The Ghost and the Pop Stars

Direct To Video

"Mother Night" (18s

Nick Nolte plays an American spy whose activities in Nazi Germany during the second World War come back to haunt him in this deeply silly and disappointing movie, based on a novel by Kurt Vonnegut. Director Keith Gordon seems unsure what tone to adopt in a story which veers wildly between absurdist farce and unconvincing tragedy.

Cinema to Video

"Extreme Measures" (15s)

Anyone who's seen Coma, or one of the countless TV movies on the same theme, will know from the first five minutes exactly how everything is going to turn out in this medical conspiracy thriller, and director Michael Apted is experienced enough to keep most of the cogs oiled. But Hugh Grant seems utterly bewildered amidst all the car chases, shoot-outs and fistfights, as if he'd wandered in from the drawing room of a Merchant-Ivory film.

"That Thing You Do!" (12s)

Tom Hanks's likeable, unpretentious comedy, set in 1964, tells the story of a small-town pop group who suddenly find themselves zooming up the hit parade. Hanks, who also wrote the screenplay, gets good performances from his cast of young unknowns in a cheerfully nostalgic portrait of an era when pop stars didn't take drugs, had very little sex, and always wore matching suits.

"The Ghost and the Darkness" (15s

Curiously old-fashioned adventure epic, based on a true story from the end of the last century, telling the story of the man-eating "lions of Tsavo", who killed more than 130 workers building a railway bridge in Kenya within the space of a few months before they were finally killed. Val Kilmer plays the Irish engineer who sets out to kill the man-eaters with the assistance of ace hunter Michael Douglas. While Kilmer's muted performance leaves a vacuum at the centre of the film. Douglas goes wildly over the top.

"Fled" (18s)

Directed by Kevin Hooks, who made the equally predictable but commercially successful Passenger 57, this formulaic buddy movie just goes through the hoops set up by countless predecessors. Laurence Fishburne and Stephen Baldwin are two escaped convicts, manacled together, who are forced to tolerate each other despite their very different personalities in the kind of dumb, raucous entertainment that could be quite acceptable if done with a little wit and humour. There's very little of either on offer here, though.

"In Love And War" (18s)

Director Richard Attenborough's drab offering is supposedly based on the experiences of the 18-year-old Ernest Hemingway in Italy at the end of the first World War. Chris O'Donnell is the wounded young novelist-to-be, recuperating in a sanatorium run by the Red Cross, where he falls in love with an American nurse (Sandra Bullock) eight years his senior. Bullock has a thankless task with her underdeveloped role, and O'Donnell's chipmunk cheerfulness seems more appropriate to a John Hughes-style high school movie.