Batteries not included (Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn)

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It’s eighteen years since we watched the DVD of the 1987 film ‘Batteries not included’. I had not remembered much about it, other than that it started rather gloomily, then delved into slightly weird science fiction. It was directed by Steven Spielberg, which is probably why we acquired it in the first place.

The opening scenes are, indeed, decidedly depressing, even disturbing in places. We see building sites in part of New York, where homes have been demolished, with a lot of action. And we see the tenants of a crumbling apartment block, who are being given notice to quit - with a financial offer - but who have nowhere else to go. 

There’s a young, pregnant woman called Marisa (Elizabeth Peña) who hopes her boyfriend will come back. There’s a struggling artist called Mason (Dennis Boutsikaris) whose girlfriend becomes fed up with him, and leaves. There’s a former champion boxer called Harry (Frank McRae) who is quite lonely, and there’s an elderly couple, Frank (Hume Cronyn) and Faye (Jessica Tandy) who are perhaps the most poignant of all. They run a diner on the ground floor of the building, and it’s reasonably popular. But Faye clearly has a form of early dementia, and gets easily confused. She has some friends who also live in the building, who help to look after her. But after some deliberation, they decide to take the offered money and move elsewhere. 

Things start to get unpleasant as the businessmen responsible for knocking the house down become more pushy, and there are some scenes of aggression and violence; I was beginning to think it was a mistake to rewatch the film. And then Frank reaches what seems to be rock-bottom, and puts his head in his hands, praying for help.

Help then comes in the unexpected guise of little flying saucers who have to plug into electricity, and acquire bits of metal in order to keep going. It’s all a bit bizarre, but somehow it works. ? Is the first person to see them, and - of course - nobody really believes her…

The film is rated PG, which reflects the lack of any ‘adult’ content, or bad language. But it’s not a film I would want to show a child, and it doesn’t feel to me like a family film at all. For one thing, there are no children in it. For another, the issues of potential homelessness and loneliness are not really appropriate for a children’s film. And while there’s some low-key humour, it’s mixed with intense poignancy.

The five main actors are very well cast and do an excellent job. Jessica Tandy in particular is totally believable, with moments of total lucidity and others of confusion. She would have been almost eighty when this film was made. Hugh Cronyn, too, is excellent as a husband who adores his wife, but feels that the odds are against him as he has to deal with so much, including her apparent decline into imaginary worlds. The chemistry between the two is moving and believable - perhaps not surprising as the two actors were apparently married in real life. 

I loved the way that the terrible circumstances drew the five diverse folk together despite some initial antipathy. And I liked the way that the little flying saucers were able to help, as if metallic angels, although reality has to be suspended rather strongly in some of the scenes. But somehow, despite the great acting and direction, it didn’t feel like a relaxing or enjoyable film - yet it wasn’t thought-provoking either. I felt angered at the greed of some property developers, sad for the situation, and extremely cynical about the eventual - uplifting, but still bizarre - ending.

I’m glad we watched this again, but it’s one of those films we probably won’t watch again.

Review copyright 2026 Sue's DVD Reviews

Doctor Who series 6 (Matt Smith)

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We finished watching Doctor Who series 5 at the end of last year. We had become familiar with Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor, and with Amy Pond, portrayed by Karen Gillen, as his companion. At the end of the fifth series, Amy married Rory (Arthur Darvill), and both had decided to keep travelling with the Doctor. 

Series 6 opens with a Christmas special entitled ‘A Christmas carol’. It was a good one to see towards the end of the Christmas period; it was first broadcast on Christmas Day 2010. We first saw it in September 2013 and had entirely forgotten the story. It features a very Scrooge-like character, brilliantly portrayed by Michael Gambon, who refuses to allow a spaceship to arrive. Rory and Amy are in it, on their honeymoon, and send out an SOS to the Doctor. 

The writing is clever, with more than a nod to Dickens; and we liked the resulting softening of the character. There are several Christmas carols featured in the background, too, and some amazing singing. It’s all very well done, we thought, with some tension and mildly scary effects - but overall, an excellent Christmas special. It’s an hour long, and then there’s an ‘extra’ on the same DVD, a Doctor Who ‘confidential’, which gives a lot of background to the episode. There are also a couple of brief ‘extra’ episodes filmed for Comic Relief. 

The following week we watched the next episode, ‘The impossible astronaut’. It starts with a bizarre summons to Amy and Rory, who have not heard from the Doctor for a while. They meet at a beach, and a strange person in a spacesuit emerges from the sea, only to shoot the Doctor. Clearly there was going to be a resolution to this, as we knew he wouldn’t be regenerating just yet, but we had not at all recalled what happened, or the complexity of the ‘story arc’ that started in this episode. 

