"Actor: Robert Parent"

• Better Than Chocolate | DVD | (21/01/2002) from £19.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Many lesbian movies are long on charm and short on production values; Better Than Chocolate has a solid dose of both and steamy sex scenes to boot. Our heroine Maggie (Karyn Dwyer), a clerk at a lesbian bookshop, meets footloose butch Kim (Christina Cox) and, after Kim's van is towed away, they move in together. Unfortunately for their romantic bliss, Maggie's mother, Lila (Wendy Crewson), and teenage brother move in that very evening thanks to Lila's impending divorce. But what really complicates matters is that Maggie can't bring herself to come out to her mother. Even when she tries, Lila steamrollers through the conversation, as if she knows what's coming and doesn't want to hear it. Interwoven with this is the struggle of Judy (Peter Outerbridge), a male-to-female transsexual who's in love with the bookshop's owner, Frances (Ann-Marie MacDonald), who's freaking out because customs officers are holding a list of books at the border that they claim are obscene. The overlapping plots are deftly juggled, the personal and political are compellingly interwoven, and, most satisfying of all, the characters have problems that aren't going to be easily resolved. A handful of candy-coloured lip-synching musical numbers give the movie some flash and the sex scenes give it some heat, but it's the elements of sorrow and ambiguity that really make the joy in Better Than Chocolate something to savour. --Bret Fetzer, Amazon.com

• Stripshow | DVD | (17/06/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £7.99

  Coming soon to a hotel pay channel near you, Stripshow, with its rednecks and top-heavy trailer-trash, is the American softcore equivalent of movies like Bridget Jones's Diary, which are more-or-less targeted at the kind of people who are in them. Tane McClure plays a stripper who acquires a suitcase full of money from an aged punter who expires during a show. She than attempts to track down an ex-lover, who eventually wanders off into the desert to die rather than risk appearing in the sequel. The end. Actually, there's rather a lot of wandering off into the desert in this movie. There's also some--but not much--of the usual faked bonking, but the closest thing to a genuinely erotic scene is the obligatory lipstick-lesbian encounter which takes place in a Native American teepee (although you can't help thinking that, somewhere off-camera, Fox Mulder is being distracted from communing with a shaman), and even that's a pretty truncated episode--after all, Billy-Bob, it just ain't natural. Anyone who'd like to see McClure in a real film may prefer to check out Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas instead. On the DVD: Stripshow has nothing extra on this 4:3 release other than a few cast biogs--not even subtitles, so listening to the dialogue is unfortunately compulsory. --Roger Thomas

• James Dean: Race With Destiny | DVD | (03/09/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £1.99

  The gripping story of James Dean's rise to fame his romantic entanglements and his fatal desire for fast cars that led to his untimely death.