"Actor: Elizabeth Whitcraft"

• Angel Heart | DVD | (27/12/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £17.99

  The film packed with stunning images jaw-dropping scenes and superb performances from Robert De Niro and Mickey Rourke is a fusion of two genres - the classic Chandleresque detective story and the supernatural. Harry Angel is hired for 5 a day to track down the big band swinger Johnny Favourite. What seems like a straight-forward missing person case dramatically becomes a murder hunt for this down-and-out private detective. His client Louis Cypher a mysterious stranger is forced to up his fee to keep Angel on the case. Each of Angel's leads ends up as a victim of a ritualistic act of murder as he begins to put together the pieces in the jigsaw of Johnny's strange story... the nightmare has just begun.

• Birdy | DVD | (17/04/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Based on William Wharton's transcendent novel of the same name, this film is about many things: friendship, war, and, of course, birds. The framing device is an effort by a horribly scarred combat soldier (Nicolas Cage) to break through to his best friend, Birdy (Matthew Modine), hospitalised after seemingly being driven mad by fighting in the Vietnam War. Cage then flashes back to their boyhood, where Birdy, a canary aficionado, was considered the school weirdo but managed to be a solid companion none the less. Directed by Alan Parker, it works best as a coming-of-age story, but misses the bizarre psychological transferences of the book, in which Birdy imagines himself within the world of canaries he creates in his bedroom at his parents' house. Modine is fine as an out-of-it misfit enraptured by his own little universe. --Marshall Fine