Latest video: Stars in your eyes

By Ewan McDonald

More stars than you can shake a remote at in this week's big video release ... Playing By Heart interweaves the stories of almost a dozen char-acters, all couples of one sort or another.

There is a mother (Ellen Burstyn) whose son (Jay Mohr) is dying of Aids, who touch one another through long conver-sations at his bedside. Joan (Angelina Jolie) is a clubber who finally meets a guy she likes, Keenan (Ryan Phillippe), and can't understand why he plays games with her.

Paul and Hannah (Sean Connery and Gena Rowlands) are coming up to their 40th wedding anniversary when a cloud crosses their marriage. Meredith (Gillian Anderson) is a neurotic theatre director starting to date an architect, Trent (Jon Stewart).

Gracie (Madeleine Stowe) meets her lover, Roger (Anthony Edwards), in hotel rooms and then goes home to her cold husband, Hugh (Dennis Quaid). Hugh has a different side, shown in relationships with Patricia Clarkson, Nastassja Kinski and a drag queen (Alec Mapa), who says he's 29, "and those are real years, not Heather Locklear years."

The film-makers ask reviewers not to say how the movie ends. Fair enough: I'll just say that all those stars and all those stories add up to a likeable evening's entertainment but sometimes, you don't, you know, really connect with it.

* In A Cool Dry Place, it's decision time for a handsome young lawyer (Vince Vaughn, Jurassic Park: The Lost World, Swingers) when he's caught in a romantic triangle and forced to choose between his estranged wife (Monica Potter, Patch Adams, Con Air) and the girlfriend (Joey Lauren Adams, Big Daddy, Chasing Amy) who wants him to herself.

* Idle Hands, as one American critic put it rather neatly, "samples other teen horror movies like a video DJ with a tape deck, exhibiting high spirits and a crazed comic energy." The film involves the adventures of Anton (Devon Sawa), a Gen X-er who spends all his time hanging out with his mates in their basement flat and is so out of it that he doesn't notice for a few days that his parents are dead - the victims of an evil killer hand that writes "I'm under the bed" on the ceiling of their bedroom. It is, too, and it possesses Anton.

Anton finally rids himself of the hand in the kitchen. His pals Mick (Seth Green) and Pnub (Elden Henson) have worse luck. Mick is taken out by a beer bottle, which remains embedded in his skull for the rest of the movie. Pnub loses his head and carries it around until Anton figures out how to re-attach it to his shoulders. Both of them continue through the film as the living dead while Anton tries to put his finger on just what's gone wrong.

Relatively harmless horror-fun for teenage boys.

* Also out this week: Absence of the Good (thriller); The Mating Habits of Earthbound Humans (comedy); Young Indiana Jones: The Phantom Train (action adventure); Roswell: The Aliens Attack (sci-fi thriller).