I realised half-way through that it was progressing slowly enough to be a two-parter, so we watched the sequel immediately afterwards. It’s a very well-done episode, bringing River Song (Alex Kingston) into it more than previously, and showing more of her character. It also, rather disturbingly, makes one question why we sometimes hear creaks and shufflings in the night… and why we sometimes go into rooms or upstairs but then can’t quite remember why…

The third episode on the second DVD is ‘The black spot’. It all takes place on board a pirate ship, where crew members are gradually vanishing, lured by a siren… or so it appears. They’re becalmed, and terrified when the Doctor arrives with Rory and Amy. Not one of my favourite episodes, as there’s quite a lot of fast action, but it was quite amusing seeing Amy dressed as a pirate.

Episode four, ‘The doctor’s wife’, is mainly about the tardis. He follows a distress signal to a distant planet, where it seems that there might be other time lords, although the only people he finds are an elderly couple… who are not quite what they seem. This is rather a bizarre episode, even by Doctor Who standards, and I’m not sure I entirely understood it, but it’s all very well done.

Episodes five and six are another two-parter which I found extremely scary. The Doctor and his companions arrive on a planet where workers have learned to build clones of themselves, known as ‘gangers’. These are considered disposable, and are used in dangerous situations. But the gangers have ‘memories’ and emotions that match those of the real people, and they start to rebel.  The Doctor tries to encourage them all to work together in a story which I found increasingly disturbing. 

Then it ends with a twist involving Amy, who (as we have seen in previous episodes) might or might not be pregnant. 

This twist is followed through in Episode seven, ‘A good man goes to war’. It’s possibly one of the most confusing episodes ever. Amy is in a remote location, about to give birth. And she’s going to have to give up her baby, whom she calls Melody. The Doctor and Rory set out to find her, after the Doctor sends out many requests for help to people (or, in most cases, aliens) who owe him a favour. And there’s another unexpected twist, one I recalled from the first time we saw this, as it was so startling.

But although I quite liked this episode, I found the timeline and contents totally mystifying. 

Episode eight, ‘Let’s kill Hitler’ introduces a new character, Amy’s former schoolfriend Mels. She says she’s heard all about the Doctor, and wants to go back in time to kill Hitler… and they end up by saving Hitler, and getting involved with some shape-shifting robot. This episode, which relates in some ways to previous ones, did nothing to clarify my confusion about the ongoing story arc.

So I very much appreciated the ninth episode, ‘Night terrors’. An eight-year-old called George is terrified of monsters in his room, and prays to be saved. His parents have given him techniques to help, but they’re almost at their wits’ end when the Doctor arrives, having picked up George’s distress call. Some of this story is a bit spooky, but it’s more light-hearted than some of the others, and has an entirely satisfactory ending. It stands alone rather than being part of the story arc.

That’s followed by a relatively light but very confusing episode, ‘The girl who waited’. The Doctor, Amy and Rory travel to - supposedly - a popular tourist destination, only to find themselves in quarantined rooms. Worse, Amy ends up in a different room and time-line… some moral issues, and a lot of character development without any enemies as such. 

Then comes ‘The god complex’, a rather spooky episode featuring a hotel with endless corridors which keep changing. Everyone has a room in which they have to face their fears… and when they do, they start praising someone - or something - and end up dead. It’s all very cleverly done, but at the end the Doctor decides that he needs to leave Amy and Rory on earth, as he’s worried that they might die if they continue travelling with him.

We then watched the last two episodes in one evening, although they’re not technically two parts of the same episode. ‘Closing time’ sees the Doctor visiting his old friend Craig - from ‘The lodger’ in series five - only to discover strange things going on, as people are vanishing from a department store. There’s some humour in this episode, and some poignancy when the Doctor sees Amy and Rory in the distance. Then it ends with a tense few scenes that made me want to move straight on to the last episode.

‘The wedding of River Song’ is perhaps one of the most confusing episodes of all. I often find the time travel rather mind-boggling when it involves multiple forays forwards and backwards, and this one does that more than I can recall. It takes us back to the first episode, and explains what happens… and it also picks up on events and situations from other episodes in this series.  I did like seeing several characters from other episodes in this series (and the fifth series) taking part in this finale. 

I think I figured out some of the storyline; in one sense it really doesn’t matter. It was all very well done, and I’m already looking forward to watching Series 7.  Matt Smith has come into his own in this series, and is an excellent incarnation of the Doctor.  The whole is very well made with an excellent blend of tension, action, human interest and - in places - humour. 

