"Actor: Lenka Peterson"

• Dragnet | DVD | (14/04/2003) from £6.79   |  Saving you £4.46 (80.65%)   |  RRP £9.99

  A seemingly squeaky-clean TV reverend and a porno magazine king are suspected of operating a crime-ridden cult. Joe Fridays nephew and his hip partner are given the task of proving these allegations with just the facts...

• Dragnet | DVD | (01/07/2002) from £11.13   |  Saving you £1.86 (16.71%)   |  RRP £12.99

  In 1987 moviegoers had yet to be crushed under the weight of the 1990s TV remake mania, and Dragnet comes off as fresh and funny. The line between parody and tribute can be hard to draw, but any marginally hip baby boomer who has ever watched Jack Webb's straight-laced Detective Joe Friday caught a glimmer of the comedic vein waiting to be mined beneath Dragnet's gritty Los Angeles streets. Dan Aykroyd plays Joe Friday, the straight-arrow nephew of Webb's iconic cop. This part was made for him (in fact, he's given top writing credit), and under his steely exterior you can tell he's having a ball delivering those rapid-fire recitations of regulations and deadpan expressions of moral outrage. Tom Hanks plays Pep Streebek, the laissez-faire narco agent who is Friday's new partner. Their assignment: bust the Pagans, a wild-and-woolly gang of dope fiends, deadbeats, and beatniks behind a bewildering array of bizarre robberies. Hilarity ensues. Friday and Streebek outfox a corrupt televangelist (Christopher Plummer), bicker over chili dogs and cigarettes, alternately revile and fawn over a porn millionaire (Dabney Coleman), wrestle a 30-foot-long anaconda, and rescue the virgin Connie Swail--the only girl capable of stealing Friday's heart. --Grant Balfour, Amazon.com

• Cheaters | DVD | (07/06/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  In the coda of Cheaters, John Stockwell's dramatisation of the 1995 Steinmetz school scandal, Jolie Fitch (Jena Malone) ruminates, "I learned more about the way the world really works from my nine months on the academic decathlon team than most people will learn in a lifetime". Fitch is the team leader of the crumbling inner-city school's first "academic decathlon" squad, a group of hard-working kids hopelessly outclassed by the perennial champions from a lavishly funded model school for the gifted and the rich. When a Steinmetz student discovers the question sheet for the upcoming finals, the issue isn't whether to cheat, but how. Stockwell discards easy moralising and empty platitudes for an ambiguous perspective framed by questions of privilege and prejudice. Jeff Daniels, so long the cinema's hapless nice guy, is excellent as the tireless teacher, a well-meaning idealist who struggles with his inner demons through the ordeal. Malone is refreshing as a streetwise class brain whose ambition drives the team on. Their guilt is the focus of a predatory media scandal, but it's the hypocrisy of the system and the double standards of the gatekeepers that Stockwell takes to task in his compelling drama. Some might call it cynical, but Cheaters is too sharp and smart for such an easy label. Better to call it disillusioned.--Sean Axmaker, Amazon.com