-01-01
Run time: 88 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £2.44

Review Planes, Trains And Automobiles [1987] / Paramount Home Entertainment:

Given the presence of both Steve Martin and John Candy, one would expect this John Hughes comedy to be much, much funnier than it is. Certainly it's not for lack of effort on the part of its stars. Martin is an uptight businessman trying to get home from New York for the holidays. But one thing after another gets in his way-most of it having to do with Candy, a boorish but well-meaning boob who takes a liking to him. Together they travel all over the map; no matter how hard Martin tries to shake him, he can't. But Hughes's writing is never as sharp as it should be and this film winds up being only intermittently humorous. -Marshall Fine.

Actors & Directors
  • Joshua John Miller
  • Caren Kaye
  • Dorian Walker
  • Dan Gauthier
  • Robyn Lively
  • Dick Sargent
Release date: 1993-04-19
Run time: 88 min.
RRP: £4.99
Price: £19.43

Review Teen Witch [1989] / 4 Front Video:


Models & Brands:
Friends - Series 5 - Episodes 1-4 [1995], Eddie Murphy - Delirious [1983], Silence of the Hams [1996], Scoundrel (Les Mariés de l'an II), She's The One [1997], Up Your Alley (Video Tape/PAL) 1988, Red Dwarf V - Quarantine, Frankie Dettori - Horsing Around, Jasper Carrott - Canned Carrott - More Of The Best Bits [1993], Only Fools And Horses - Fatal Extraction [1981], The Lizzie McGuire Movie [2003], Look Who's Talking 1&2, Friends - Series 10 - Vol. 4 (Episodes 13-16) [1995], Death Becomes Her [1992], Charlie Chaplin - The Great Dictator [1940], Dad's Army Selection Box - All Time Favourite Clips, Boogie Nights [1998], Friends - Best Of Friends, Planes, Trains And Automobiles [1987], Teen Witch [1989]

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