Definitely recommended if you like this series, and if you like complex storylines. The rating is 12, reflecting the extreme tension and some violence, but younger children who like this kind of thing might enjoy it too. 

Review copyright 2026 Sue's DVD Reviews

Little women (Winona Ryder)

(Amazon UK link)

We have two DVDs with films based on Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel ‘Little Women’. We watched the 2019 version - updated for a modern audience - in 2020, and I liked it much more than I had expected to. But it was over twenty years since we watched the 1994 version which is rather closer to the original. So we decided to see it again. I am very familiar with the story, my husband much less so as he has never read the books.

On the whole, this is quite true to the original, although inevitably a lot has been cut out. The four March sisters are realistically portrayed: Trini Alvarado is the responsible Meg, and Winona Ryder is the impetuous Jo, who never quite manages to look tidy, and who spends most of her time writing. I thought Beth (Claire Danes) was the least believable of the four; but a lot of her story is removed from the film. Kirsten Dunst is an excellent young Amy; she’s the only sister who has a different actress (Samantha Mathis) playing her as an adult. But then Meg and Jo were older teenagers anyway at the start of the story.

Nim's Island (Abigail Breslin)

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We’ve picked up a lot of DVDs over the years, many of them second-hand. Since we have regularly had young friends coming to watch a DVD, we made sure that there was a good collection with U rating for them to select from when they were small. There were some which we were familiar with, of course; I bought quite a few children’s classics when our own sons were younger. But others were completely new to us. 

Recently I thought it would be a good idea for us to watch some of them - not the 3d animated ones which I dislike intently, but the ones with real people. Last night we decided to watch ‘Nim’s Island’.  I had no idea what it was about, but I know our young friends quite liked it a few years ago. 

The star of this film is Abigail Breslin, who is perfectly cast as 11-year-old Nim. She narrates the start of the story, illustrated with cartoons, showing how her mother was eaten by a whale when Nim was three. So she lives with her father, Jack (Gerard Butler). They went around the world a couple of times on his boat, as he’s a marine scientist, always looking for new forms of microscopic life.  And now they have settled on a tiny island which doesn’t have any other human inhabitants. 

My dog Skip (Frankie Muniz)

(Amazon UK link)

Just over three years ago, I came across the DVD of ‘My dog Skip’ - and probably some others - in a thrift store, and bought it inexpensively. It looked like a pleasant family film, rated U, but for some reason we didn’t get around to watching it until last night. 

I was slightly concerned that it might be a ‘weepy’, but was relieved that it really wasn’t. The film was made in 2000 but set in the 1940s in Mississippi. It's based on a true story which was written in a book of the same name by Willie Morris. 

There’s an introductory voiceover from an adult, talking about looking back to his childhood. And then we meet young Willie, who is brilliantly played by Frankie Muniz. Willis is only supposed to be eight at the start of the film, and the actor must have been thirteen or fourteen, but he’s totally believable both then, and as he starts to grow up. 

Under the Tuscan sun (Diane Lane)

(Amazon UK link)

It’s over ten years since we first saw the film ‘Under the Tuscan sun’, so it seemed like a good idea to watch it again. I had entirely forgotten what it was about. I realised, after seeing the credits and one of the extras, that it was based on a semi-autobiographical book with the same title. 

The main character is a woman called Frances, played entirely believably by Diane Lane. Frances is a writer, who learns that her husband has been unfaithful. The early scenes are short and rapid, and we see her trying to negotiate a divorce settlement, then moving into a small and rather seedy flat. 

Frances’ best friend is called Patti (Sandra Oh). She and her partner meet Frances for a celebratory dinner after the divorce is finalised… and Frances learns that her friend is pregnant. She is then given a very generous offer of an Italian tour, which she’s reluctant, at first, to take. 

Dad's Army series four

(Amazon UK link)

We finished watching the third series of the classic TV series ‘Dad’s Army’ shortly before Christmas last year. On Boxing Day we started watching Series Four. Once again, we found that we didn’t recall much of this at all, although we had both seen the series as children, and some of the repeats over the years. This series was first broadcast in 1970. Each episode is around half an hour, so we usually watch two at a time. 

Episode One sees the platoon preparing for a big parade through the town. They come into conflict with the ARP warden - as ever - about who should be leading (after the town band, that is). Captain Mainwaring (Arthur Lowe) thinks it would be a good idea to have a mascot. But Private Walker (James Beck) doesn’t quite come up with what he was expecting. This is a fast-moving episode with a very amusing ending.