Kool Karaoke experience. Take control of the sound tracks as you edit, remove include sounds and percussions of your choice. With the lyrics rolling, sing it out man?

With Interiors Woody Allen, fresh from the critical and commercial triumph of Annie Hall, set out to prove for the first time that he wasn't just a maker of funny movies. It feels like it, too. The film leans heavily on Allen's revered mentor, Ingmar Bergman (and especially on Bergman's masterly 1972 chamber-drama Cries and Whispers) right from the word go, with its austere white-on-black titles and its pointed lack of any music track. The camera moves relatively little, preferring to hold on close-ups of one or two faces. And Allen himself, again for the first time, doesn't appear in his own movie--sensing no doubt that the mere presence of that woebegone face and kvetching accent would start his audience giggling.

The plot in many ways prefigures Allen's later, more accomplished Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). The father of three adult daughters announces he wants a "trial separation" from their mother, a fastidious control freak played with pained passive-aggressiveness by Geraldine Page. The daughters, their loyalties tugged different ways, try to deal with the situation and with the demands of their partners. Much of the action, as usual with Allen, is conversation--but lacking the spice of his one-liners, it tends to drag glumly on.

Where the film works, the acting carries it, especially Page, Diane Keaton and Marybeth Hurt as two of the daughters, and Maureen Stapleton as the ebullient vulgarian the father takes up with on the rebound. Stapleton's scenes introduce some much-needed humour into a movie that takes itself all too seriously. Allen would go on to achieve a far better balance between light and dark in films like Hannah or Crimes and Misdemeanours.

On the DVD: Interiors on disc features just the theatrical trailer. The soundtrack is mono and the picture an anamorphic widescreen presentation of the original 1.85:1 theatrical ratio. --Philip Kemp

Mike Figgis' Internal Affairs makes great play with some fairly obvious ironies--"Trust me, I'm a cop", Richard Gere says to a couple for whom he is arranging the death of their parents--but its real strength lies in a cluster of central performances. Gere has rarely been better than he is as the charismatic, self-righteous entirely corrupt and corrupting Dennis Peck, but Andy Garcia is at least as impressive as the "selfish yuppy bastard", the ambitious Internal Affairs cop Avila whose determination to bring Peck down is as much to do with massaging his own ego as with fighting the good fight, particularly after Peck starts making moves on Avila's gallery curator wife. This is a film about men destructively manipulating each other's self-love--the two men have more in common than they like to admit, a point sardonically made by Amy, the world-weary lesbian cop who is Avila's partner (an impressive performance by Figgis regular Laurie Metcalfe). Internal Affairs was the best thriller of 1990 and one of the decade's best. --Roz Kaveney