"Actor: Walter Stahl"

• The Phantom Of The Opera | DVD | (14/10/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  This spectacular retelling of Gaston Leroux's immortal horror tale stars Claude Rains as the masked phantom of the Paris opera house - a crazed composer who schemes to make a beautiful young soprano the star of the opera company and wreak revenge on those who stole his music.

• The Flamingo Kid | DVD | (08/04/2002) from £14.98   |  Saving you £-8.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  As The Flamingo Kid amply demonstrates, there's always room for one more rites of passage film if it's made with care and affection. Garry Marshall's 1984 study of a young Brooklyn poker player who thinks the grass is greener at a Long Island beach club, nails the bad guy, realises he got it wrong and returns to the bosom of his "humble" family certainly satisfies on both counts. It also has a strong cast: Matt Dillon as Jeffrey, whose niggling aspirations create the inevitable barrier between himself and his parents; Richard Crenna as his prospective role model who turns out to have feet of clay; and Hector Elizondo as his bemused father. But Jessica Walter (Clint Eastwood's stalker from hell in Play Misty for Me) almost steals the show as an acid-tongued beach-club wife. If the whole thing lacks the depth and warmth of, say, Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs, it succeeds on its own merits as an homage to a more innocent time when a young man didn't need to stray far from his own tenement block in order to find himself, with the help of a suitably nostalgic early-1960s soundtrack of course. On the DVD: As far as extras go, this is a budget offering. There are detailed actor biographies but precious little on the film itself, apart from the snippet that Richard Crenna earned a Golden Globe award nomination. There is an adequate scene index and, for those who want to study Dillon in detail, a reasonable stills gallery. The picture is presented in standard format, and hardly distinguishable from ordinary VHS or telecast quality, but the stereo audio certainly helps pump out the period soundtrack. --Piers Ford

• Lover's Prayer | DVD | (23/04/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Lover's Prayer is a sweeping tale of an innocent rich boy's (Nick Stahl) infatuation with a beautiful young woman (Kirsten Dunst) who is summering next door. He quickly abandons toys and pastimes for the thrill of her seductive ways. But when he is finally confronted with who she really is and the tangled web she has spun he is forced to become a man and understand that the world is more complicated than he ever suspected. He begins spying on her by day by night and as the truth about her secret scandal is revealed and the identity of her true lover emerges in the summer moonlight he learns through shattered innocence the hardest lessons of life and love.