When missile technology is used to enhance toy action figures, the toys soon begin to take their battle programming too seriously.

In Small Time Crooks, Woody Allen plays someone radically distinct from himself and his standard film persona--Ray, a failed safe-cracker who believes that his nickname "The Brain" is other than sarcastic. Increasingly, Allen is at his best when least present in his films, either by playing someone else or by having someone else play him. Good and funny as he is here, though, the film belongs to the two women stars: Tracey Ullmann is a force of nature as Frenchy, Ray's wife, who turns their cookie shop cover story for a bank job into a multi-million dollar enterprise and then decides that she wants to smarten up their image; Elaine May, meanwhile, is adorable as Frenchie's dim cousin May, one of the film's principal voices of good sense. Hugh Grant is a splendidly despicable gigolo and a large cast do impressive comic turns. Another of the film's stars, though, is the decor of Frenchie's apartment--there's a guilty pleasure in seeing just what vast wealth and bad taste can do. Small Time Crooks is lightweight Allen, but it is attractively good-humoured and intelligently plotted and not above the pleasures of pure slapstick--the sight gags when Ray and his gang are trying to tunnel into the bank are predictable but still funny.

On the DVD: The DVD has Dolby sound, which brings out attractively a score made up of forgotten pop songs from the late-Swing Era; the anamorphic widescreen picture gives surprising crispness to what is, most of the time, a chamber piece.--Roz Kaveney

A loser of a crook and his wife strike it rich when a botched bank job's cover business becomes a spectacular success.

Erroneously labelled a "gangster film", the independently made British film Small Time Obsession is in fact a thought-provoking essay on generation gaps and loyalties. London's Polish District is the setting, where four long-term friends are used to filling time and their pockets with petty crime. Michael (Alex King) has come to realise he has increasingly less in common with the others, and also with his parents who own a delicatessen. Life's big decisions elude Michael. His exclusively Polish-speaking father wants him to take over the family business, his greyhound Bullitt is starting to win prizes at the track and he's also secretly in love with Ali (Juliette Caton). Unfortunately she's already spoken for by tough guy Chris (Jason Merrells). This love triangle hardly has time to sort itself out since Chris is inadvertently embroiling them all in more Big Time crime. Although the circumstances inevitably lead to bouts of violence , what's refreshing here is that character relationships genuinely resonate with believability. First time writer/director Piotr Szkopiak tells the story with several shades of sympathetic subtlety, sensitively portraying the problems of a generation torn between inheriting their parents' displaced traditions and "fitting in".

On the DVD: In this anamorphic widescreen presentation the dirty grey backdrop of London seems to rise up and swamp the characters. A 14-minute documentary ("Behind the Obsession") talks about those locales and how the director and distributor marketed the film. As well as a trailer, the extras package includes numerous text pages devoted to: cast and crew biographies, Production Notes, Locations, Media Reviews and the Polish Community. --Paul Tonks