Direct to video
Directed by former thirtysomething star Peter Horton, The Cure is a low-key, well-judged drama about the friendship between two 11-year-old boys, one of whom has AIDS. Horton gets good performances from his young co-stars, Brad Renfro (The Client) and Joseph Mazzello (Jurassic Park), and from Annabella Sciorra as the dying boy's mother. It's the kind of thing that could descend into pure saccharine in the wrong hands, but most of the worst pitfalls are avoided.
It's something of a mystery why magic realism, which seems to have such cinematic potential, transfers so badly from page to screen. Debutant director Clare Peploe's Rough Magic attempts the trick with mixed results. Bridget Fonda and Russell Crowe star in this adaptation of James Hadley Chase's novel Miss Shumway Waves A Wand, with Fonda playing a young woman who flees to Mexico after witnessing a killing, only to become embroiled in ancient shamanic magic.
Two adaptations of H.E. Bates novels provide quiet entertainment for those who like their movies in a Merchant-Ivory style. Feast of July stars Embeth Davidtz as a "fallen woman" who finds shelter in the home of Tom Bell and Gemma Jones, but wreaks havoc with the emotions of the couple's three sons. In A Month By The Lake, Vanessa Redgrave, Edward Fox and Uma Thurman form the three points of a romantic triangle which unfolds by an Italian lakeside during the spring of 1937.
Cinema to video
Madonna and Frances McDormand may be the front-runners for this year's Best Actress Oscar, but don't rule out Brenda Blethyn who this week won the Golden Globe for Best Actress (Drama) for her performance in Mike Leigh's wonderful Secrets And Lies, released on video this month. Blethyn plays a woman meeting her grown-up black daughter (Marianne Jean Baptiste) for the first time in Leigh's film, which didn't do very impressive business in the cinemas here, but shouldn't be missed now.
In contrast to Leigh's perceptive intimacy, Brian De Palma relies on bludgeoning set pieces and plot contortions in Mission Impossible. One of the first of last year's summer blockbusters to hit the video shelves. In truth, it's not that impressive, with a confused and unconvincing plot not improved by De Palma's bludgeoning style. If you want wham-bam entertainment, the current video chart-topper The Rock is a much better bet, with Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage blowing their way into Alcatraz to take on renegade soldier Ed Harris.
If boys with toys are not to your taste, there's always The Truth About Cats And Dogs, a female reworking of Cyrano De Bergerac, with Janeane Garofalo as the supposedly plain girl who uses the beautiful Uma Thurman to woo object of desire Ben Chaplin. The trouble is that Garofalo herself is actually quite attractive. How To Make An American Quilt, one of the better "chick flicks" released during last year's summer of sport, makes up in acting power for what it lacks in narrative, with good performances from Winona Ryder, Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Kate Nelligan, Alfre Woodard, and Maya Angelou on board, competently directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse.
Competence is not much in evidence in Stephen Frears's disastrous Mary Reilly, starring Julia Roberts as the housekeeper of John Malkovich's Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde, proving that atmospheric sets and design can't make up for bad storytelling. The same is true of Diabolique, a witless remake of Henri Georges Clouzot's 1954 thriller starring Sharon Stone, Isabelle Adjani and Chazz Palminteri.
Bigas Luna's The Tit And The Moon continues the exploration of male sexual fantasy evident in the Spanish director's earlier films, Jamon, Jamon and Golden Balls, but the story of a young boy's sexual obsession with a circus performer is considerably less effective.
Sell-through
Michelle Pfeiffer does her best, but it's difficult to believe in her as a dowdy high school teacher in Dangerous Minds, the latest in a long line of "teacher-saves-ghetto-pupils" uplifting dramas, which always seem to be based on improbable true stories. Pfeiffer grabs her class's attention with the assistance of the poetry of Dylan Thomas, but the movie is best known for its soundtrack, featuring Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise.
Keanu Reeves looks pretty, but not much else in A Walk In The Clouds, in which he plays a GI who passes himself off as the husband of a young woman (Altana Sanchez-Gijon) in order to break the news, of her, pregnancy to her father (Anthony Quinn, going wildly over the top). Former NYPD Blue star David Caruso is a district attorney drawn, into a steamy triangular relationship with Linda Fiorentino and Chazz Palminteri in Jade, a typically seedy offering from screen-writer Joe Eszterhas (Basic Instinct, Showgirls), and there's more flesh on view in, The Lover, the story of an affair between a middle-aged Chinese man and a teenage girl, played by Jane March, whose performance earned her the memorable tabloid sobriquet of the Sinner from Pinner.
