It's hard to know who thought it would be a good idea to make a live-action version of Disney's animated classic. The one bright notion anyone had was casting Glenn Close as Disney Übervillainess Cruella de Vil; her flashing eyes and angular features are a perfect match and do credit to what is one of the most indelible animated characters Disney has ever created. The story remains essentially the ...

Manufacturer: Walt Disney Home Video
Starring: Glenn Close, Jeff Daniels, Joely Richardson, Joan Plowright, Hugh Laurie
Directed By: Stephen Herek

Manufacturer: Paramount Home Video

Manufacturer: Abbey Home Media
Starring: Cam Clarke, Barry Gordon, Rob Paulsen, Renae Jacobs, Jim Cummings

This direct-to-video sequel (the second) to The Land Before Time suffers from less ambitious animation, but the story is superior to the last film. This time, a meteorite has cut off the water supply to the Great Valley, causing inhabitants to bicker and bully among themselves. By contrast, Littlefoot and his friends are getting along just fine, and they leave the valley to go in search of ...

Manufacturer: Universal Pictures UK
Starring: Scott McAfee, Candace Hutson, Heather Hogan, Jeff Bennett, Rob Paulsen
Directed By: Roy Allen Smith

Littlefoot and the gang meet a shy newcomer, Ali, but the pleasantries stop there. There's a dire environmental theme to this third sequel in the series, in which the world's weather changes beyond the Great Valley, and what had been dry land is now a "land of mists". The shift brings new creatures who push out older inhabitants, and Littlefoot sees these radical changes for himself when he has to ...

Manufacturer: Universal Pictures UK
Starring: John Ingle, Candace Hutson, Heather Hogan, Rob Paulsen, Jeff Bennett
Directed By: Roy Allen Smith

For better or worse, David Mamet's hit play Sexual Perversity in Chicago is watered down into this romantic comedy about a couple (played by Rob Lowe and Demi Moore) who get together and then fall apart due to Lowe's character's inability to commit. Jim Belushi is on hand as the gratuitously swinish best friend who looks at women as meat, and Elizabeth Perkins is entertainingly arch as ...

Manufacturer: 4 Front Video
Starring: Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, James Belushi, Elizabeth Perkins, George DiCenzo
Directed By: Edward Zwick

And Now for Something Completely Different, Monty Python's first feature, is a reworking of their best skits from the first two seasons of the TV series. Originally made for the US market (where the show had yet to be aired), it was shot on film outside the usual studio sets ("Nudge Nudge", for example, is set in a tavern filled with passers-by). The writing and performances are fine and ...

Manufacturer: 4 Front Video
Starring: John Cleese, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle
Directed By: Ian MacNaughton

Holy camp site, Batman! After a fabulously successful season on TV, the campy comic book adventure hit the big screen, complete with painful puns, outrageous supervillains, and fights punctuated with word balloons sporting such onomatopoeic syllables as "Pow!", "Thud!", and "Blammo!" Adam West's wooden Batman is the cowled vigilante alter ego of straight-arrow millionaire Bruce Wayne and Bruce ...

Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
Starring: Adam West, Burt Ward, Lee Meriwether, Cesar Romero, Burgess Meredith
Directed By: Leslie H. Martinson

Garry Marshall's 1988 drama about a 30-year friendship between two women, one wealthy (Barbara Hershey) and the other (Bette Midler) seeking her fortune in show business, is well written (based on the novel by Iris Rainer Dart) and nicely textured in its contrast between the characters' separate destinies. When Hershey becomes ill with cancer, the film takes a predictably sentimental course, yet ...

Manufacturer: Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainm
Starring: Bette Midler, Barbara Hershey, John Heard, Spalding Gray, Lainie Kazan
Directed By: Garry Marshall

Manufacturer: Paramount Home Entertainment
Starring: Eddie Murphy, Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, Jürgen Prochnow, Ronny Cox
Directed By: Tony Scott