Jake comes to the aid of Carl Lee Bailey (Samuel L Jackson), a black vigilante who has killed the white brutes who raped his daughter.Now Carl is up for murder, and heading for death row unless the Boy Wonder can pull off an insanity plea. Early on, the movie tries to suggest that it won't be like other courtroom thrillers. "There's no place in my court for grandstanding!" bellows the judge (Patrick McGoohan) What, none? Oh, come on. You mean no harrowing descriptions of human suffering? No shaky witnesses spectacularly discredited by the prosecution? No impassioned speeches about how, if we only let our children play together, irrespective of colour, we can piece this shattered world back together, God damn it? Well, all right Just a few. The supreme moment in this Emma is Miss Bates being snubbed by Emma at the picnic - partly because Sophie Thompson knows exactly what she is doing, but also because it happens for once without musical interpretation. It's almost worth being snubbed if it allows you to hear yourself think.n 'Emma' is on general release from tomorrow.

To criticise A Time to Kill for being manipulative is like complaining that it's in English, or in colour. It's adapted from a novel by John Grisham (his first, and most sanctimonious), so we would be justified in claiming a refund if we found one syllable in the script that didn't advance the plot, plant a clue or persuade us to be angry/upset/deeply moved. Although I will not have them in my life as long as some people (I'm now 25), I do not wish for one moment that they were any younger. I love and respect them immensely.Rich, BristolNEXT WEEK'S DILEMMA: UNSETTLED DAUGHTERDear Virginia,My daughter, Mary, is 32 and apart from a two-year relationship with a man in her early twenties, shows no sign of settling down She's had the odd boyfriend but it's always ended quickly.

Although she has a wide circle of friends - mostly married - and a very interesting job, I know she would give anything to find someone special, but she finds it hard meeting single men I would love grandchildren but most of all I worry for her. I'd like to offer her the present of membership of a dating agency, but my husband said I shouldn't even suggest it. Certainly she gets very irritated if I ask her about the men in her life, but last month she suddenly broke down in tears when she told me about her best friend getting married, saying she felt so different to everyone else. Do other mothers worry like I do? Or are there other thirty-something single girls who could advise on how they'd like a mother to behave? Would they appreciate a dating agency present or would they see it as interference?Yours sincerely,LouiseComments are welcome, and everyone who has a suggestion quoted will be sent a Dynagrip 50 ballpen from Paper:Mate. Send relevant personal experiences or comments to me at the Features Department, the 'Independent', 1 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5DL; fax 0171-293 2182, by Tuesday morning. If you have any dilemmas you would like to share, let me know..

You may not have seen any of the films that Andy Warhol made, or lent his name to, in the 1960s and 1970s, but you will doubtless have had a discussion or an argument about one of them Probably Sleep That comprised six hours of footage of a man sleeping. Or Empire, in which the camera unblinkingly documents a day in the life of the Empire State Building from a single static point. Or the half-hour Blow Job, which really needs no explanation. It seems now that this was the purpose of those films: to be debated and bickered over at parties; to attract myths and gossip. But to be seen? Fifteen minutes of Sleep or Empire might hold a certain hypnotic allure, but linger with the films any longer and the concept quickly becomes more appealing than the reality. Warhol was using these films to challenge cinema's temporal laws, and to make explicit the scopophilia - the sexual pleasure in looking - which underpinned the medium.