"Actor: Chuck Hicks"

• Dick Tracy | DVD | (12/02/2001) from £8.25   |  Saving you £6.74 (81.70%)   |  RRP £14.99

  A flawed but stylish adaptation of the Chester Gould comic strip by director Warren Beatty, who also stars in the title role. The minimalist plot involves a battalion of baddies who confront the intrepid detective in a series of strung-together vignettes. Al Pacino is a comedic if overblown standout as Big Boy Caprice and Madonna simply smoulders as aggressive blonde bombshell Breathless Mahoney. It matters not that the plot is Spartan, as this dazzling eye candy is much enhanced by Stephen Sondheim's songs, including the Academy Award-winning ditty, "Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)". Beatty took his cue from the source material and concentrated on the relationships between these people, whether strained, romantic or hateful. The performances are subtle and more amusing than you would expect from such a visually bold picture. Shot in bright, primary colours, this also won Oscars for Best Art/Set Direction and Makeup (for those inventively hideous criminals). Watch for well-known names, such as Dustin Hoffman and Dick Van Dyke, in cameo appearances and supporting roles. --Rochelle O'Gorman

• The Twilight Zone - Vol. 3 | DVD | (29/05/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  In 1959 screenwriter Rod Serling first opened the door to the "dimension of imagination" that is The Twilight Zone, a show quite unlike anything that had gone before, and better than much that has followed in its wake. This original and daring television series ran for a magnificent five seasons from 1959 to 1964 and still looks as fresh as ever, particularly on DVD. What distinguished the series (and still does) is the quality of the scripts, many of which were penned by Serling, but with significant contributions from veteran sci-fi authors and screenwriters such as Richard Matheson. Actors of the calibre of Robert Redford, Burgess Meredith, Lee Marvin and William Shatner gave some of their best small-screen performances, while an unforgettable main title theme by Bernard Herrmann and musical contributions from young turks such as Jerry Goldsmith underlined the show's attraction for great creative talent both behind and in front of the cameras. Volume 3 contains another selection of four episodes from across the series. "Steel" (episode 122) stars Lee Marvin in a futuristic Richard Matheson story concerning a penniless boxing manager who is forced into the ring when his robot boxer breaks down. Matheson is concerned to illustrate the lengths to which people are forced to go when desperate, but his moral is undermined a little by setting the story in the far future of 1974; Marvin, however, is a magnetic presence. In the tense and tautly written "A Game of Pool" (episode 70), Jack Klugman (The Odd Couple, Quincy) is a boastful pool player who challenges champion "Fats" Brown (Jonathan Winters) to a match in which the stakes are his life. "Walking Distance" is a slice of wistful, semi-autobiographical nostalgia from Serling in which a burned-out media exec returns to the town of his childhood (watch out for a very young Ron Howard as one of the kids). Bernard Herrmann's masterful score for this episode was composed not long after his music for Hitchcock's Vertigo, and has a similar tragi-romantic streak. Finally, "Kick the Can" (episode 86) is the story of the residents of a retirement home who discover (or rediscover) Peter Pan's secret for staying permanently young: it's easy to see why Steven Spielberg decided to adapt this episode for the 1983 movie. On the DVD: A neat animated menu with a winking eye guides the viewer "Inside the Twilight Zone", which consists of digests of background information on the individual episodes, as well as a general history of the show, season-by-season breakdown and a potted biography of Serling. --Mark Walker