Latest video: The ODD couple

By Ewan McDonald

ODD COUPLES - the movies are full of 'em. Not just the Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon kind, either. Teaming just about anyone with Danny DeVito is going to lead to an odd-couple movie, unless it's Rhea Perlman, his wife since they played against one another in Taxi.

In Living Out Loud, out on video this week, his other half is Holly Hunter.

As the movie opens, Judith (Hunter) is breaking up with her doctor husband of 15 years (Martin Donovan), who's been cheating on her.

She meets Pat (DeVito), the lift operator (remember those?) in her Fifth Ave apartment building, whose wife has thrown him out because of his gambling debts and a whole lot more, and whose daughter is dying.

They appear to have nothing in common until they start talking.

A third character enters their lives: Liz Bailey (Queen Latifah), a torch singer in a nightclub where Judith goes to hide from her feelings, and the odd couple becomes a kind of odd treble.

Based on two short stories by Chekhov, Living Out Loud is written and directed by Richard LaGravenese (A Little Princess, The Bridges of Madison County, Beloved), which may sound like another odd couple in itself. But with the help of two outstanding actors he has produced an excellent, mature work which recognises what so few Hollywood productions do: that there are far more happy endings in the movies that there are in real life.

* True confession: I think Silence of the Lambs is the most over-rated movie of all time, and the reason I wasn't scared out of my seat was that I was too busy falling out of it, laughing at the preposterous concept and overwrought acting.

The last thing I'd have expected (apart from a remake which is now in doubt because even Jodie Foster seems to realise that is a really stupid idea) was that Anthony Hopkins would go there again.

Sadly he does, in Instinct, where he plays Ethan Powell, an anthropologist who went missing in 1994 in an African jungle and surfaced two years later while murdering two rangers and injuring three others. After a year in chains, he's returned to the United States and locked up in a brutal psycho ward.

His interrogation is to be conducted by an eminent psychiatrist (Donald Sutherland), but for some reason he assigns the weirdo to Theo Caulder (Cuba Gooding jun), a student just completing his final year who wants to write a bestseller about him. Hey, that's American medical ethics for ya.

Powell has been mute since the murders, but Caulder thinks he can get him to talk which, of course, he does, because you wouldn't play that much money for that marvellous voice and not use it.

From here on in, all you need to know is that this is a Hollywood blockbuster - which means that it has not one but about four happy endings.

* Jimeoin has been a regular visitor to Auckland's annual comedy festival and his first movie has been made welcome at our box offices in recent months.

In The Craic, the transplanted Irish comedian, who wrote the script, and his old Belfast mate, Alan McKee, play Fergus and Wesley, who are on the run around Australia from Britain's SAS and the Aussie immigration authorities.

Part standup routine, part travelogue (in a football-team-on-tour kind of way), Jimeoin finds the big screen is too large for his talents.