RECORDED DELIVERY

A critical guide to the week's videos

Liese Spencer
Friday 16 May 1997 18:02 EDT
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Michael Collins (15) Warner Home Video, rental, 23 May.

Neil Jordan's passionate biopic (above) of the Irish freedom fighter distorts the facts to produce a stirring piece of cinematic rhetoric. With a leonine Liam Neeson on ferocious form in the tub-thumping central role, a well-cast Alan Rickman as the pragmatic Eamon De Valera and Charles Dance playing the pantomime villain - as an unredeemably nasty Black-and- Tan English baddie. Less blind hagiography than a universal tale of spiritual victory over oppression.

Dragonheart (PG) CIC, rental, 23 May. History is rewritten to a different agenda in this SFX storybook adventure, which sees Dennis Quaid's questing knight thoroughly upstaged by an animatronic dragon. Sean Connery voices the world's last remaining dragon, accompanying Quaid on his mission to overthrow tyrant David Thewlis (in another of his "ugly equals bad" Hollywood roles) and liberate the peasants from their enslavement to hokey medievalism.

Fear (18) CIC, rental, 23 May. Risible teenage Fatal Attraction with (Marky) Mark Wahlberg as an adolescent psycho and Reese Witherspoon as the girl who realises too late that she's dating death. Rubbish.

Jingle All the Way (12) Fox Guild, rental, 23 May. Arnold Schwarzenegger proves once and for all that his Teutonic grimace, while great for cyborgs, doesn't fit this kind of family drama. The unseasonal action sees his desperate dad racing to buy the Buzz Lightyear-like toy to win the love of his child, but the film's saccharine satire capsizes under the weight of it's hard-headed hypocrisy.

The Deer Hunter (18) Warner Home Video, retail, pounds 12.99, 19 May. Robert de Niro, Christopher Walken and John Savage star in Michael Cimino's masterpiece about the brutality and psychological repercussions of the Vietnam War.

The Mission (PG) Warner Home Video, retail, pounds 12.99, 19 May. Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons star as warring missionaries in Roland Joffe's visually stunning 18th-century colonial drama set in South America.

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