"Actor: Albert"

• The Fabulous Baker Boys | DVD | (10/09/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  An inspired casting gimmick, a wonderful mood, a grown-up love story--all this in The Fabulous Baker Boys, but the only thing anybody ever talks about is Michelle Pfeiffer on top of a piano. Granted, it's a showstopper: clad in a slinky dress, Pfeiffer rolls around on the Steinway while she purrs out a languid version of "Makin' Whoopee". Adding to the seductive vibe is the fact that she's not singing to the audience, but to the sullen piano player (Jeff Bridges) whose fancy she has captured. Bridges and his real-life brother, Beau, play two lounge entertainers whose act has grown stale; they're not above doing "Feelings" for the tourist crowd. They've hired songbird Pfeiffer (who does her own sexy singing) to spice up the routine, a strategy that pays off in spades. The three actors are terrific, with the fabulous Bridges boys playing neatly off their own sibling rhythms. Writer-director Steve Kloves captures the feel of second-rate Seattle clubs, and Dave Grusin's jazzy score keeps propelling the film forward. The story itself might have come from a 1940s romance, yet Kloves and his actors keep it unusually modern and thoughtful. And then there's Michelle Pfeiffer rolling around on top of a piano.... --Robert Horton

• GUMSHOE | DVD | (20/09/2010) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Oscar nominee Albert Finney (2001, Best Actor in a supporting role, Erin Brockovich) stars in this hilarious parody of American Film Noir directed by Stephen Frears (The Queen). Meet Eddie Ginley - small time bingo caller and big time loser. He's lost hi girlfriend and now maybe he's losing his marbles. Why, even his psychiatrist has officially diagnosed him as 'a bloody nut'... See, Eddie dreams of being Sam Spade, the ultimate private dick. He's gone so far as to advertise his services as a 'gumshoe' in the local paper. Then one day he gets a call. A mysterious fat man hands him a package with a photo of a girl , £1000 cash - and a gun. Now Eddie's up to his trench coat in femme fatales, hit men, dead bodies - and an international conspiracy. Not bad for a Liverpudlian with a big mouth and an overactive imagination. Now Eddie plunges himself into the mystery world he's always dreamed of living in. He's in his element - but is he also hopelessly out of his depth?

• Road To Perdition/ Miller's Crossing/ Capone | DVD | (13/04/2009) from £3.83   |  Saving you £6.16 (160.84%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Miller's Crossing: The year is 1929. The place is a gangster-ridden American city run by Leo (Albert Finney). But the real power lies with Tom (Gabriel Byrne) the power behind the man. Their friendship is severed when they both fall in love with the same woman (Marcia Gay Harden) and a bloody gang war erupts... Road To Perdition: Two-time Academy Award-winner Tom Hanks stars as Michael Sullivan a father fighting to keep his only son from traveling the Road To Perdition. Directed by Oscar-winner Sam Mendes this towering motion picture achievement has been acclaimed by audiences and critics alike as one of the year's most extraordinary films. Capone: The man who made the Twenties roar! The story of the rise and fall of the infamous Chicago gangster Al Capone (Ben Gazzara) and the control he exhibited over the city during the prohibition years as well as with his subsequent fall...

• Vanished | DVD | (17/04/2006) from £4.03   |  Saving you £1.96 (48.64%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Paris 1929. Marielle and Charles Delauney's happy life is shattered by an accident that claims their son's life ends their marriage and threatens Marielle's sanity. She moves to New York and works as a curator of Malcolm Patterson's art collection. The work leads to romance marriage and the birth of another son. When this boy disappears ex-husband Charles is the prime suspect. In disbelief Marielle digs to uncover the truth.

