"Actor: Anne Carlisle"

• Desperately Seeking Susan | DVD | (17/04/2019) from £11.63   |  Saving you £4.36 (37.49%)   |  RRP £15.99

  This likeable, feminist screwball comedy about several incidents of mistaken identity is remembered more as the film that made Madonna a movie star. She's flip, hip and energetic as Susan, the wild tramp with whom bored, suburban New Jersey housewife Roberta Glass (Rosanna Arquette) becomes obsessed after reading of her sexual conquests in the personal ads. Of course, since Madonna essentially played herself, the role's hardly a stretch. Director Susan Seidelmen presents a series of zany incidents too complicated to recount, but the result is that Roberta swaps lifestyles with her fixation to explore New Wave culture on New York's Lower East Side. It's territory Seidelmen knew well as her more offbeat, indie debut, Smithereens, revelled in the same setting. But where Smithereens took a more edgy approach to its characters, Susan is a fairy tale romantic comedy, and eventually becomes as conventional as the suburban characters it mocks by settling conflicts with predictable Hollywood formulae. Still, there's much to be enjoyed. The film's at its funniest when juxtaposing New York hip and New Jersey suburbia, like when Arquette's straight, suit-and-tie husband dances with Madonna in a punk club. The performances, too, are engaging, especially Arquette and Aidan Quinn, playing a romantic film projectionist who becomes her grubby Prince Charming. --Dave McCoy, Amazon.com --This text refers to the VHS edition of this video

• Desperately Seeking Susan - Deluxe Limited Edition | Blu Ray | (21/11/2022) from £21.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  If you know what to look for, you can find almost anything in the personal ads...including the love of your life! Rosanna Arquette (Pulp Fiction) is irresistible and, in her first starring role, pop star Madonna (Evita) gives a marvellously comic performance in this delightfully mad-cap comedy about mistaken identity. Bored New Jersey housewife Roberta (Arquette) fills her days by reading the personal ads and following an ongoing romance between Jim (Robert Joy) and Susan (Madonna), a mysterious drifter who appears to lead the kind of free-spirited life about which Roberta can only dream. And dream she does, until the day she actually shows up at the couple's pre-arrange rendezvous in New York City...and after a bump on the head, a bout of amnesia turns Roberta into Susan and opens the door to intrigue, laughter and love! Product Features Brand new interviews with director susan seidelman, producer sarah pillsbury & author of Madonna: like an icon lucy o'brien. Postcards, booklet & poster Bespoke cover art.

• Relative Values | DVD | (25/03/2002) from £8.80   |  Saving you £4.19 (47.61%)   |  RRP £12.99

  The Noel Coward play about a Hollywood star and the english aristocracy. With Julie Andrews, Stephen Fry, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Colin Firth.

• Radio Days | Blu Ray | (20/02/2017) from £14.84   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Woody Allen's gentlest and most unassuming movie, Radio Days isn't so much a story as a series of anecdotes loosely linked together by a voice-over spoken by the director. The film is strongly autobiographical in tone, presenting the memories of a young lad Joe (clearly a stand-in for Allen himself) growing up in a working-class Jewish family in the seafront Brooklyn suburb of Rockaway during the late 1930s and early 40s. In this pre-TV era the radio is ubiquitous, a constant accompaniment churning out quiz shows, soap operas, dance music, news flashes and Joe's favourite, the exploits of the Masked Avenger. Given Allen's well-publicised gallery of neuroses, you might expect childhood traumas. But no, everything here is rose-tinted and even the outbreak of war makes little impact on the easygoing, protective tenor of family life. Now and then Allen counterpoints his family album with the doings of the radio folk themselves (blink, and you'll miss a young William H Macy in the studio scene when the news of Pearl Harbour comes through). The rise to fame of Sally (Mia Farrow), a former night-club cigarette girl turned crooner, is the nearest the film comes to a coherent storyline. But most of the time Allen is content to coast on a flow of easy nostalgia, poking affectionate fun at the broadcasting conventions of the period and basking in the mildly rueful Jewish humour and small domestic crises of Joe's extended family. There aren't even any of his snappy one-liners, and the humour is kept low-key, raising at most an indulgent smile. A touch of Allen's usual acerbity wouldn't have come amiss. But for anyone who shares these memories, Radio Days will surely be a delight. On the DVD: Not much besides the theatrical trailer, scene menu and a choice of languages. The screen's the full original ratio, but nothing seems to have been done to enhance the soundtrack, and the dialogue's not always clear. A boost in volume may help.--Philip Kemp