Latest video: An eye on the big picture

By Ewan McDonald

Love, war, crime and murky pasts. New versions of all the familiar themes turn up on the rental shelves this week, with Kevin Costner's Message in a Bottle heading a roll-call of big-name, big-budget movies.

After divorce, Theresa (Robin Wright Penn) fills her life with caring for her son, Jason, and working as a researcher at the Chicago Tribune newspaper. She appears dependable and quietly driven, hiding her disappointment at her failed relationship and determined never to be vulnerable again.

Alone on holiday while Jason visits his father, Theresa is walking along a deserted coast when she finds a bottle containing a passionate letter signed "G." She searches for the writer, and finds him: a boatbuilder named Garret Blake (Costner) on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

Since his wife died, Blake has been a loner, his only companion his crotchety father, Dodge (Paul Newman).

Okay, we don't need the throbbing violins and meaningful looks to tell us we're deep into Love Story territory here. (Very deep. This movie runs for more than two hours.)

Snapshot: Costner is wooden, Wright Penn is puppy-dog mournful, Newman is absolutely awesome and the story is soppy.

* And here's Mr Penn's latest, the Pacific war study The Thin Red Line. Well, Sean and just about every other male member of the Union, even if most of them drop in for only a minute or two.

Cinema freaks swoon at the mention of reclusive director Terrence Malick, whose earlier gems, Badlands and Days of Heaven, have raised him to the status of legend. Here he presents Hollywood's second attempt at James Jones' novel, depicting the unopposed landing of Charlie Company on Japanese-occupied Guadalcanal, American Army troops replacing battle-weary Marines, and follows their long attempt to take a hilltop bristling with machine-gun posts.

This is not so much a war story as a collection of incidents. The ensemble includes such names as George Clooney, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack, Ben Chaplin, but many come and go so quickly that you'll need the pause/rewind buttons to find them. The main act is Nick Nolte, superb as the obsessive commander.

Snapshot: "Only a fool would deny that it abounds in sublime moments. The Thin Red Line is an important and mesmerising film. But it has to be adjudged a magnificent failure," wrote our critic Peter Calder.

* Nicolas Cage is one of the rare and precious breed of actor who can straddle any style from romantic comedy to muscled-up action hero, with quite a few stops in between. Sadly, this ability has led him to take on a few jobs that he'd have been better advised to pass on.

Such as 8mm. A tycoon's widow finds a snuff movie in her dead husband's safe and hires private eye Tom Welles to find out what happened to the girl in the film, without involving the cops.

His guide through this dirty underworld to the runaway teenager is Max California (Joaquin Phoenix), a smart-talking clerk in a porn store. Back at home, just to give this a semblance of respectability, Welles' family life is crumbling.

Snapshot: at least Boogie Nights didn't, like, y'know, show all the pictures ...

* Oprah Winfrey burst into notice in The Color Purple, Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Alice Walker's emotional tale of a black woman's life and hard times in the Old South. Its inspirational/aspirational themes have set the tone for much of Oprah's career.

Many will be quick to point out similarities in the not-so-dearly Beloved, her pet project for more than a decade since Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel appeared.

She hired good help, too: director Jonathan Demme (Oscar winner for The Silence of the Lambs and the moving Philadelphia), and actors Danny Glover and the veteran Beah Richards.

Sethe (Winfrey) is a runaway slave struggling to carve out an existence with her daughter (Kimberley Elise) in Ohio, 1873. However, she is tormented by ghosts from her past.

When her old friend Paul D (Glover) arrives they lay some ghosts to rest - until Beloved (Thandie Newton) turns up to revive them.

Snapshot: three hours of the spiritual segment of Oprah at one sitting? Get with the programme!

* Also out: High Art (Ally Sheedy), Woundings (Guy Pearce), Bad As I Wanna Be (Dennis Rodman), Suicide Kings (Christopher Walken, Dennis Leary), Passing Glory (basketball story produced by Magic Johnson).

* Warm fuzzies: Eddie Murphy's version of Dr Doolittle is on sale now and to mark the occasion Roadshow is giving $1 from each copy sold to the RSPCA.