"Actor: Marilyn Cooper"

• Family Business | DVD | (04/10/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Connery Hoffman and Broderick star as three generations of a family formerly linked to organized crime. Grandfather Jesse has been in and out of jail and his son Vito has decided to leave a life of crime in order to become a respectable family man but when grandson Adam comes up with a can't-miss heist plan the intergenerational sparks begin to fly.

• The Basketball Diaries | DVD | (05/08/2002) from £18.13   |  Saving you £-5.14 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  The pre-Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Jim Carroll, the poet and musician who spent much of his adolescence addicted to heroin and shooting hoops with fellow Catholic high-school kids. As a biography, the film doesn't amount to more than the sum of its gritty scenes of smack use, violence, perversions (poor Bruno Kirby plays a lecherous coach who comes on to young Jim), and the usual scream-and-puke dramas that go along with a cold-turkey session. Director Scott Kalvert doesn't seem to realise that most people don't know who Carroll is and therefore can't possibly understand why they should care about his gutterball youth. DiCaprio, having nowhere to go with his performance but maintain Carroll's tailspin, is boring and redundant. Some kind of allusion to the literary and rock & roll life that follows the mess we're watching might have been helpful. The DVD release offers the choice of a full or widescreen (letterbox) picture, plus interviews. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com

• The Survivors | DVD | (15/04/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  At the height of urban paranoia and the birth of survivalist movement in the 1980s, director Michael Ritchie decided to team Robin Williams and Walter Matthau in The Survivors. Talk about an odd couple; yet it actually might have worked, with Matthau's hang-dog deadpan and Williams' manic energy, were it not for a limp script by Michael Leeson. Williams and Matthau play two victims of Reaganomics, unemployed acquaintances who witness a robbery and identify one of the participants to the police, an act that turns them into targets for the robber in question who comes looking for them. Williams' response: become a one-man arsenal and join a training camp for militant survivalists. But the comedy is neither sharp enough nor sufficiently smart to pull it off; Matthau is the calm centre while Williams' comedy rockets all around him, to surprisingly little effect. --Marshall Fine, Amazon.com