"Actor: Anne Pitoniak"

• A Thousand Acres | DVD | (06/03/2006) from £6.20   |  Saving you £3.79 (61.13%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Best friends. Bitter rivals. Sisters. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning best-selling novel A Thousand Acres (penned by Jane Smiley) follows the saga of the Cook family headed by the indomitable patriarch Larry Cook (Jason Robards). Cook's kingdom is a fertile farm that spans 1 000 acres but the seeds of its destruction are sown when he impulsively decides to distribute it among his three daughters Ginny (Jessica Lange) Rose (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Caroline (Jenn

• Best Seller | DVD | (16/09/2002) from £4.15   |  Saving you £10.10 (349.48%)   |  RRP £12.99

  John Flynn has directed some good, tough, pacy thrillers and Best Seller, along with the 1973 The Outfit, can claim to be the best of them. It kicks off with not one but two slam-bang action sequences and then, having grabbed our attention, pitches us straight into its twisty plot premise. Brian Dennehy, reliably watchable as ever, plays an ageing cop-turned-novelist who has hit a writer's block since his wife died. James Woods at his most suavely sinister is a hitman with dirt to dish on the head of a big corporation. Woods proposes a Faustian pact. He provides Dennehy with the full crooked story on the mobster-turned-corporate boss and the cop writes it up. Dennehy gets a best seller; Woods gets his revenge and comes out looking like a hero. The dialogue, courtesy of screenwriter and horror-movie director Larry Cohen (It's Alive; Q--The Winged Serpent), is satisfyingly hard-boiled and slips in plenty of subversive sideswipes at rampant capitalism. ("It's the American Way, Dennis," says Woods, detailing how he helped his boss rise via robbery and murder. "I'm a businessman, an executive.") This certainly isn't the only movie to get mileage out of the symbiotic relationship between cop and crook (see Michael Mann's Heat), but it works several neat variations on the theme, with Dennehy and Woods both at the top of their respective forms. If the film never quite lives up to its potential--the required final confrontation between the two principals doesn't materialise and Victoria Tennant is thrown away as Dennehy's love-interest--it remains a way better than average thriller with its roots deep in the best B-movie traditions. On the DVD: Best Seller on disc has no extras apart from the theatrical trailer. The transfer is good and clean, and preserves the original's full-width framing. --Philip Kemp

• Agnes of God | DVD | (09/10/2003) from £15.57   |  Saving you £-9.58 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  This Broadway hit gets a solid film treatment by director Norman Jewison but that can't make up for the weaknesses of the script (which were as true onstage as they are here). Jane Fonda plays a chain-smoking shrink sent to a convent to do a psychological evaluation of a novice (Meg Tilly) who gave birth to a baby and then killed it in her little room. Was it a virgin birth? A miracle? And what of the bloody stigmata that seem to spontaneously appear on her hands? Fonda also finds herself clashing with the Mother Superior (Anne Bancroft) over the line between faith and science. But writer John Pielmeier can't flesh this out beyond an idea; in the end, the solution is a disappointingly earthbound one that even the strong acting in this film can't elevate. --Marshall Fine

• Agnes Of God | DVD | (15/04/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  This Broadway hit gets a solid film treatment by director Norman Jewison but that can't make up for the weaknesses of the script (which were as true onstage as they are here). Jane Fonda plays a chain-smoking shrink sent to a convent to do a psychological evaluation of a novice (Meg Tilly) who gave birth to a baby and then killed it in her little room. Was it a virgin birth? A miracle? And what of the bloody stigmata that seem to spontaneously appear on her hands? Fonda also finds herself clashing with the Mother Superior (Anne Bancroft) over the line between faith and science. But writer John Pielmeier can't flesh this out beyond an idea; in the end, the solution is a disappointingly earthbound one that even the strong acting in this film can't elevate. --Marshall Fine

• VI Warshawski | DVD | (01/03/2004) from £5.38   |  Saving you £9.61 (178.62%)   |  RRP £14.99

  When an ex-hockey player is slain his 13 year old daughter hires Warshawski to track down the evil killer. An action story of money murder and Chicago's notorious criminal world....

• Old Gringo | DVD | (12/08/2002) from £5.99   |  Saving you £7.00 (53.90%)   |  RRP £12.99

  An American spinster (Fonda) travels to Mexico to teach the children of a wealthy landowner and to find a new life for herself. What she finds is a general in Pancho Villa's army who is the bastard son of the landowner and a journalist out for adventure...

• The Survivors | DVD | (15/04/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  At the height of urban paranoia and the birth of survivalist movement in the 1980s, director Michael Ritchie decided to team Robin Williams and Walter Matthau in The Survivors. Talk about an odd couple; yet it actually might have worked, with Matthau's hang-dog deadpan and Williams' manic energy, were it not for a limp script by Michael Leeson. Williams and Matthau play two victims of Reaganomics, unemployed acquaintances who witness a robbery and identify one of the participants to the police, an act that turns them into targets for the robber in question who comes looking for them. Williams' response: become a one-man arsenal and join a training camp for militant survivalists. But the comedy is neither sharp enough nor sufficiently smart to pull it off; Matthau is the calm centre while Williams' comedy rockets all around him, to surprisingly little effect. --Marshall Fine, Amazon.com

• House Of Cards | DVD | (10/06/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  When Ruth Matthews finds that her young daughter has withdrawn from reality she and a well-meaning doctor struggle to come to the aid of the child. But when conventional science appears unable to reach the little girl Ruth embarks on a journey within herself to unlock the mysteries that hold her daughter captive in this passionate and heartrending tale of a mother's love - and a family's determination to heal.