• Death Drums Along The River | DVD | (14/04/2014) from £7.00   |  Saving you £5.99 (85.57%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Based on an Edgar Wallace’s novel ‘Death Drums along the River’ was made on location in Africa and contains some outstanding filming of both scenery and wildlife. While investigating the murder of a fellow police officer in the British West African colony of Gambia ex-patriot Inspector Harry Sanders (Richard Todd) discovers links to a sinister diamond smuggling operation working further up the River Gambia. The evidence points to a clinic run by Dr Schneider (Walter Rilla) and his assistant director Dr Weiss (Albert Lieven). At first Inspector Sanders suspects that a local businessman Jack Pearson is behind the crimes. But when Pearson together with American journalist Jim Hunter are murdered Sanders realises he was mistaken and begins to suspect that the clinic may be the centre of a diamond smuggling ring. Can the Inspector solve both the murder and the centre of the smuggling activity before the River resonates once more to the funeral beat of the ‘Death Drums’?

• Devil in a Blue Dress | DVD | (05/09/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  It's 1948 and Los Angeles is booming but Easy Rawlins (Denzel Washington) has seen better days. He has just been fired and his house payments are due so when DeWitt Albright (Tom Sizemore) offers him a seemingly harmless job he jumps at the chance. All he has to do is track down the elusive Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals) a mysterious beauty known to keep company on the wrong side of town. Soon he finds himself implicated in two murders and is forced to call upon an old friend Mouse (Don Cheadle) who is all too familiar with the violent world Easy has landed himself in. Slowly drawn deeper and deeper into a web of blackmail dirty cops and even dirtier politicians the ways out for Easy become harder and harder to find.

• Guarding Tess | DVD | (14/01/2002) from £13.97   |  Saving you £6.02 (43.09%)   |  RRP £19.99

  What do you do with a former First Lady who's unpredictable ornery and impossible to please? Anything she wants!! Shirley MacLaine and Nicolas Cage star in this comic compassionate look at life after the White House for two former Washington insiders : First Lady Tess Carlisle and Secret Service agent Doug Chesnic. As uproarious as it is uplifting Guarding Tess is ""a grand mixture of laughter and tears"" (Gary Franklin KCOP-TV).

• Guarding Tess | DVD | (07/09/2009) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  What do you do with a former First Lady who's unpredictable ornery and impossible to please? Anything she wants!! Shirley MacLaine and Nicolas Cage star in this comic compassionate look at life after the White House for two former Washington insiders : First Lady Tess Carlisle and Secret Service agent Doug Chesnic.

• Annie | DVD | (11/12/2000) from £8.74   |  Saving you £7.24 (125.91%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Though it's not in the same league as the classic screen musicals, Annie's heartwarming rags-to-riches storyline, social comment (shallow as it may be) and catchy songs make for an entertaining and unpretentious 90 minutes' viewing. Aileen Quinn is the irrepressible titular orphan, by no means as irritating as she looks in the cover picture; Albert Finney is Oliver Warbucks, the tyrannical tycoon (with a hidden heart of gold, of course) who adopts her for a week in the interests of good PR. The real show-stopper, though, is Carol Burnett as the gin-soaked harpy Miss Hannigan, ruling with an iron fist over an orphanage full of unruly girls, flirting with every man in sight and eventually scheming with her unscrupulous brother (Tim Curry) to kidnap Annie and reap a fat Warbucks reward cheque. While the songs--including "Tomorrow", "You're Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile" and "It's a Hard Knock Life"--are excellent, the kids' voices are shrill and the production pretty low-rent: Annie is very obviously a stage show brought to screen on a low budget. But while it lacks the polish that make the Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe musicals so special, it's funny and sweet and has a rough charm all its own. On the DVD: The film is presented in widescreen, preserving its original 2.35:1 aspect, and is enhanced for 16:9 widescreen TVs; the soundtrack is Dolby surround, though as noted above the music score is relatively rough and ready so top-notch sound isn't actually as important as it would be in other musicals. The extras are pretty disappointing--an uninspired interactive menu features only the obligatory multi-language subtitles, (very) short biographies of the key cast members, a few publicity cards and posters, the theatrical trailer and--most interestingly--an isolated musical score. No commentary from director John Huston, no documentaries, nothing about the 1930s cartoon strip that was, apparently, one of the most popular of its day. There's actually more information in the accompanying booklet than there is on the disc. --Rikki Price

• Big Fish | DVD | (01/03/2010) from £6.99   |  Saving you £3.00 (42.92%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Tim Burton brings his inimitable imagination to a story about an adventurous story-telling father and his estranged son.

