"Actor: Andrew Fraser"

• Beautiful Thing | DVD | (03/12/2001) from £9.90   |  Saving you £3.08 (44.57%)   |  RRP £9.99

  A grim, gritty South London housing estate makes an unlikley setting for a romantic fairy-tale, but Hetti MacDonald's gay teenage love story all but brings it off. Adapted by screenwriter Jonathan Harvey from his own stage play, Beautiful Thing tells how teenage loner Jamie falls for next-door neighbour Ste, one of the tough kids who bullies him at school. Amazingly, he finds his feelings reciprocated, and the two progress to a tender, tentative affair. Sidestepping conventional notions of working-class homophobia, the film succeeds in presenting its central relationship not as anything startlingly different, but simply as a teenage romance--with all the joy and heartbreak it implies--that happens to be between two 15-year-old guys. Problems of brutality and deprivation are acknowledged but never allowed to dominate, and under the influence of love even the harsh walkways and terraces of the estate take on a sunlit glow. --Philip Kemp

• Too Late The Hero | DVD | (08/04/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Set on a Pacific island in 1942, Too Late the Hero is a hard-as-nails "men on a mission" war movie: a group of British soldiers have to traverse the New Hebrides to destroy a Japanese radio transmitter, then get back to safety while being hunted all the way. Inevitably everything goes wrong, but director Robert (The Dirty Dozen) Aldrich turns the book of WWII movie clichés on its head and springs some unnerving surprises. Even the token American star, Cliff Robertson--echoing William Holden's grafted-on role in The Bridge on the River Kwai--proves less than obviously heroic, while an outstanding Michael Caine brings considerable depth to his usual cynical cockney. Henry Fonda gets heavily billed for a brief guest appearance, but there are star performances such fine British character actors as Denholm Elliot, Ian Bannen, Ronald Fraser and Lance Percival. This portrait of battle-worn men offers greater complexity than Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, while the jungle trek was more recently paralleled in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line. Only the attitudes--more 1970 than 1942--detract from Aldrich's tellingly realistic vision, which with a thoughtfully ironic script and a succession of tense set pieces and brutal firefights, builds to a harrowing climax. On the DVD: The picture is presented at approximately 1.7:1, reformatted from the original 2.2:1 70mm theatrical presentation. Despite approximately 25 per cent of the original image being missing, this loss is only really noticeable in a few scenes. Apart from the occasional fleck, the print is in superb condition, and despite the lack of anamorphic enhancement the picture is sharp, detailed and has excellent colour. The surround sound (not mono as listed on the packaging) is highly effective, with the tension being increased by a considerable amount of the music coming from the rear speakers. The special features are simply a few static pages of biographical and production notes. --Gary S. Dalkin

• There Was a Crooked Man | Blu Ray | (30/04/2018) from £15.98   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Unseen for over fifty years, this exceptionally rare feature sees comedy legend Norman Wisdom at his best playing a naïve explosives expert who finds himself involved with a criminal gang after uncovering nefarious dealings by a prominent industrialist! Hailed as one of Wisdom's finest films, it was one of two features he made independently, and marked a departure from his more familiar and endlessly popular comic creation, 'the Gump'. Co-starring Alfred Marks and Susannah York, There Was a Crooked Man was directed by the BAFTA-nominated Stuart Burge. Features: Image gallery Original promotional PDFs Booklet by Norman Wisdom expert Richard Dacre

• Prime Suspect 2 | DVD | (12/05/2003) from £9.70   |  Saving you £0.29 (2.90%)   |  RRP £9.99

  In the first Prime Suspect, Helen Mirren's ballsy woman Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennyson battled the boys club and their sexist barbs to prove herself in a chauvinist department. In Prime Suspect 2, she's assigned to head a racially charged murder investigation in a largely African/Caribbean neighbourhood. It's politics as usual in the image-conscious organization, so the superintendent adds to the team black Detective Robert Oswalde (Colin Salma), a sharp but hot-headed investigator who has just broken off an affair with Tennyson. Now Tennyson grapples with her own conflicted feelings while fighting political and public-relations battles both in the media and within the police system itself in the midst of investigating the labyrinthine case. Between the scant clues left to sift, a prime suspect on the verge of death himself and divisions in her own team that result in a devastating death, Tennyson soon begins to suspect she's been hung out to dry by the department. Screenwriter Allan Cubitt dives into the murky waters of volatile racial and social relations to create an even more complex and compelling mystery in Tennyson's second appearance and Mirren rises to the challenge to explore the contradictions of an uncompromising cop in a compromising position. --Sean Axmaker

• Danger UXB | DVD | (06/09/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Classic military drama series revolving around a World War Two bomb disposal squad. Dead Man's Shoes: It is the autumn of 1940. The Great Blitz has taken London by surprise hundreds of civilians have been killed and thousands more made homeless nightly. Brian Ash a young Royal Engineer Officer finds himself posted to a Bomb Disposal Company hastily assembled to combat a terrible new menace - the hundreds of unexploded bombs that are coming close to paralysing the whole city. Unsung Heroes: Second Lieutenant Brian Ash is settling in with life in Bomb Disposal but he soon finds out that even in the blitz there are certain rules that you can break at your peril. Just Like a Woman: When the tragedy of war comes too close it brings out an even stronger determination from the men of the Bomb Disposal to help defend the citizens of London. But a bomb has to be handled gently...

• Danger UXB 4 | DVD | (20/05/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Classic military drama series revolving around a World War Two bomb disposal squad.

• Danger UXB 3 | DVD | (05/09/2002) from £41.49   |  Saving you £-26.50 (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Classic military drama series revolving around a World War Two bomb disposal squad.