In 1990, Welcome Home Roxy Carmichael showed Winona Ryder as cinema's top teenage role model. Her edge was a delinquency-equals-sympathy angle that held true throughout Beetlejuice, Mermaids, Heathers and Edward Scissorhands. Here as Dinky Bossetti she's chasing the ghosts of a past no one can explain. She's adopted; her town of Clyde, Ohio is mysteriously stuck in the 1950s; but weirder still is everyone's fixation with the imminent return of once-famous homecoming girl Roxy Carmichael. Dinky's school peers conform to the John Hughes 80s look and mindset, but it's the retro adult population that really winds her up. Jeff Daniels ought to be a perfectly conditioned suburbanite, but can't get over having once been married to Roxy. Imparting the secret that they'd had a child and given it away, Dinky's own confusions and obsessions suddenly make sense. The tangle of B-plots are given purpose at the same time she is. Her silent admirer (Thomas Wilson Brown) is able to approach her at last, and her school guidance counsellor becomes the friend she's never had. Ultimately the story's about the notion that no teenager ever feels like they fit in. Of course the real problem facing Ryder, Dinky and any viewer is that all teens grow up. What then?

On the DVD: This is a bare-bones package with a simple two-channel stereo and 16:9 anamorphic ratio transfer. That said, it looks and sounds just fine. There's only one trailer, but someone's tried with the diner-style menu at least. --Paul Tonks

A disparate group of low rent criminals band together for 'the big one'. Mainly due to their incompetence and greed, nothing goes right...

Whether as a subject for historical investigation or social drama, the war in the former Yugoslavia is made for film, as 1997's Welcome to Sarajevo demonstrates. Inspired by the book Natasha's Story by ITN reporter Michael Nicholson, this takes very much a human-interest angle on the conflict. Stephen Dillane plays a journalist whose involvement moves from the professional to the personal as he faces up to marauding Serbian mercenaries, then family ties, to get the apparently orphaned Emira out of Sarajevo and back to the security of his own family in the UK.

It could have been awash with journalists-are-good-guys-really sentiment, but director Michael Winterbottom is mindful to present the story in the context of the siege--some of the filming here is harrowingly realistic--and draws responsive performances from a cast including Woody Harrelson as a hard-living American reporter and Marisa Tomei as an aid worker determined to save children's lives at all costs. As a film about the "why" of the Yugoslavian war, Pretty Village, Pretty Flame is unsurpassed, but Welcome to Sarajevo is a potent look into the "how".

On the DVD: Welcome to Sarajevo comes to DVD with a decent 16:9 anamorphic picture and Dolby Digital 5.1 sound that has the necessary immediacy. English subtitles are included, rightly so in a film of this nature. Special features include 30 minutes of interview snippets with cast and crew, "on location" sequences and three theatrical/TV trailers. --Richard Whitehouse