Videowatch

Babe: Pig in the City (U) to rent

JUST WHEN you thought you could look a bacon sandwich in the eye, Babe, the triumphant sheep-pig from George Miller's charming bucolic fantasy, makes his return. Those expecting more whimsy will be disappointed, however. Barely has the porker savoured his victory, than he inadvertently lands the farm in financial hock, and himself and Mrs Hoggett in the metropolis. The perverse delight Miller takes in plunging cute Babe into the mean streets almost pays off. Babe is granted a wealth of macabre animatronic companions, but the Gothic surrealism of the set design seems to have infected the script. The disappointing box-office will probably put the kibosh on what would have been, given this, an enticing prospect: Babe 3.

Your Friends & Neighbors (18), to rent

"MISOGYNIST!" WAS the slur levelled at Neil Labute for his first film, In the Company of Men. Criticism of his second - Misanthropist! - was broader, if no less shrill. Both labels made the mistake of confusing the director with the middle-management predators of the first film and the self-obsessed manipulators of the second - but Labute does seem guilty of a coldness here that was perhaps better hidden in his first film.

A claustrophobic round of sexual dalliances among an anonymous group of thirtysomethings shapes up as a black morality tale for the Nineties. The premiss is soapy, but Labute disguises this by avoiding his protagonists' addressing one another by name or identifying their home town. This device, and the razor-sharp dialogue, Labute has carried over from In the Company of Men - but this film is more a universal portrait of the war of the sexes. Without a polemical focus, it plays with the emotional permutations of its cast to little effect.