"Actor: Sicily Johnson"

• How Stella Got Her Groove Back | DVD | (01/03/2004) from £6.08   |  Saving you £6.91 (113.65%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Based on Terry McMillan's best-selling novel How Stella Got Her Groove Back, stars Angela Bassett as a 40-year-old, Manhattan stock trader and single mother whose static life gets a jolt during a vacation with her pal (Whoopi Goldberg) in Jamaica. Sparks fly when Bassett meets a 20-year-old stud (Taye Diggs) who has an ambivalent career path but a great body and lots of sexual energy to burn. After some prodding by Goldberg's warm-funny secondary character, Bassett gets it on with the fellow--and proceeds to worry about what she's doing with a man half her age. The film is most enjoyable in its sunny, exotic early scenes and becomes more formulaic once the unlikely couple transports their will-we-stay-together-or-won't-we tensions back to the Big Apple. But director Kevin Rodney Sullivan goes out of his way to make a movie unabashedly thick with fantasy and wish-fulfilment for female audiences (it's Diggs who reveals a lot more flesh than the regal Bassett). This is a Saturday-night movie all around. --Tom Keogh