Soderbergh and videotape

Direct to video

HAVING conquered Cannes with his Palme D'Or winning first feature, Sex, lies & videotape, Steven Soderbergh's career has been on a downhill slope ever since. His fourth feature, The Underneath (15s) is his third in a row - after Kafka and the underrated King of the Hill to go straight to video here. Soderbergh reunites with Peter Gallagher, one of the stars of his debut film, in The Underneath, a contemporary remake of Robert Siodmak's 1949 film noir, Criss Cross.

Cutting in and out of three time frames, Soderbergh's version is a moody and quite involving movie featuring Gallagher in the Burt Lancaster role, as an habitual gambler planning a heist. This visually striking film also features Elisabeth Shue, Paul Dooley, Anjanette Comer, and resembling a your Christopher Walken in both looks and acting style, the impressive William Fincher.

A capable cast led by Aidan Quinn, Kate Beckinsale and Anthony Andrews is left mostly to their own devices in Lewis Gilbert's rambling and unconvincing ghost movie, Haunted (15s), based on a James Herbert novel. A prologue set in 1905 shows the accidental death of a young girl; 23 years later, her twin brother (Quinn), is still haunted by the experience. A parapsychologist who has published a book debunking psychic phenomena, he is drawn to a remote house populated by mysterious characters. There is a distinctly dated feel to this tired and tiresome yarn, despite the best efforts of Quinn, in particular.

Cinema to video

DOING on video rental release today, Chris Noonan's Babe (Gen) was the biggest surprise hit at the international box office last year and went on to receive seven Oscar nominations. Oozing with wit, charm and invention, the gem of a movie charts the progress of the endearing piglet who wants to become a sheepdog. Playing the kindly farmer who senses something special in Babe, James Cromwell heads the human cast. The result is delightful entertainment for all ages and rewards multiple viewing more than most movies.

In complete contrast is the magnificent Seven (18s), David Fincher's moody, richly symbolic and creepily unpredictable psychological thriller which makes riveting and unsettling viewing. Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman play detectives on the trail of a brutal serial killer whose motif is based on the seven deadly sins. Gwyneth Paltrow and Kevin Spacey also feature in the strong cast. Be advised that some viewers may find this film very disturbing.

Devil in a Blue Dress (15s) is Carl Franklin's intriguing and strongly atmospheric film based on Walter Mosely's novel set in Los Angeles in the late 1940s. It features Denzel Washington at his most charismatic as Easy Rawlins, a decorated war veteran drawn into a murky web of murder, blackmail and corruption. The fine jazz and blues soundtrack features, among others, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, T Bone Walker and Memphis Slim.

Theatre director Nancy Meckler makes her cinema debut with Sister, My Sister (15s), an expertly acted and claustrophobic drama set in a French provincial town in 1932, with Julie Walters as the domineering Madame Danzard, Sophie Thursfield as her awkward daughter and Joely Richardson as their orderly maid. Jodhi May plays the maid's sister whose arrival disturbs their upstairs downstairs world.

The versatile young French actor, writer, editor and film maker, Mathieu Kassovitz, was named best director at Cannes last year for La Haine (15s). This provocative picture, shot in arresting black and white images, follows 24 hours in the lives of three volatile, unemployed young men from a Paris housing project after a friend of theirs, a 16 year old Arab boy, has been beaten senseless by police during interrogation. On screen time checks heighten the developing tension in this vibrant and gripping film.

La Haine is also available on widescreen, as is the much more conventional French film The Horseman on the Roof (15s), Jean Paul Rappeneau's handsome but laboured romantic, Swashbuckling adventure, set in the 19th century with Juliette Binoche being escorted through cholera ridden Provence by Olivier Martinez. From Hong Kong, Chunking Express (15s) - which is also available for retail - recounts dual stories of Kowloon policemen who have been dropped by their girlfriends. Director Wong Kar-wai emerges as a virtuoso stylist with this endearing and totally unpredictable movie full of intoxicating delights.

A Walk in the Clouds (PG), directed by Al fonso Arau (who made Like Water For Chocolate), is a ravishingly lit romantic fantasy, set in the 1940s. It stars Keanu Reeves as a decorated soldier who, returning home from the war, has a chance encounter with a pregnant young woman (Aitana Sanchez Gijon) and agrees to pose as her husband to help her face her gruff father (Giancarlo Gianini). Winner of the best film award at the Sundance festival last year, The Brothers McMullen (15s), marks a notable debut for its writer director, Ed Burns, who also stars in it with Mike McGlone and Jack Mulcahy, as Irish American brothers with different attitudes to the problems in their sex lives. This appealing low budget picture gets by on the strength of its wry, witty screenplay and its principal cast, especially Burns himself.

Another low key, notably well acted American independent production, Heavy (15s) is directed by James Mangold and set in a remote truck stop bar where an overweight chef (Pruitt Taylor Vince) works for his domineering mother (Shelley Winters) and falls for a new, young waitress (the diverting Liv Tyler). Deborah Harry and Evan Dando are in it, too.

The Basketball Diaries (18s) is Scott Kalvert's updated movie of poet Jim Carroll's dated autobiographical writings and it is elevated by the gifted Leonardo DiCaprio as Carroll, the Catholic boy descending into drug addiction. Mark Wahlberg and Lorraine Bracco also feature.

At the bottom of this month's video barrel is the wretched Jade (18s) - David Caruso, Linda Fiorentino and Chazz Palminteri are left stranded by a vapid and illogical screenplay in William Friedkin's tiresome thriller of a lawyer defending his wife when she is suspected of murder.

Sell-through video

RECOMMENDED recent titles include Before Sunrise, Bullets Over Broadway, Heavenly Creatures, Eat Drink Man Woman, Ed Wood, Circle of Friends, The Madness of King George and from Iran, The White Balloon and The Runner. Notable films of an older vintage include Battleship Potemkin, the 1939 Stagecoach, To Catch a Thief Dr Strangelove, The Deer Hunter and, on widescreen for the first time, Ran and Tess.