RECORDED DELIVERY

A critical guide to the week's videos

Bound (18) Fox Guild Entertainment, rental, 14 July. This brazenly self-confident debut feature from the Wachowski brothers owes a large debt to those other US independent siblings, the Coens. The rapid-fire action is claustrophobically confined to two rooms of an apartment block - one inhabited by Violet (Jennifer Tilly) and her gangster partner Caesar, the other by Gina Gershon's Corky (above). Before you can say "femme fatale" the women are in love and plotting a scam to relieve Caesar of $2m mob money. Inevitably, plans go awry and the film turns into a blistering battle of wits, with banter and mind games the preferred weapons of the central triangle. Despite some glossily-choreographed passion, the relationship between the two women is all hollow glamour. Tied and gagged by Caesar, Corky realises she is bound to Violet not just by sex, but also by what may well turn out to be a fatally misplaced trust. Bound and bound, trussed and trust, even love is a cue for a visual gag from the Wachowskis. The film is flashy and not a little formulaic, and the swooning camerawork becomes a little wearing after a while. But there's still much to enjoy, not least Tilly's surprisingly resourceful Betty Boop-style seductress, who's as breathless as the pace of this pastiche noir.

Dracula: Dead and Loving It (PG) PolyGram, rental, 14 July. Mel Brooks's toothless satire with Leslie Nielsen giving a suitably catatonic performance. Deadly.

Fled (18) MGM Home Entertainment, rental, 14 July. A nasty, violent and redundant remake of The Defiant Ones, with Stephen Baldwin and Laurence Fishburne as the escaped convicts on the run and shackled together by handcuffs. The film's so cliched that Baldwin regularly name-checks other movies, but instead of being cleverly self-referential, this merely draws attention to how derivative the film is.

Crimetime (18) First Independent, rental, 14 July. Another disappointment from George Sluizer, whose career has gone downhill since he made the expert chiller The Vanishing. Here, Baldwin pops up again as an actor playing a serial killer on TV and getting tips from the real killer (Pete Postlethwaite). What the flinty-cheeked Postlethwaite is doing in this nonsense is anyone's guess.