DVD round-up 4: DEAR FRANKIE****

Talented British actress Emily Mortimer shows her full range in the challenging role of Lizzie, a single mother who tries to protect her son Frankie from the grim horror of an abusive father. She does this by telling him that his dad's actually a gallant merchant seaman. When Frankie works out that his dad's ship is about to dock in his home town, Frankie naturally expects a visit. In desperation, Lizzie hires a stranger, played by Gerard "This is Sparta" Butler, to pretend to be the kid's dad for the weekend.

It's an unreal premise, but the wonder of Andrea Gibb's intelligent and sensitive script is that it throws up all sorts of real emotional problems. Lizzie and the stranger are attracted to each other, but this is threatening to a woman so used to protecting her son and herself from any new powerful influence. It is also testament to director/DP Shona Auerbach that she manages to coax such powerful performances from her cast.

DEAR FRANKIE played Cannes, Edinburgh and Toronto 2004 and went on global release in 2005. It is available on DVD.

DVD round-up 3: NINA'S HEAVENLY DELIGHTS*

It says a lot for the advance and acceptance of the gay rights cause that we can now have queer cinema that's as formualic, trite, saccharine and basically piss-poor as your average Richard Curtis flick. The Nina of the title is an Asian twenty-something lesbian who left her family back in Glasgow. She returns for her father's funeral to learn that he gambled away the family restaurent. Her only hope is to win a televised national cooking contest. The movie wears its PC credentials on its sleeve: there's an Asian kid-sister who yearns to be a highland dancer, a Bollywood-aspirant transvestite, and of course the central Asian-Scottish lesbian love affair. The dialogue and love scenes are stilted and awkward, the humour weak and sporadic, and the denouement as ridiculous as that of NOTTING HILL. The acting - from a largely unknown cast of Brits - is uniformly wooden. The most shocking thing is that this glib rom-com was penned by Andrea Gibb, the writer behind the infinitely more challenging and mature Scottish drama, DEAR FRANKIE.

NINA'S HEAVENLY DELIGHTS opened in the UK in November 2006 and opens in the US in November 2007. It is available on DVD.