The very thought of sharks, brings the Hollywood smash hit 'Jaws' into our minds. Catch the two shark trainers Ron and Valerie who trained the sharks for this and many more flicks talking about their life and work.

Shadow of the Vampire is a film full of good ideas that are only partially developed. Clever, engaging, and boosted by the sublime casting of Willem Dafoe as Nosferatu "actor" Max Schreck, its premise is ripe with possibilities but the movie's too slight to register much impact: characters remain achingly underdeveloped and the whole lacks a sense of pace or structure. What's left, however, is enough for anyone to get their teeth into: the delightful performances from a sterling cast and director E Elias Merhige's affectionately tongue-in-cheek homage to a landmark of German silent cinema. John Malkovich is aptly loony as the eccentric director FW Murnau, whose passion in filming the 1922 classic Nosferatu leads to the extreme casting of Schreck as the vampire, a vision of evil who, in this movie's delightfully twisted imagination, actually is a vampire, sucking the blood of cast and crew members who've dismissed Schreck as an over-zealous method actor.

As these on-set maladies and "accidents" continue, Schreck wields greater control over Murnau, who descends into a kind of obsessive art-for-art's-sake madness until diva co-star Greta Schroeder (Catherine McCormack, doing wonderful work) is served up as the actor's ultimate motivation. Merhige and his actors (including Cary Elwes, as intrepid cameraman Fritz Wagner) have great fun with this ghastly escapade, and the humour is kept delicately subtle to balance the movie's artistic aspirations. To that end, Dafoe is just right, his bald pate and gaunt features a perfect match for the mysterious Schreck, his grimace and talon-like fingers suggesting a human vulture on the prowl. Likewise, the re-creation of Nosferatu's expressionist style is both fanciful and brilliantly authentic. Too bad, then, that this movie suffers from a case of vampiric anaemia, with budgetary shortcomings apparently the cause of at least some of its shortcomings; if Shadow of the Vampire shared the depth and richness of, say, Ed Wood, it might have been a cult classic for the ages. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

Shadow Skill is a fairly conventional sword 'n' sorcery/martial arts comic and this anime version consists of various linked stories most of which exist purely as build-ups to prolonged displays of battle pyrotechnics. Ella is a champion in the Shadow Skill school who has adopted young orphan Gau as her brother and apprentice; Scarface, an even greater champion, also has an interest in the boy's training. A rival takes Gau hostage in order to kill Ella before an arena confrontation; the pair, and Ella's friend Fowari, helps young Quo against the monstrous King of the Moon; an evil stepbrother misleads Fowari into attacking Ella. In the shorter feature "Epilogue", Scarface rescues Ella from the sinister Wolfman and she and Gau engage in an all-out fight as part of his training. The animation is better than that in some anime, but is nothing remarkable.

On the DVD: Shadow Skill has rather aggressively loud Dolby Sound and the option of listening to it in Japanese with subtitles or in poorly dubbed English; it comes with images and short biographies of the characters as well as Web links and ads for other animes. --Roz Kaveney