"Actor: Valerie Wright"

• Sleepless in Seattle | DVD | (17/04/2019) from £5.26   |  Saving you £7.73 (146.96%)   |  RRP £12.99

  The director and stars of 1998's You've Got Mail scored a breakthrough hit with this hugely popular romantic comedy from 1993, about a recently engaged woman (Meg Ryan) who hears the sad story of a grieving widower (Tom Hanks) on the radio and believes that they are destined to be together. She's single in New York, he lives in Seattle with a young son, but the cross-country attraction proves irresistible and pretty soon Meg's on a westbound flight. What happens from there is... well, you must have been living in a cave to have let this sweet-hearted comedy slip below your pop-cultural radar. There's little complexity or depth to writer-director Nora Ephron's cheesy tale of a romantic fait accompli, and more than a little contrivance to the subplots that threaten to keep Hanks and Ryan from actually meeting. But the purity of star chemistry here is hard to deny, and this may be the first film to indicate the more serious and sympathetic side of Hanks that is revealed in later roles. With its clever jokes about "chick movies" and repeated homage to the classic weeper An Affair to Remember, this may not be everybody's brand of amorous entertainment, but it's got an old-Hollywood charm that appeals to many a movie fan. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

• Scanners / Scanners II - The New Order / Scanners III - The Takeover | DVD | (18/07/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Scanners (Dir. David Cronenberg 1981): Cameron Vale is living on the fringe of society self-induced due to his telepathic ability to read other people's minds. Darryl Revok has the same condition and is the head of an underground association of so-called Scanners that want world domination. When Vale is taken to Dr Paul Ruth as a result of supposed insanity he's enlisted into a program that will involve him in a battle against his fellow Scanners. Scanners 2 - The New Order (Dir. Christian Duguay 1991): In order to take over the city corrupt police commander Forrester intends to use a telepathic breed of human Scanners. To control the Scanners Forrester enlists the help of evil scientist Dr Morse who wants to conduct mind control experiments on the Scanners with a new drug. Unfortunately the side effects render the Scanners incapable so Forrester finds David Kellum a good rational Scanner who unaware of his own powers agrees to work with him. Scanners 3 - The Takeover (Dir. Christian Duguay 1992): A young lovable Scanner with extraordinary telepathic powers transforms into a murderous megalomaniac after taking one of her father's experimental drugs. After taking over his pharmaceutical drugs company the deranged Scanner runs amok on a killing spree and takes over a television company in her quest for world domination. Will her Scanner brother fresh from a spell in a Thai Monastery have the power to stop her?

• Scanners III - The Takeover | DVD | (18/07/2005) from £7.24   |  Saving you £9.75 (57.40%)   |  RRP £16.99

  A young lovable Scanner with extraordinary telepathic powers transforms into a murderous megalomaniac after taking one of her father's experimental drugs. After taking over his pharmaceutical drugs company the deranged Scanner runs amok on a killing spree and takes over a television company in her quest for world domination. Will her Scanner brother fresh from a spell in a Thai Monastery have the power to stop her?

• Whatever Happened To Aunt Alice? | DVD | (02/07/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? sees a change of direction for Robert Aldrich's unofficial trilogy which all involve "ageing actresses" in macabre thrillers (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte). The busy Aldrich only produced What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?, calling in TV director Lee H Katzin (a Mission: Impossible regular) to handle the megaphone. Aldrich also opted to shoot the film in pastel colours appropriate to the unusual Arizona desert setting rather than the gothic black and white of the earlier films. The film cast the less iconic Geraldine Page as the genteelly unpleasant Mrs Clare Marrable. Left apparently penniless by her departed husband, Mrs M opts to keep up appearances by hiring a succession of timid elderly housekeepers, bossing them around with well-spoken nastiness, duping them out of their life savings and, on the pretence of getting help with a midnight tree-planting program, lures them into their own graves, batters them to death and plants lovely pines over them. Page gets her own way with the meek likes of Mildred Dunnock, until the feistier, red-wigged R!uth Gordon applies for the job and gets down to amateur sleuthing. While Bette Davis and her partners went wildly over the top in previous films, Page and Gordon play more subtly, finding odd pathetic moments in between the monstrous, irony-laced horror stuff. The supporting cast of pretty or handsome young things, mostly putty in the hands of the manipulative Page, contribute striking little cameos (Rosemary Forsyth sports a pleasing 1969 hairdo as the kindly but intimidated neighbour), but the film belongs to its leading ladies, delivering a fine line in twist-packed cat-and-mouse theatrics. The video is handsomely letterboxed, as befits a film made before widescreen films were shot with all the action in the middle of the frame to facilitate television sales. --Kim Newman