"Actor: Hallie Kate Eisenberg"

• Bicentennial Man | DVD | (06/03/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  From director Chris Columbus comes this original funny and heart-warming film. When Richard Martin (Sam Neill) introduced a robot named Andrew (Robin Williams) to the family nobody expects anything more than an ordinary household appliance. But this is no ordinary robot! Andrew is a unique machine with real emotions a sense of humour and a burning curiosity to discover what it means to be human. Over the course of his service with the Martins spanning two hundred years and several

• Bicentennial Man | DVD | (03/07/2000) from £26.96   |  Saving you £-22.97 (N/A%)   |  RRP £3.99

  Bicentennial Man was stung at the 1999 box office, due no doubt in part to poor timing during a backlash against Robin Williams and his treacly performances in two other, then-recent, releases, Jakob the Liar and Patch Adams. But this near-approximation of a science-fiction epic, based on works by Isaac Asimov and directed, with uncharacteristic seriousness of purpose, by Chris Columbus (Mrs Doubtfire), is much better than one would have known from the knee-jerk negativity and box-office indifference. Williams plays Andrew, a robot programmed for domestic chores and sold to an upper-middle-class family, the Martins, in the year 2005. The family patriarch (Sam Neill) recognizes and encourages Andrew's uncommon characteristics, particularly his artistic streak, sensitivity to beauty, humour and independence of spirit. In so doing, he sets Williams's tin man on a two-century journey to become more human than most human beings. As adapted by screenwriter Nicholas Kazan, the movie's scale is novelistic, though Columbus isn't the man to embrace with Spielbergian confidence its sweeping possibilities. Instead, the Home Alone director shakes off his familiar tendencies to pander and matures, finally, as a captivating storyteller. But what really makes this film matter is its undercurrent of deep yearning, the passion of Andrew as a convert to the human race and his willingness to sacrifice all to give and take love. Williams rises to an atypical challenge here as a futuristic Everyman, relying, perhaps for the first time, on his considerable iconic value to make the point that becoming human means becoming more like Robin Williams. Nothing wrong with that. -- Tom Keogh, Amazon.com

• Paulie | DVD | (02/07/2006) from £8.83   |  Saving you £9.16 (103.74%)   |  RRP £17.99

  The human beings are almost as interesting as the title character in the surprisingly subtle and engaging Paulie, a film about the cross-country adventures of a smart-mouthed parrot. As director John Roberts deploys the footage, the bird becomes a vivid personality; every quizzical twist of his head is oddly expressive. The people who interact with Paulie are a quirky and interesting bunch as well, and the casting is topnotch: Tony Shalhoub (The Siege) as a Russian immigrant janitor, Cheech Marin as an open-hearted mariachi musician, and Gena Rowlands as a widowed painter in a footloose Winnebago--all are vividly eccentric individuals, memorable in their own right. There are some tired swipes at the cold-blooded meanies of Big Science (beady-eyed researcher Bruce Davison has Paulie clapped in irons), but for the most part the film respects the complexity of everyone's motivations, and that's virtually unheard of in today's Hollywood, even in films supposedly designed for grownups. --David Chute

• How To Eat Fried Worms | DVD | (05/02/2007) from £2.69   |  Saving you £7.30 (73.10%)   |  RRP £9.99

  It's Global Worming! During the first day of his new school year a fifth grade boy squares off against a bully and winds up accepting a dare that could change the balance of power within the class.

• Nicholas Gift | DVD | (28/04/2008) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £4.99

  Viva Nicholas! Viva Nicholas! shouts Reg Green at the dedication of a school named after his slain son. And that sums up how all of Italy feels about 7-year-old Nicholas Green and American tourist and accidental victim of a bandit's bullet. In this highly publicized 1994 crime would-be robbers who fired the fateful shots were not even after the Greens but were trying to intercept a jewelry shipment. Still the bizarre story of mistaken identity is little more than a footnote to the powerful true story of two parents' generosity and willingness to forgive - all while dealing with their boy's grim prognosis. Under the worst circumstances Reg and Maggie Green make the most courageous decision possible: They will donate Nicholas' organs a practice almost unheard of in Italy at that time. Since then organ donation in Italy has increased 118 percent giving more than 3 000 people a second chance at life. It is call The Nicholas Effect.

• Nicholas' Gift | DVD | (23/07/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £1.99

  This is the extraordinary true story of a close and loving family on a sightseeing holiday in Italy in September 1994 whose lives were shattered one desolate night with the indiscriminate shooting of their little seven year old son Nicholas. As Nicholas lies dying in hospital his devastated parents take the most painful decision imaginable to donate Nicholas' organs so that other little children may receive the gift of life. What begins as an intensely private and unbelievably courageous act of love and human compassion was soon to send emotional ripples right around the world that would come to be known as the Nicholas Effect.