One of Ridley Scott's most wrong-headed films, this one (like all of his movies) looks fabulous and sounds utterly ridiculous, almost from the beginning. His first mistake was casting the wonderful Gerard Dépardieu as Columbus and forcing him to speak English, which Dépardieu does with decided difficulty. After spending far too much time on the ocean with Columbus' three ships (you wish they would sail over the edge of the world), they arrive in the West Indies, only to turn around and sail back. The rest of the film deals with the not particularly comprehensible politics of Columbus' venture, which leads to the violent slaughter of trusting natives by a band of cardboard villains. Dépardieu, who radiates sympathy, looks as if he's at sea with this material. --Marshall Fine, Amazon.com

Focused on the madcap lives of flatmates Vince (Sean Lock) and Errol (Benedict Wong), the first series of the critically acclaimed BBC comedy Fifteen Stories High craftily points out the eccentricities of the modern world. Vince is an oddball with the habits of a man who has spent too much time in his own company. A lifeguard at the local swimming pool, he takes great pride in being able to tell swimmers off for no reason, and obtains his home decorating ideas from photos in Readers' Wives. His lodger, Errol is the opposite of Vince, naively stupid and always taken advantage of by others. But he has his own unusual habits, too, such as tearing at wallpaper whenever he sees an unstuck corner. Vince has the weirdest encounters, though: such as being locked in the stocks for six hours when wrongly accused of killing a swan; or taken hostage by a neighbour when he spies a moon-boot wearing Shetland pony in the man's spare bedroom.

Equally as funny are the short stories of the other residents living in the tower block that are interspersed between the antics of Vince and Errol. Enclosed within the four walls of different flats on the estate, these claustrophobic locations provide the ideal settings for the extreme behaviours depicted. There's the hygiene obsessive who forces a visiting double-glazing salesman to take a bath and wear a protective suit before being able to look round his flat; the old man who spends all night in front of a mirror in a pair of underpants pretending he's James Bond; and a New Age enthusiast who's always getting disturbed when recording relaxation tapes. The general weirdness of the series takes some getting used to, but once you decipher the crazy world of Vince and Errol this is five-star comedy with a dark tinge. --John Galilee