Martin is of the hit and run variety. Being a Broadway producer, he gets young girls, dancing to his tunes. And to avoid any suspicion from his wife, he has young Martin-always ready to take the blame?

Anthony Hurst's interestingly flawed You're Dead aspires to being an elegant clockwork thriller, but gets bogged down along the way in various sorts of laddishness. As a second-generation gangster keen to prove himself, Rhys Ifans works a bit too hard at being a likable psychotic, and David Schneider's ingratiating puppy-dog eyes get used too much. John Hurt is extraordinary, though, as the burned-out case of a safe-cracker 20 years into a life stretch for a murder he didn't do, whom the others free from jail to help them in a robbery. We know from the start that things went horribly wrong and that young Jo (Claire Skinner) is the only surviving hostage--we also know that this has something to do with the rivalry between the old-style brutal corrupt cop Badger (John Benfield) and the woman forensic psychologist who has taken over the investigation. You're Dead has wit, surprises and some inventively unpleasant violence working for it, but never quite hangs together. On the DVD: the disc includes extensive interviews with the cast, and the writer-director, in which everyone talks illuminatingly about how much fun it was to work on the film; these overlap heavily with the material in a "making-of" documentary. --Roz Kaveney

By now, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan have amassed such a fund of goodwill with moviegoers that any new onscreen pairing brings nearly reflexive smiles. In You've Got Mail, the quintessential boy and girl next door repeat the tentative romantic crescendo that made Sleepless in Seattle, writer-director Nora Ephron's previous excursion with the duo, a massive hit. The prospective couple do actually meet face to face early on but Mail otherwise repeats the earlier feature's gentle, extended tease of saving its romantic resolution until the final, gauzy shot.

The underlying narrative is an even more old-fashioned romantic pas de deux that is casually hooked to a newfangled device. The script, cowritten by the director and her sister, Delia Ephron, updates and relocates the Ernst Lubitsch classic, The Shop Around the Corner, to contemporary Manhattan, where Joe Fox (Hanks) is a cheerfully rapacious merchant whose chain of book superstores is gobbling up smaller, more specialized shops such as the children's bookstore owned by Kathleen Kelly (Ryan). Their lives run in close parallel in the same idealized neighbourhood yet they first meet anonymously, online, where they gradually nurture a warm, even intimate correspondence. As they begin to wonder whether this e-mail flirtation might lead them to be soul mates, however, they meet and clash over their colliding business fortunes.

It's no small testament to the two stars that we wind up liking and caring about them despite the inevitable (and highly manipulative) arc of the plot. Although their chemistry transcended the consciously improbable romantic premise of Sleepless, enabling director Ephron to attain a kind of amorous soufflé, this time around there's a slow leak that considerably deflates the affair. Less credulous viewers will challenge Joe's logic in prolonging the concealment of his online identity from Kathleen, and may shake their heads at Ephron's reinvention of Manhattan as a spotless, sun-dappled wonderland where everybody lives in million-dollar apartments and colour co-ordinates their wardrobes for cocktail parties. --Sam Sutherland