• Royal Wedding | DVD | (20/09/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £4.99

  Brother and sister dance act Tom and Ellen Bowen finish an engagement in New York and journey to London at around the same time as a Royal wedding. On board the cruise ship Ellen meets and falls in love with Lord John Brindale with the result she pays less attention to her dancing. Upon arrival in London Tom auditions for a new partner and meets Anne Ashmond but romance starts to threaten the act...

• Hollyoaks Fitness | DVD | (27/12/2004) from £4.70   |  Saving you £13.29 (282.77%)   |  RRP £17.99

  Get fit with the stars of Hollyoaks! This is a fun dance-based fitness programme featuring some cool music high on glamour and style! It takes you through a whole fitness programme from warm-up to cool-down and how to put the whole workout together in a choreographed style.

• Return From Witch Mountain | DVD | (22/03/2004) from £8.86   |  Saving you £7.13 (80.47%)   |  RRP £15.99

  An entire city teeters on the brink of nuclear disaster when greedy criminals manipulate a young boy's supernatural powers for their own devious gain.

• The Entertainer | DVD | (01/03/2004) from £20.97   |  Saving you £-4.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  The Entertainer of the title is Archie Rice, a mediocre music hall artist upholding a dying tradition in an English seaside against a background of the 1956 Suez Crisis. Laurence Olivier stars and is supported by a superb cast including a young Alan Bates as his son, Roger Livesey as his kindly, now retired, always more talented and popular father, and Joan Plowright as his daughter (who, ironically given the story, married Olivier the following year). Albert Finney makes his screen debut in a tiny role and the remarkable cast also features Daniel Massey, Shirley Anne Field, Thora Hird and Charles Gray. Archie himself is a hollow man who brings pain to all around him, and while Olivier's brilliant performance reveals the layers of cynicism which disguise the emptiness inside, the emotional resonance lies with those forced to endure Rice's manipulations, adulteries and deceits. On stage John Osborne's play proved to be a signature part for Olivier, and director Tony Richardson--who filmed Osborne's equally sour Look Back In Anger (1958)--handles the material with unvarnished realism. Unfolding like a dark variation on Chaplin's Limelight (1952), the film equally casts a shadow over the less stellar Tony Hancock vehicle The Punch and Judy Man (1963), ultimately working as both family tragedy and allegory for a declining post-war England. Surprisingly an American 1976 TV movie remake starring Jack Lemmon held its own against this minor British classic. On the DVD: The Entertainer is presented letterboxed at 1.66:1, and sourced from an excellent print preserves the look of the original black and white cinematography very well. Even so a little material is clipped from either side of the image, though this is most notable on the left of the picture. The mono sound is very good. There are no features other than optional subtitles, including English for those hard of hearing. --Gary S Dalkin

• The Hi-Line | DVD | (11/12/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Vera Johnson (Rachael Leigh Cook) is two years out of high school but still lives with her parents. Wasting time with meaningless jobs she dreams of life beyond the limits of her small Montana town. When a young stranger walks into her life bearing a horrible dark secret it will turn her world upside down forever!

• Critical Care | DVD | (01/09/2003) from £12.98   |  Saving you £-6.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Werner Ernst is an overworked intern who only wants what is best for his elderly comatose patient--until he falls for the ailing man's beautiful daughter Felicia. The seductive Felicia has ten million reasons to let her father ""die with dignity "" while her deeply religious sister has her own motives for keeping him alive. Caught between passion and duty Werner descends into a moral mine field where the physician's god-like powers of life and death depend on knowing right from wrong-

