"Actor: Jurnee Smollett Bell"

• Jack | DVD | (12/02/2001) from £3.99   |  Saving you £11.00 (275.69%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Jack is Francis Coppola at his most pointless noodling, looking for the film he wants to make instead of just making it. Robin Williams stars as 10-year-old Jack, a boy with an inexplicable disease that ages him at four times the normal human rate. Kept at home like a contemporary Boo Radley, Jack becomes a neighbourhood legend until his parents relent and send him to school. In time, the other kids befriend him and stay loyal as his hyperdevelopment puts a strain on his body and emotions. The idea is sound, but the execution is a bore. The best the script and Coppola can come up with are painfully long scenes in which Williams's character proves himself on the playground and in gross-out contests in a tree house. Coppola fishes around for signs of life and spontaneity in these scenes, but the film is actually best when Jack has to cope with certain feelings in his mature body (such as his attraction to a character played by Fran Drescher) that he isn't prepared for emotionally. Jack would have been a lot better if Coppola had embraced a plan from beginning to end and stuck to it. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com

• Beautiful Joe | DVD | (07/10/2002) from £6.97   |  Saving you £-3.98 (-133.10%)   |  RRP £2.99

  Beautiful Joe is a well-intentioned film. The problem is that it tries for both comedy and drama, and succeeds in neither. Amiable Irishman Joe (Billy Connolly), after one of the worst days imaginable, decides to leave his adopted New York home and seek adventure. Unfortunately, he runs into Hush (Sharon Stone) and gets "Far More Adventure than He Bargained For". Stone's character is the standard beautiful-but-messed-up-woman-who-needs-rescuing that is for some mystifying reason supposed to be appealing. And yes, of course she has a mute son who just might speak if only he had the right reason. Stone is "stretching" herself here, and is clearly eager to play a character: she mugs, she drawls, she wiggles and she cries. Not a scrap of scenery escapes her gullet; at times her attempts at comedy actually become sort of upsetting. Ally McBeal's Gil Bellows turns in a similarly inept and cartoonish "comic" performance. Beautiful Joe's one saving grace is Connolly, who manages to rise above his fellow cast members and the bizarre editing to turn in a charming, dignified performance. --Ali Davis, Amazon.com