"Actor: David Warry Smith"

• The Long Kiss Goodnight | DVD | (01/10/1999) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £17.99

  Geena Davis and her former husband, director Renny Harlin, attempted to pick up the pieces after the debacle of their box-office disaster, Cutthroat Island. What they came up with was The Long Kiss Goodnight, a repulsive ode to American film noir, based on a script by Shane Black (Lethal Weapon) about an amnesiac schoolteacher (Davis) who searches for her true identity and finds she is actually a secret agent immersed in a deadly plot to topple the government. Mechanistic in its violence, obnoxious in its attitude, the film makes Davis, a once-promising actress, nothing more than a special effect. She tosses one to sadists in the audience by allowing her character to be beaten, punched unconscious and tortured. --Tom Keogh

• Cheaters | DVD | (07/06/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  In the coda of Cheaters, John Stockwell's dramatisation of the 1995 Steinmetz school scandal, Jolie Fitch (Jena Malone) ruminates, "I learned more about the way the world really works from my nine months on the academic decathlon team than most people will learn in a lifetime". Fitch is the team leader of the crumbling inner-city school's first "academic decathlon" squad, a group of hard-working kids hopelessly outclassed by the perennial champions from a lavishly funded model school for the gifted and the rich. When a Steinmetz student discovers the question sheet for the upcoming finals, the issue isn't whether to cheat, but how. Stockwell discards easy moralising and empty platitudes for an ambiguous perspective framed by questions of privilege and prejudice. Jeff Daniels, so long the cinema's hapless nice guy, is excellent as the tireless teacher, a well-meaning idealist who struggles with his inner demons through the ordeal. Malone is refreshing as a streetwise class brain whose ambition drives the team on. Their guilt is the focus of a predatory media scandal, but it's the hypocrisy of the system and the double standards of the gatekeepers that Stockwell takes to task in his compelling drama. Some might call it cynical, but Cheaters is too sharp and smart for such an easy label. Better to call it disillusioned.--Sean Axmaker, Amazon.com