"Actor: Erik Dellums"

• Dr. Dolittle | DVD | (26/11/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  There's something intrinsically funny about tactlessly truth-telling talking animals. And there are plenty of those--and laughs to go with them--in this 1998 re-imagining of Hugh Lofting's children's story. Eddie Murphy plays the doctor in question, a modern-day San Francisco physician who discovers that he can understand what animals have to say. Director Betty Thomas makes the most of an amazing voice cast for the animals, led by Norm McDonald and including everyone from Garry Shandling to Julie Kavner to Albert Brooks. The story itself is pretty slim--will the conscientious doctor sign his soul away to a greedy HMO?--but Murphy makes the most of it, often providing priceless reactions to animal voices only he can hear. --Marshall Fine, Amazon.com

• Doctor Dolittle | DVD | (02/07/2001) from £5.65   |  Saving you £7.34 (129.91%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Betty Thomas directs and Eddie Murphy stars in Doctor Dolittle, the 1998 hit film which, while ostensibly aimed at children, has a high quotient of hip and even mildly gross humour. Murphy stars as John Dolittle, whom we see as a child talking to a neighbourhood dog who explains that the reason mutts sniff each others' butts is to assess their characters when first meeting them. Little John promptly tries this out on being introduced to his school principal. Warned off such social eccentricity, Dolittle stops talking to animals and as an adult becomes a respectable doctor running his own medical practice--until a bump on the head revives his capacity to understand animals, whereupon mayhem, mortification and a menagerie of needy and freeloading creatures are heaped upon his ordered existence. Murphy plays it relatively straight. It's the animals, some of them vividly enhanced by Jim Henson's animating team, who provide the real laughs here, and a thoroughly worldly, wisecracking bunch of characters they prove to be. There's a couple of hard-boiled, squabbling rats, a pigeon who complains of impotence, Rocky the guinea pig (voiced by Chris Rock) with a neat line in hip backchat, while Albert Brooks voices the gruff, melancholy tiger whose life Dolittle must try to save. A sweet but by no means saccharine comedy. On the DVD: The DVD edition features scene selection and a trailer. --David Stubbs

• Boycott | DVD | (03/02/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  A drama based on the events in Alabama in 1955. When a black woman refuses to give up her seat on a bus for a white woman she is arrested and charged under the state's segregation laws. Enter a man called Martin Luther King who leads a boycott of the buses and a fight against prejudice...