Video Releases

The Honest Courtesan

Directed by Marshall Herkowitz Starring Catherine McCormack, Rufus Sewell, Jacqueline Bisset

This historical romance, set amongst the courtesans and nobility of 16th century Venice, clearly aspires to the feminist revisionism of many other recent costume dramas, but is too sanitised and simpleminded to offer anything more than vapidities about the place of women in a pre-modern society. McCormack plays Veronica, a young woman prevented from marrying the man she loves (Sewell) and inducted instead into the ranks of the high-class prostitutes who tend to the sexual needs of the city's aristocracy. The clunky dialogue is interspersed with slow-motion, sun-dappled sequences which wouldn't look out of place in a 1970s shampoo commercial.

Arlington Road

Directed by Mark Pellington Starring Jeff Bridges, Tim Robbins, Joan Cusack

ATTEMPTING to marry the political conspiracy thriller with the suburban nightmare genre, Arlington Road falls uneasily between two stools - the dynamics of the thriller are too obvious, while the suburban surrealism sits uneasily with the whodunit plot. The uneasiness is reinforced by the performances - Bridges is watchable as ever, but his sympathetic naturalism is at odds with the cartoonishness of Cusack and Robbins, who seems to be reprising his overrated portrayal of another right-wing nasty in Bob Roberts. Within a few minutes, most viewers will have guessed what this pair are up to, helped along by some heavy hints.

The Faculty

Directed by Robert Rodriguez Starring Elijah Wood, Piper Laurie, Robert Patrick

IT MUST have seemed like an inspired idea to unite Scream writer Kevin Williamson with Rodriguez, director of such cartoonish, knowing fare as From Dusk Till Dawn, and, as you'd expect, The Faculty is full of references to trash classics of the past. Set in an Ohio high school, the tongue-in-cheek plot concerns an alien takeover of the bodies of the staff and pupils, resisted only by a few of the school's outcasts and dropouts, led by loner Elijah Wood. Along the way, we get some so-so special effects, and the usual Williamson style of characters discoursing learnedly on the genre plot they're enacting. It's all a bit too bland for its own good, and lacks the wit or energy of previous excursions into similar terrain.