"Actor: Timothy McNeil"

• Contact | DVD | (25/09/1998) from £7.19   |  Saving you £6.80 (94.58%)   |  RRP £13.99

  The opening and closing moments of Robert (Forrest Gump) Zemeckis's Contact astonish viewers with the sort of breathtaking conceptual imagery one hardly ever sees in movies these day--each is an expression of the heroine's lifelong quest (both spiritual and scientific) to explore the meaning of human existence through contact with extraterrestrial life. The movie begins by soaring far out into space, then returns dizzyingly to earth until all the stars in the heavens condense into the sparkle in one little girl's eye. It ends with that same girl as an adult (Jodie Foster)--her search having taken her to places beyond her imagination--turning her gaze inward and seeing the universe in a handful of sand. Contact traces the journey between those two visual epiphanies. Based on Carl Sagan's novel, Contact is exceptionally thoughtful and provocative for a big-budget Hollywood science fiction picture, with elements that recall everything from 2001 to The Right Stuff. Foster's solid performance (and some really incredible alien hardware) keep viewers interested, even when the story skips and meanders, or when the halo around the golden locks of rising-star-of-a-different-kind Matthew McConaughey (as the pure-Hollywood-hokum love interest)reaches Milky Way-level wattage. Ambitious, ambiguous, pretentious, unpredictable--Contact is all of these things and more. Much of it remains open to speculation and interpretation but whatever conclusions one eventually draws, Contactdeserves recognition as a rare piece of big-budget studio film making on a personal scale. --Jim Emerson

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

  A teen-themed entry in the long-established Psycho-Bitch-from-Hell sub-genre of Hollywood thriller, Wicked affords current high school princess Julia Stiles an opportunity to stop smiling and play a manipulative, disturbed, alienated girl who is also the number one suspect in the “did she or didn't she batter Mum to death with a heavy tragedy mask” mystery.Set in one of those hideous American "gated communities", a pastel suburban enclave with round-the-clock security and enough adulteries to keep a soap going for a year, the film is subtler than stablemates like The Crush and Teacher's Pet, with a more convoluted plot and enough suspects to put the outcome in doubt. However it's still a by-the-numbers mix of soap and suspense. Stiles crosses her eyes and pouts a lot, making tastefully incestuous moves on her weakling father (an aptly hollow William R Moses), but she's not really well cast in a role Christina Ricci could have played in her sleep a few years ago. The best supporting performance comes from Michael Parks as a drawling cop brought into the community by the killing of the strident mother (Chelsea Field), who lingers to watch the fall-out as Stiles replaces Mum as the homemaker only to be sidelined in favour of the au pair who needs a green-card marriage. When the battering and stabbing starts, the film is surprisingly explicit, splattering several distinct types of stage blood around the designer living caricature home.On the DVD: the picture is an anamorphic 1.85:1 print, with Dolby Digital surround-sound. The minimal extras include trailers, filmographies for very few of the principals, and a neat menu. --Kim Newman