"Actor: Randall Arney"

• The Color Of Money | DVD | (05/02/2001) from £9.25   |  Saving you £5.74 (62.05%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Martin Scorcese handles directing duties in this 1986 sequel to the classic 1961 film The Hustler, which marks the return of Paul Newman to the role of pool shark Fast Eddie Felson. Anxious to break into the big time again, Eddie finds a talented protégé (Tom Cruise) to groom; but with the addition of the latter's manipulative girlfriend (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and the wild streak in Cruise's character, the trio make for a fascinating portrait in group psychology. The cast is brilliant, the script by Richard Price (Clockers) is a paragon of tightly controlled character study and drama (at least in the film's first half), and Scorcese and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus make an ornate show of the collision and flight of pool balls through space--something of a metaphor for the dynamics among the three principals. The film is generally regarded as weaker in its second half, and rightly so, as everything that was interesting in the first place disappears. Still, Newman won a deserved Oscar for his performance. --Tom Keogh

• The Out Of Towners | DVD | (05/03/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  This remake of Neil Simon's l970 comedy finds Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin as Ohio yokels cast adrift in Mayor Rudy Giuliani's sanitised New York City. With their son recently departed for Britain, the empty-nesters travel to the Big Apple for a job interview and are beset with all kinds of bad luck, starting with their flight being rerouted to Boston. Things only go downhill from there, of course, as they're mugged by an Andrew Lloyd Webber imposter, the high-tech multilingual navigation system on their rented Cadillac goes haywire, and their hotel reservations fall through. Although marred by some out-of-place slapstick and mawkish romance scenes, this film's not without its funny moments. The couple stumbles into a sexual-addiction encounter group and has to try to back out gracefully (not succeeding very well, of course). John Cleese is howlingly funny as he reprises his Fawlty Towers role of a cross-dressing hotelier, and Martin has a great drug-delirium scene, in which he's slipped a hit of LSD in jail (thinking it's aspirin). Just try not to think in terms of comparisons to Neil Simon's original and this remake works fairly well. --Jerry Renshaw, Amazon.com

• Normal | DVD | (17/05/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £13.99

  A poignant and funny portrait of a marriage that undergoes a wrenching examination... After 25 years of a loving marriage in a small midwestern town husband Roy announces to his wife Irma that he is a woman trapped in a man's body and wants to have a sex change operation.