• Scrooge | Blu Ray | (07/11/2011) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Most critics couldn't get behind Bill Murray's modern retelling of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, finding it too unfocused at times and not nearly wicked enough. Still, if you are a Murray fan, you have to enjoy his deliciously nasty portrayal of the world's meanest TV executive, who has his cathartic moment one cold Christmas night in New York City. The various ghosts lead him on a ghost-town tour of Manhattan, with stops at holidays past, present and future and a Kumbaya moment when Al Green and Annie Lennox sing "Put a Little Love in Your Heart". The effects are otherworldly, but one wishes the writing were as sharp as Murray's edgy portrayal. --Marshall Fine

• Jimi Hendrix Story | DVD | (11/09/2000) from £8.60   |  Saving you £5.39 (62.67%)   |  RRP £13.99

  If any artist deserved a hagiography it was Hendrix, and Joe Boyd's 1973 "authorised" tribute The Jimi Hendrix Story adequately sanctifies the legend. Perversely for a documentary, it achieves this simply by well-chosen concert footage rather than through the insights of the various talking heads. Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, Lou Reed and Germaine Greer are all wheeled out to wax lyrical about their days with Jimi--but nothing is more eloquent than watching and listening to him play. From "Hey Joe" in grainy black and white on Ready Steady Go, classic footage of Monterey, Woodstock (yes, "The Star-Spangled Banner") and the Isle of White festivals, to an acoustic 12-string rendition of "Hear My Train a' Comin'", Hendrix the musician speaks for himself. But if Hendrix the musician shines through, this is not the most insightful profile of Hendrix the man: the circumstances surrounding his death, for example, are hardly touched upon (girlfriend at the time Monika Dannemann gets only a few seconds screen time). Interview footage with Hendrix himself plus some occasionally rambling and incoherent comments from such intimates as his father, army buddies, ex-girlfriends (including Linda Keith, who "discovered" him in New York and brought him to England) and fellow musicians all take second place to the music itself. The most sensible quote comes from Little Richard, who proves once and for all that he's utterly bonkers, when he says of Jimi's music: "At times he made my big toes shoot up into my boot." On the DVD: This is a dual-layer disc, with a widescreen (1.85:1) print on one side and a standard (4:3) ratio version on the other--although watching in widescreen is redundant, as the film is shot in 4:3 anyway. There are no extras other than a theatrical trailer (despite being advertised as such a menu and scene access surely don't count as "special features": what use is a disc without them?) --Mark Walker

• Hustle | Blu Ray | (16/05/2023) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• 1940s Great British Movies | DVD | (22/09/2014) from £12.48   |  Saving you £7.51 (60.18%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Boxset of four classic films from the 1940s. 'Sleeping Car to Trieste' (1948) stars Jean Kent and Albert Lieven. Set on board the Orient Express the film follows the story of a man named Charles Poole (Alan Wheatley) who has stolen an important political diary and is being pursued by two different people who want it back. 'It's Not Cricket' (1949) stars Basil Radford as Major Bright and Naunton Wayne as Captain Early - detectives who have recently been thrown out of the army for their failure to capture a notoriously evil Nazi Otto Fisch (Maurice Denham). The detectives are invited to a weekend of cricket by their old friend Gerald Lawson (Nigel Buchanan) but what Gerald doesn't realise is that the ball he has purchased for the match contains the famous Rothstein diamond, stolen by Fisch, who will stop at nothing to get it back. 'All Over the Town' (1949) is a British comedy drama starring Norman Wooland as a Royal Air Force pilot who returns to work as a newspaper reporter. After fighting in the Second World War, Nat Hearn (Wooland) resumes his former position at the Tormouth Clarion and finds himself working with Sally Thorpe (Sarah Churchill), the woman who was given his job when he left. When Nat is promoted to editor of the paper, he decides to use his new status to make changes within the publication that will benefit the town but in the process he angers powerful figures within the community. 'Once a Jolly Swagman' (1949) is a British drama about speedway racer Bill Fox (Dirk Bogarde). Factory worker Fox is bored of his daily life and decides to quit his job to become a motorbike racer. Success goes to his head as he leaves his wife (Sandra Dorne) for socialite Pat (Renee Asherson), but when tragedy strikes on the track he returns to his wife and joins a union to fight for riders' rights.