"Actor: Allen Hamilton"

• The Last Detail | DVD | (05/08/2002) from £19.99   |  Saving you £-7.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  The Last Detail nearly didn't get a release. Columbia, for whom it was made, was alarmed by the movie's barrage of profanity and resented the unorthodox working style of its director, Hal Ashby, who loathed producers and made no secret of it. Only when the film picked up a Best Actor Award for Jack Nicholson at Cannes did the studio reluctantly grant it a release--with minimal promotion--to widespread critical acclaim. Nicholson, in one of his best roles, plays "Bad-ass" Buddusky, a naval petty officer detailed, along with his black colleague "Mule" Mulhall (Otis Young), to escort an offender from Virginia to the harsh naval prison at Portsmouth, NH. The miscreant is a naïve youngster, Meadows (Randy Quaid), who's been given eight years for stealing $40 from his CO's wife's favourite charity. The escorts, at first cynically detached, soon start feeling sorry for Meadows and decide to show him a good time in his last few days of freedom. Ashby, a true son of 60s counterculture, avidly abets the anti-authoritarian tone of Robert Towne's script. Meadows is a sad victim of the system--but so too are Buddusky and Mulhall, as they gradually come to realise. A lot of the film is very funny. Nicholson gets to do one of his classic psychotic outbursts--"I am the fucking shore patrol!"--and there are some pungent scenes of male bonding pushed to the verge of desperation. But the overall tone is melancholy, pointed up by the jaunty military marches on the soundtrack. Shot amid bleak, wintry landscapes, in buses and trains and grey urban streets, The Last Detail is a film of constant, compulsive movement going nowhere--a powerful, finely acted study of institutional claustrophobia. On the DVD: The Last Detail disc doesn't have much in the way of extras. There are abbreviated filmographies for Ashby, Nicholson and Quaid (though not for Young) and a trailer for A Few Good Men (1992). The mono sound comes up well in Dolby Digital, and the transfer preserves DoP Michael Chapman's subtle, subfusc palette and the 1.85:1 ratio of the original. --Philip Kemp

• Code Of Silence | DVD | (12/01/2004) from £12.24   |  Saving you £0.75 (6.13%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Chuck Norris plays Det. Eddie Cusack a tough Chicago cop who battles two opposing mob gangs in this fast-paced police actioner. Norris is asked to rectify the situation when the daughter of an underworld Don is used as a pawn in an escalating drug war. Complete with dazzling martial arts action and incredible stunts!

• The Organization | DVD | (03/02/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  The Organization was the second and final sequel to 1967's In the Heat of the Night and sees Sidney Poitier's homicide detective Virgil Tibbs called in to investigate the murder of a factory manager. In a lengthy, dialogue-free opening (the film's best sequence), it appears that we are witnessing the culprits in action. However, this group turns out to be a gang of idealistic young vigilantes who knew that the factory was a front for an international drugs cartel--the Organization of the title--and have made off with a haul of heroin secreted there. Suspected of the manager's murder, they meet Tibbs and seek his cooperation. He agrees to help them, pitting himself not only against the Organization but his own police department. Set in San Franscisco, The Organization invites invidious comparisons with Bullitt: its somewhat cheesy contemporary soundtrack, derived from Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, certainly marks it as a piece of its period, as do the occasionally less-than-convincing action sequences, risible acting and far-fetched plot. Poitier, as ever, lends the film a certain dignity and poise, worthy of better material to work with than this. The film is also notable for providing early showcases for two of Cop TV's most famous Captains: Daniel J Travanti (Hill Street Blues) and Bernie Hamilton (later Captain Dobey in Starsky & Hutch) are both assigned minor roles here. On the DVD: The Organization comes to disc in an adequate transfer, though still a little grainy. The sole extra is the original trailer. --David Stubbs

• Soul Survivors | DVD | (21/10/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The story tells of Cassie, a college student plagued by hallucinations that her boyfriend has come back to life after he is killed in a car crash.

• Schizopolis | DVD | (10/03/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Both a kind of home movie and a salute to the hip, pop-up sketch comedy of 1960s/early 1970s television--Laugh-In, Monty Python's Flying Circus, that sort of thing--Schizopolis is a hit-and-miss series of gags with vaguely connecting threads of Kafkaesque paranoia. Soderbergh himself stars as two people--one an ineffective dentist and the other a speechwriter for a cult movement called Eventualism, which has set out to "question all answers"--connected by their romances with the same woman, played by Soderbergh's real-life ex, Betsy Bramley. There isn't so much a story as a series of bits in which these characters often (though not necessarily) turn up, from press conferences on the subject of horse urination to old footage of nudists to a scene of an Eventualist exchange between husband and wife: "Generic greeting!" "Generic greeting returned!" None of this leads to a literal point but after a while an undercurrent of disease about making sense of the modern world becomes apparent beneath the jokes. Soderbergh (sex, lies, and videotape, Out of Sight) is certainly a filmmaker who goes his own way in life, always hitting his target in one spot or another and occasionally getting a bull's-eye for his trouble. Schizopolis is no bull's-eye and it has just as many detractors as admirers but it's impossible not to appreciate Soderbergh's conviction that making a film out on the fringes is a worthy endeavour. --Tom Keogh

• Bullet Boy | DVD | (04/12/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  So Solid Crew's Asher D leads this gritty drama set in the tough streets of East London.