Artisan DVDs Under $10

Alice in Wonderland

This is an impressive-looking version of Lewis Carroll's story originally produced for NBC-TV. Dreading a singing recital at her parents' lavish home, Alice falls into a strange world in pursuit of a large White Rabbit. The talented child actor Tina Majorino (Corrina, Corrina) plays Alice with all the good graces but mostly wanders through the story unquestioningly. Carroll's tale of whimsical, illogical adventures is a field day for designers Roger Hall and Alan Tomkins, costumer Charles Knode, Jim Henson's Creature Shop, and director Nick Willing (Photographing Fairies. Influenced by Time Bandits and Labyrinth (the latter also designed by the Henson company), the film has a splendid array of effects, many dealing with multiple perspectives as Alice constantly changes sizes. The highlight is Whoopi Goldberg as the Cheshire Cat, a seamless mix of cat and comic. Martin Short as the Hatter and Mirandra Richardson as the Queen of Hearts seem to be having the times of their lives. This is not the definitive version of Carroll's tale, and, like the popular Disney animated version, combines some elements of Carroll's sequel, Through the Looking Glass. It is perhaps better viewing for the fan that has seen another version of the tale or read the book. --Doug Thomas

Capricorn One

Thanks to repeated showings on cable television and home video, this speculative thriller has built quite a loyal following since its release in 1978. The provocative "what if?" scenario still packs a punch, even if it is not always believable. James Brolin, Sam Waterston, and O.J. Simpson star as three astronauts who agree to spare the government embarrassment by faking their historic landing on Mars after their spacecraft is determined to be unsafe for blastoff. When a scheming mission controller (Hal Holbrook) plots to kill the astronauts in a staged capsule fire, the trio embarks on a dangerous mission to expose the truth. Elliott Gould costars as the journalist determined to crack the conspiracy, and director Peter Hyams turns up the tension with an exciting chase sequence involving Telly Savalas as an eccentric barnstormer who comes to Gould's aid. --Jeff Shannon

The Punisher

First, a few facts. Dolph Lundgren expresses emotions ranging from stoic to, well, really stoic. There are holes in the story large enough to pilot the Exxon Valdez through without spilling a drop. And the film is littered with action movie clichés. But none of this matters. The Punisher succeeds because it stays true to its origins, the Marvel comic of the same name. Studio-engineered films such as Batman never quite capture the mixture of loyalty and betrayal, justice and revenge, moral ambiguity and emotional truth that are the hallmarks of the graphic novel. Films such as Darkman do. So does The Punisher. Lundgren plays Frank Castle, a dedicated policeman whose family was wiped out in a mob hit. He went underground (literally) and, as the Punisher, has been exacting his revenge, killing 125 mobsters in the past five years. But when the yakuza (Japanese Mafia) moves in on the mob's territory and kidnaps their children, it's up to the Punisher to rescue the kids. The action blazes, Lundgren (a former full-contact karate champ) moves with feral grace, the production design is a pleasure to watch, and director Mark Goldblatt (whose credits as editor include such big films as Starship Troopers and True Lies) has a clean, efficient style. --Geof Miller

One Man's Justice

Critical Care

Basic Instinct

The take-no-prisoners sex thriller from 1992 now stands as a milestone in the career of screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, but in the hands of director Paul Verhoeven Basic Instinct is an undeniably stylish and provocative study of obsession. In the role that made her a star (and showed the audience a little more skin than she intended), Sharon Stone plays the cleverly manipulative novelist Catherine Tramell who snares San Francisco detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) with her insatiable sexual appetite during the investigation of her boyfriend's murder. Tramell is the prime suspect, but the plot twists and turns until Curran is trapped in a dangerous cycle of dead ends and unsolved murders, never sure if Tramell is committing the crimes or if it is some other, unknown suspect. With a plot that keeps viewers guessing, Basic Instinct is the work of a director who is clearly in his element. --Jeff Shannon

The Jazz Singer

Not much jazz spoken in this 1980 version of the Jolson classic, directed by Richard Fleischer (The Vikings) and starring a very tentative Neil Diamond as a cantor's son who would rather sing commercially than in a synagogue. The soundtrack is tedious, the portrait of L.A.'s music industry preposterous, and Diamond (despite his talents as a singer-songwriter in the real world) can't help but look like a speck on the wall in the presence of Laurence Olivier, who plays his father. --Tom Keogh

Millennium

Time-hoppers from the future, led by Cheryl Ladd, are abducting airline passengers about to crash, and transporting them a millennium hence in order to reseed a future blighted by environmental disaster. This is a dangerous business, plagued by the specter of accidentally creating time paradoxes, which could throw the future out of whack. Unfortunately, they've lost a couple of the stunners they use to subdue troublesome passengers, and these fall into the hands of a curious physicist (Daniel J. Travanti) and an investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board (Kris Kristofferson). Cheryl Ladd must retrieve these devices before a time paradox wipes out her world, but manages to complicate things by developing a romance with Kristofferson. All of which is very intriguing, having come from the short story, "Air Raid," by science fiction luminary John Varley, who also is credited with the screenplay. The part about airline abductions to save the disastrous future is straight from the original story, and the rest is expanded (you wouldn't say extrapolated) from it. The results are not very happy. About a third of the film is maddeningly wasted by repeating action from a different point of view. Seems natural when there are disparate timelines to deal with, but here nothing is added by the conceit. Only Travanti turns in a creditable performance as the physicist, bent on proving his theories about the future. He seems hungry for discovery, which is one of the things you want from a science fiction story, that sense of awe. But here it's just, "Aw, shucks!" --Jim Gay

Suicide Kings

Here's another gritty independent film that tries to invade Tarantino territory by casting Christopher Walken--that most reliable of indie-film actors--as a Mobster who gets chummy with a group of preppie-like young men and becomes the victim of a kidnapping scheme. One of the kidnappers (Henry Thomas) has a sister who's been abducted by another group of kidnappers, and they've bagged Walken for his Mob connections and negotiating power. What follows is a game of psychological strategy in which the desperate group of guys slowly lose their advantage to the smarter, more experienced gangster--even though they've got Walken tied to a chair. The situation turns volatile when the young men start to doubt the wisdom of their strategy and suspect betrayal within the group, and Suicide Kings turns into a talky, repetitious thriller only partially redeemed by Denis Leary's cagey role as Walken's Mob lieutenant. The movie's a showcase for its cast of rising talent (including Jay Mohr, Jeremy Sisto, Johnny Galecki, and Sean Patrick Flanery), but not even Walken can hold it all together. What's best about the film is Leary's sinister presence in a peripheral role and Walken's trademark villainy, here toned down to a steady, simmering menace. --Jeff Shannon

Young Guns

Part of what was touted as a late-1980s revival of Westerns (and you can see how long that lasted), this good-looking, empty-brained film was like a spurs-and-chaps version of a Joel Schumacher movie, filled with pretty faces, prettier imagery, and absolutely no new ideas. The idiotically grinning Emilio Estevez is cast as Billy the Kid, who slowly accumulates a gang of Brat Pack buddies (Lou Diamond Phillips, Kiefer Sutherland, Dermot Mulroney) and fashions them into a group of male models with six-guns. The action is confused and the script is trite, though Terence Stamp is intriguing as the old reprobate who helps the gang get its act together. Followed by an even worse sequel. --Marshall Fine