Latest video: A lot of Kiwi-Anna

By Ewan McDonald

Kiwi banners should be floating from your video store this week. No less than three new releases have a New Zealand connection - two star Anna Paquin and the third is set and filmed in this country by first-time director Niki Caro.

* Paquin and a high school-full of mall rats feature in She's All That, kind of an extended episode of Beverly Hills 90210 which is aimed at, and will be lapped up by, people who love that show.

The "story" has - yep, you guessed it - a Beverly Hills high school sports star (Freddie Prinze Jr, whose dad was the star of a genuinely funny high school comedy) being dumped by the school beauty and deciding to prove his princess-making potential by betting his team-mates that he can change shy and clumsy (Rachael Leigh Cook) into the prom queen.

Yep, you guessed it, they fall for each other, thus proving that even if you're a teenage girl who wears glasses you can have inner beauty and be won by the captain of the first fifteen, or whatever it is, and the beautiful one can turn out to be not so nice inside.

* That's the sort of movie which teenage girls like Paquin often make. But you have to wonder who's guiding her career when our little Oscar-winner turns up as the star of something as unpleasant as Hurly Burly.

Arriving on video before the last Jaffas have hit the floors of the multiplexes, this puts Paquin on the same bill as Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey, Chazz Palminteri, Gary Shandling, Meg Ryan and Robin Wright Penn.

A nasty, tawdry tale of Hollywood life which sees Paquin as jailbait for sleazy moviedom wannabes.

* You are invited to the wedding in Memory and Desire, only the third New Zealand film to be invited to screen in the Cannes competition. It's an indication of the low priority given to Kiwi films, and to arthouse films, that it has taken a year for it to be released on video.

Sayo (Yuri Kinugawa) is a clerk and Keiji (Eugene Nomura) is the man going places in a Tokyo office. He lives with his dominating mother (Yoko Narahashi, Nomura's real mother), a widow who has big plans for her boy.

Well, bigger than Sayo, anyway. So the young couple elope to New Zealand, wed and then Keiji drowns on a west coast beach.

Sayo must follow tradition and return to live with her mother-in-law, who's really got it in for her now. All Sayo wants, however, is to be reunited with her husband.

* My pick is Pleasantville, one of those movies which seem to defy pigeonholing into a neat category like "drama," "romantic comedy," "action" or whatever, but ends up closest to the "satire" shelf.

Two kids from the 90s - Toby Maguire from The Ice Storm as geeky David Parker, Reese Witherspoon as his bratty sister, Jennifer - accidentally slip through the screen into a 50s, black-and-white television programme called Pleasantville, a Donna Reed Show or an Andy Griffith Show, that they've been watching on re-run. They become characters in the show - David becomes Bud, Jennifer becomes Mary Sue.

Soon, some of the locals begin to break out of their showtime routine. Some - notably mum Betty Parker (Joan Allen, who played Maguire's mother in The Ice Storm, too) - break into the sexual revolution a decade earlier than we're always told it happened. Some break out into living colour. That's when the town becomes divided and signs reading "No Coloureds" appear.

As our critic, Russell Baillie, put it: "Pleasantville works as a fizzy and funny populist fantasy. It is recommended you see this rather good film before they try to make a bad television show out of it."

* Office Space turns out to be lightweight, relaxing humour in the form of TV-turned-big-screen-types Jennifer Aniston and Ron Livingston, directed and scripted by Beavis and Butt-head/King of the Hill creator Mike Judge. Livingston is Peter, just about the lowest form of pond life in a computer corporation. Dates with a hypnotist and a waitress, Joanna (Aniston) convince him that life could be more fun if he got himself fired. As if you couldn't guess, the consultants fixing up his firm decide that Peter's relaxed approach makes him management material.

* Okay, so maybe it was the food, but Stanley Tucci's Big Night is high on my personal Top Ten Movies of All Time. Hard act to follow and it's enough to say that his second acting-directing outing, The Impostors, won't quite make that list.

Like Big Night it's a period piece, this time set in 1930s New York. Tucci and his co-star Oliver Platt are actors who (deliberately) resemble the great early movie comedians Laurel and Hardy. But this is the time of the Great Depression and the pair bum money by staging acts which often involve unwitting bystanders.

Chased by one of their "victims" (Alfred Molina), the pair hide in a packing crate on a ship which sails for Paris. You and I know that the bad guy is going to be a passenger on the boat and our lovable heroes will have to go to great lengths to stay out of trouble.

Nice cameos from Woody Allen (a neurotic playwright), Isabella Rossellini (a mysterious former royal) and - best of all - Billy Connolly (gay tennis coach).

* Also out this week: Landgirls, with three city girls sent to a decrepit Dorset family farm to help the Second World War effort, featuring Catherine McCormack (Braveheart), Rachel Weisz (The Mummy), and Anna Friel ... The Acid House, a cheaper and poorer return trip with the Trainspotting crew ... The Hunted, a passable thriller with Harry Hamlin (L.A. Law), a wrecked plane with millions aboard, and a meddling insurance investigator ... Australia's favourite son, Bryan Brown, is On The Border ... Jacqueline Bisset teams with another Aussie, Cameron Daddo, in Witch Hunt ... and Tim Roth, who rarely makes a bum movie, will satisfy his most ardent fans with No Way Out.