"Actor: Sachi Parker"

• About Last Night | DVD | (17/05/2010) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  For better or worse, David Mamet's hit play Sexual Perversity in Chicago is watered down into this romantic comedy about a couple (played by Rob Lowe and Demi Moore) who get together and then fall apart due to Lowe's character's inability to commit. Jim Belushi is on hand as the gratuitously swinish best friend who looks at women as meat, and Elizabeth Perkins is entertainingly arch as Moore's gal pal and Belushi's nemesis. There is nothing about this 1986 film by Edward Zwick (co-creator of TV's thirtysomething and director of Glory and Courage Under Fire) that is at all reminiscent of Mamet, but that doesn't make it bad or dull. While one can feel the script straining to fill in gaps where chunks of the original play have disappeared, Zwick often successfully tells the story without words at all, relying on the actors to convey pure emotion. Lowe is good, and the then-willowy Moore's understated performance reminds one of the actress she might have been before she became a spectacle. --Tom Keogh

• Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael | DVD | (17/09/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £6.99

  In 1990, Welcome Home Roxy Carmichael showed Winona Ryder as cinema's top teenage role model. Her edge was a delinquency-equals-sympathy angle that held true throughout Beetlejuice, Mermaids, Heathers and Edward Scissorhands. Here as Dinky Bossetti she's chasing the ghosts of a past no one can explain. She's adopted; her town of Clyde, Ohio is mysteriously stuck in the 1950s; but weirder still is everyone's fixation with the imminent return of once-famous homecoming girl Roxy Carmichael. Dinky's school peers conform to the John Hughes 80s look and mindset, but it's the retro adult population that really winds her up. Jeff Daniels ought to be a perfectly conditioned suburbanite, but can't get over having once been married to Roxy. Imparting the secret that they'd had a child and given it away, Dinky's own confusions and obsessions suddenly make sense. The tangle of B-plots are given purpose at the same time she is. Her silent admirer (Thomas Wilson Brown) is able to approach her at last, and her school guidance counsellor becomes the friend she's never had. Ultimately the story's about the notion that no teenager ever feels like they fit in. Of course the real problem facing Ryder, Dinky and any viewer is that all teens grow up. What then? On the DVD: This is a bare-bones package with a simple two-channel stereo and 16:9 anamorphic ratio transfer. That said, it looks and sounds just fine. There's only one trailer, but someone's tried with the diner-style menu at least. --Paul Tonks