"Actor: Allison Cook"

• Desperate Justice | DVD | (08/10/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £1.99

  A harrowing, if limited, 1993 thriller, Desperate Justice stars Lesley Ann Warren as Carol, a mother whose young daughter is raped by the caretaker of her school and left in a coma. The culprit is quickly rounded up; however, the case against him is dismissed for lack of rock-solid evidence. In a moment of blind fear and rage, Carol metes out summary justice of her own--and must face up to the consequences. Desperate Justice is suitably restrained in dealing with the violence central to its subject matter. While competently enough scripted and acted to retain the viewer's interest and sympathy, it has a slightly fuzzy, sucrose feel about it that acts as a general anaesthetic against the inevitably disturbing subject matter. The final scenes in particular achieve a tidy, somewhat predictable sense of "closure" so beloved by Americans. Despite its made-for-TV air, Desperate Justice has just enough about it to ensure a passable late night 90 minutes over a mug of Horlicks. On the DVD: This is not the sort of movie that was ever designed to benefit from DVD enhancement. Picture format is 4:3. As well as trailers, there are included here items entitled "About the film" and "About the stars", which turn out to be perfunctory text-only blurbs. --David Stubbs

• Poulenc: Dialogues des Carmelites | DVD | (16/08/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Poulenc's late pious works for voice share the sprightliness of his early secular orchestral and chamber pieces; this is perhaps especially true of his 1952 work of devotion and martyrdom. Young aristocrat Blanche seeks refuge in the cloister from her fear of death only to find the Carmelites she joins the object of persecution by the Jacobin Revolution; she flees, but then comes back to share her sisters' death--a powerful scene in which a hymn is stripped down a voice at a time, and finally silenced when Blanche joins them on the guillotine. Anne Sophie Schmidt as Blanche is convincing both in her terror and her resignation; Patricia Petibon is delightful as her closest friend, the lively young nun Constance to whom fear is never especially an issue and who has sought death cheerfully from the start, praying that the dying Prioress might be saved and she taken in her place. The older women--the two Prioresses and Mere Marie who persuades the nuns to refuse compromise--are equally fine in their graver music. --Roz Kaveney