"Actor: Annie Miller"

• The Wild Child | DVD | (04/08/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  An ingenious and poignant experience, Francois Truffaut's fascinating The Wild Child is based on a real-life 18th-century behavioural scientist's efforts to turn a feral boy into a civilised specimen. In a piece of resonant casting that immediately turns this story into an echo of the creative process, Truffaut himself plays Dr Itard, a specialist in the teaching of the deaf. Itard takes in a young lad (Jean-Pierre Cargol) found to have been living like an animal in the woods all his life. In the spirit of social experiment, Itard uses rewards and punishments to retool the boy's very existence into something that will impress the world. Beautifully photographed in black and white and making evocative use of such charmingly antiquated filmmaking methods as the iris shot, The Wild Child has a semi-documentary form that barely veils Truffaut's confessional slant. What does it mean to turn the raw material of life into a monument to one's own experience and bias? The question has all sorts of intriguing reverberations when one considers that Truffaut's own wild childhood was rescued by love of the cinema and that a degree of verisimilitude factors into his films starring Jean-Pierre Leaud--the troubled lad who grew up in Truffaut's work from The 400 Blows onward. (The Wild Child is dedicated to Leaud.) --Tom Keogh

• Free Willy Gift Set | DVD | (14/04/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £20.99

  Free Willy Three and one-half tonnes of best friend: family adventure doesn't get any bigger! Willy is an orca whale confined in a Pacific Northwest aquatic park's too-small tank and separated from his family in the nearby bay. No one understands Willy's moods - except a 12 year-old boy who knows what it's like to be without a family. That boy is scruffy street kid Jesse (Jason James Richter) who befriends Willy and risks all to set him free. Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home Two years after helping his friend escape into the sea Jesse enjoys life with his adoptive parents and is delighted to be reunited with the 3 tonne killer whale. However a crashed supertanker causes an oil spill which threatens the life of both... Free Willy 3: The Rescue Now 16 Jesse has taken a job on an orca research ship to encounter his old friend threatened by illegal whalers hoping to make money from turning the whale into sushi...