"Actor: George Catalano"

• The Vanishing | DVD | (25/08/2003) from £11.98   |  Saving you £-3.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  It's not unusual for Hollywood to remake European hits. What is unusual is the director of the original getting the chance to helm the new version with an American cast, which is what happened with this film based on an intensely creepy Dutch film of the same name (both directed by George Sluizer). Kiefer Sutherland and Sandra Bullock are on vacation when, while stopped at a crowded rest area, she disappears. He devotes the next several years to discovering what happened to her, ruining his life in the process. When he does get a clue, it leads him to Jeff Bridges, who plays a bizarre and highly organized individual whose motives are almost as strange as he is. Bridges is spooky, but Sluizer ultimately is undone by Hollywood's demand for a happy ending, which makes this film affecting but far less unsettling than the original. --Marshall Fine

• Drugstore Cowboy | DVD | (16/09/2002) from £19.10   |  Saving you £-3.11 (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Drugstore Cowboy was the breakaway change of pace and success for a number of those involved in its making. Principally, Gus Van Sant became a director of immediate notability winning multiple international Festival awards and acclaim. It also allowed Matt Dillon to stretch his acting abilities well outside of the teen rebel pigeonhole he'd become associated with in the 1980s and provided far meatier roles for Kelly Lynch and Heather Graham. Adapted from James Fogle's novel, the broad strokes of the plot are simple enough; a junkie foursome led by Dillon's headstrong Bob, move around the Pacific Northwest in the early 70s scoring pharmaceutical drugs in a series of robberies. The finer details, created with the sense of family developing between the principals, and how they are not portrayed as either victims or "bad" criminals. Van Sant occasionally slips into the surreal depicting Bob's drug-addled thinking like a James Bond title sequence, along with a questionable in-joke cameo with Williams S Burroughs, dish out advice and temptation to Bob. In one simple way, it's little more than a road movie. Yet on another level there's a cautionary tale of the life of a junkie that has relevance well beyond the film's timeframe. On the DVD: A stereo track and a grainy print in 1.85:1 usually does a movie little favours, but here they add to the overall gritty atmosphere surprisingly well. The only extra is unfortunately the original trailer. --Paul Tonks

• Joyful Partaking | DVD | (05/09/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Walter Majeski a former TV weatherman lost his young son in a freak snowstorm that Walter failed to forecast. On this day Walter decides it is time to end his life but his own ineptitude keeps getting in the way... A darkly comic Altmanesque look at a day in the life of a suburban American neighbourhood. Joyful Partaking reveals how seemingly small acts of kindness or carelessness can change a life forever.