DIRECT TO VIDEO

An Oscar nominee this week for Leaving Las Vegas, Nicolas Cage gives his most low key performance to date in Hugh Wilson's Guarding Tess (12), in which Cage plays the patient bodyguard assigned to the widow of a former US president. Shirley MacLaine on good form plays her as a cantankerous and demanding woman who's secretly lonely in this modest and quite amiable movie which registers as a cross between Driving Miss Daisy and The Bodyguard.

The slew of new US independents on the market include new comer C.M. Talkington's energetic chase movie, Love And A .45 (18), which follows a similar narrative route to Natural Born Killers but with less emphasis on the violence and a substantially smaller budget. Gil Bellows (the young prisoner in The Shawshank Redemption) and Renee Zellwegger are impressive as the armed young lovers on the run, and Peter Fonda has a cameo as an eccentric eternal hippie.

Backdraft screenwriter Gregory Widen makes an inauspicious directing debut with The Prophecy (18), featuring Elias Koteas as a man who pulls out of the priesthood during his ordination; years later, working as a homicide detective on a grisly murder case, he finds himself caught up in a war between good and bad angels. Less compelling than the average XFiles episode, this ponderous and pretentious movie only comes to life with the belated arrival of reliable Christopher Walken as the Angel Gabriel. The underused cast also includes Virgina Madsen, Viggo Mortensen, Amanda Plummer and the ubiquitous Eric Stoltz.

First time director Paul Warner falls flat on his face with the tedious and self conscious Fall Time (18), set in a smalltown America in the 1950s with mannered Mickey Rourke and bored Stephen Baldwin giving a hard time to inane younger men.

CINEMA TO VIDEO

The best movie I saw in the cinema last year, Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects (18) is a very clever, imaginative and intricately plotted thriller tantalisingly revealed in flashbacks. The title refers to five well known criminals rounded up in an NYPD investigation: this proves a big mistake when the crooks are brought together overnight in the same cell, they get to know each other and combine their criminal skills for a series of precisely planned heists.

This rich, teasing, and fascinating movie is ingeniously structured and highly original. Riveting all the way from its arresting opening to its final resolution, it regularly confounds the viewer as it swerves around and away from the conventions of the genre. The razor sharp screenplay deservedly has secured an Oscar nomination for Christopher McQuarrie, and Singer elicits bravura performances from an exemplary ensemble cast - notably from Gabriel Byrne, Benicio del Toro and Kevin Spacey.

Gritty pulp fiction set in present day New York, Barbet Schroeder's thriller, Kiss Of Death (18), features David Caruso as an edgy ex convict caught in a dangerous tug of war between the law - who want his inside knowledge - and the criminals - who demand his silence. Nicolas Cage is outstanding in a very good cast that also includes Samuel L. Jackson, Helen Hunt and Michael Rapaport.

Nobody's Fool (15), Robert Benton's gentle, witty and wholly en grossing film, set in a small town in upstate New York, exhibits a genuine affection for its characters. They are played by a fine cast, especially Paul Newman, droll and zesty as a 60 year old construction worker with no steady work and, in her penultimate role, the late Jessica Tandy.

Released next Wednesday, John Boorman's accomplished Beyond Rangoon (12) is set in 1988 when an American doctor (Patricia Arquette), traumatised by the murder of her husband and young son, goes on holiday to Burma and gets caught up in the protests against the country's military dictatorship. The film is undermined by the underwritten role of the doctor and by Arquette's performance.

Forget Paris (12) is an amiable picture of four eventful years in the marriage of unlikely lovers played by Billy Crystal (who also directed and co wrote the film) and Debra Winger. Peppered with sharp one liners and featuring a solid supporting cast, the movie suffers when it nosedives into sentimentality.

Pick of the new foreign language releases is Nikita Mikhalkov's Oscar winning Russian film, Burnt By The Sun (15). Meanwhile staggeringly impressive production design and special effects cannot rescue Jean Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's eerie but laboured The City Of Lost Children (15) from being a triumph of form over content.

The set pieces are also the raison d'etre of the contrived Die Hard With A Vengeance (15), which goes on video release on Tuesday. Bruce Willis's third screen outing as the unorthodox detective, John McClane, features Willis and Samuel L. Jackson as reluctant partners against a sneering adversary played by Jeremy Irons. Ghost director Jerry Zucker tackles the Arthurian legend as a romantic moral tale in the overstretched First Knight (PG) which is centred on an emotional triangle involving Arthur (Sean Connery), Lancelot (Richard Gere) and Guinevere (Julia Ormond).

Set in 1950s America, Fred Schepisi's disappointingly slight romantic comedy, I.Q. (U), features Walter Matthau as Albert Einstein, engineering a love affair between his niece (Meg Ryan) and a car mechanic (Tim Robbins). And Congo (12), Frank Marshall's lumbering and wearisomely contrived film of Michael Crichton's novel, deals with an expedition deep into the darkest region of the Congo.

SELL THROUGH:

Look out for Bryan Singer's modest but promising first feature, Public Access; Denys Arcand's underrated Love And Human Remains; and Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands (in widescreen), and Benny & Joon. Older movies available include. William Wyler's 1953 Roman Holiday, Michelangelo Antonioni's 1960 L'Avventura and Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 Romeo And Juliet.

With the Brit Awards coming up on Monday night, VCID has released Brit Awards 96, a 90 minute compilation of 25 promos featuring, among others, Oasis, Blur, Supergrass, Tricky, Black Grape, Ash, Cast and Coolio.

And next Friday, Oliver Stone's infamous Natural Born Killers goes on sell through release in Britain and Northern Ireland. The film remains banned in the Republic until 2001.