Home entertainment for couch potatoes

Stop-loss

Cast: Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum, Abbie Cornish, Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Fine print, as many people realise when it's rather late, can lead to a lot of trouble. The contract is signed, and you are happy that things are going as planned when you encounter sinister covert clauses.

That's life you may say, but tell that to a combat-weary soldier.

Sergeant Brandon Leonard King (Phillippe) has run 150 missions in Iraq and is manning a a coalition searchpoint in Tikrit, Iraq, when insurgents in a racing cab fire on them.

King and his buddies chase them and find themselves snared in an alley. The outcome is inevitable: loss of life on both sides.

Fast forward to a coming home parade in the Texan town of Brazos. King, Shriver (Tatum) and Tommy (Gordon-Levitt) and the rest of the brigade are relieved that their tour of duty is finally over. But life is not the same any more.

Shriver takes to drinking, abuses his girlfriend Mich (Cornish), messes up his pad, digs a foxhole in his garden and makes it his bed.

Tommy marries his mate Jeannie, fights with her and is thrown out of the house. In a burst of anger he shoots apart the unopened wedding gifts.

King is racked with guilt. He feels responsible for what is happening, and is troubled by nightmares in which he revisits the horrors of war.

Then he hears he's been stop-lossed: as per the fine print, he will be reshipped to Iraq. It's not that he's scared, it's the manipulation that makes him mad.

A fugitive now, he turns to a sympathetic senator in Washington DC. But no, he can't help. What next? Should he cross over to Canada or Mexico?

Stop-Loss is a moving story, very different from other war movies such as Redacted or Battle for Haditha.

Rating: R.

Bill and Ted's excellent adventure

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, George Carlin

This cult classic is 20 years old, so you'll be seeing a Reeves you may not recognise at first sight.

Ted ‘Theodore' Logan (Reeves) and Bill S. Preston (Winter) are classmates. They are passionate about music and have teamed up to form a band called the Wild Stallyns.

Performance in class, of course, falters. It's so bad that if the two don't get an A+ in the History exam that's just a day away, they'll fail the class.

This means Ted's father will ship him to Oates Military Academy in Alaska and the band will break up.

But they are not the only worried ones. The rulers of the future know that their world will not be as it is, if the band falls apart.

The boys have to pass, no matter the cost. So a time traveller (Carlin) is sent to the present. The time machine? A phone booth!

This machine is remarkable. They've just got to dial a number to transport themselves into the past. Why the past? Well, how else can they learn history?

So they get to meet the outlaw Billy the Kid, Napoleon, Socrates and Dr. Sigmund Freud.

Now it's just a matter of bringing these characters to the present for the presentation that will get them their A+.

Rating: PG.