"Actor: Anita Gillette"

• Moonstruck | DVD | (17/04/2019) from £7.19   |  Saving you £5.80 (80.67%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Remember the outfit Cher wore to the Oscars when she won an Academy Award for her performance in this 1987 film? Ay-yi-yi. The actress' more retiring character in this infectious comedy leaps several psychological hurdles just giving her hair a permanent. But then the original screenplay of Moonstruck, by John Patrick Shanley (Joe Versus the Volcano), is a wonderful, gently satirical tale of an Italian-American family dealing with repression and dissatisfaction against a backdrop of cultural expectations. Cher is focused and funny as a widow who feels she should marry an older fellow (Danny Aiello), but then falls for his black-sheep brother (Nicolas Cage). Olympia Dukakis and Vincent Gardenia are perfect as her parents, and John Mahoney (of TV's Frasier) has a memorable, small role as a middle-aged man on the make who gets a lecture from Dukakis's character. Shanley's dialogue is comically stylised in a way that makes one appreciate how much words can inform an actor's performance. Taking its cues from him and director Norman Jewison (And Justice for All), the cast immerse themselves in a pool of hilariously operatic emotion. --Tom Keogh

• Moonstruck (The Criterion Collection) | Blu Ray | (17/11/2020) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• She's The One | DVD | (04/02/2002) from £4.89   |  Saving you £8.10 (165.64%)   |  RRP £12.99

  She's the One is actor-writer-director Edward Burns' second film, following the widely acclaimed The Brothers McMullen. Given a slightly larger budget to play with ($3m as against his debut project's $25,000), Burns revisits much the same territory--love and sibling rivalry within a New York Irish-American family--but rather more expansively. This time, too, he can run to a few stars-in-the-making (Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Aniston, and John Mahoney from Frasier) to jazz up his cast of relative unknowns. Burns himself plays Mickey, a cab-driver in the Big Apple, with Mike McGlone as his yuppie stockbroker brother, and Maxine Bahns as Hope, the girl Mickey falls for and impulsively marries, much to the romantic delight of Francis' neglected wife Renee (Aniston). Francis, meanwhile, is having a clandestine affair with Heather (Diaz), Mike's former girlfriend--something Mike has yet to learn. Dispensing flawed wisdom and generally muddying the waters yet further is the lads' blunt-spoken father (Mahoney). Plotwise that's about it. Burns relies on his appealing cast and some amiably barbed repartee to hold our interest in what's essentially a dialogue-driven movie. He makes shrewd and sometimes unexpected use of his New York locations, too--it's a fair bet most people's mental image of Brooklyn wouldn't include a waterfront fishing community. This is a good-natured, slightly old-fashioned movie whose benevolent view of the battle of the sexes (where the women are invariably smarter than the men) never digs too deep or hits too hard. On the DVD: She's the One is presented on disc in its original widescreen ratio (1.85:1) and Dolby 4.0 sound that does the movie fair justice. Along with the original trailer, we get a seven-minute "making-of" featurette and a music video of the title song "Walls" from Tom Petty, who composed the film's score. Burns provides an unpretentious voice-over commentary, dealing mainly with matters of casting and the problems of shooting on location. --Philip Kemp

• Larger Than Life | DVD | (06/10/2003) from £11.47   |  Saving you £-2.49 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  A man inherits his dead father's estate in the shape of an elephant. To sell his inheritance he must first cross America taking his oversized companion along for the ride...