"Actor: Byron Coll"

• A Matter Of Life & Death Blu-Ray | Blu Ray | (22/04/2019) from £7.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  NOTICE: Polish Release, cover may contain Polish text/markings. The disk has English audio.

• A Matter Of Life And Death | DVD | (11/06/2007) from £6.38   |  Saving you £13.61 (213.32%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Legendary director Powell and Pressburger at their most imaginative - and controversial - with a film about a pilot who suffers strange hallucinations after surviving being shot down over the English Channel.

• Desperate Justice | DVD | (08/10/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £1.99

  A harrowing, if limited, 1993 thriller, Desperate Justice stars Lesley Ann Warren as Carol, a mother whose young daughter is raped by the caretaker of her school and left in a coma. The culprit is quickly rounded up; however, the case against him is dismissed for lack of rock-solid evidence. In a moment of blind fear and rage, Carol metes out summary justice of her own--and must face up to the consequences. Desperate Justice is suitably restrained in dealing with the violence central to its subject matter. While competently enough scripted and acted to retain the viewer's interest and sympathy, it has a slightly fuzzy, sucrose feel about it that acts as a general anaesthetic against the inevitably disturbing subject matter. The final scenes in particular achieve a tidy, somewhat predictable sense of "closure" so beloved by Americans. Despite its made-for-TV air, Desperate Justice has just enough about it to ensure a passable late night 90 minutes over a mug of Horlicks. On the DVD: This is not the sort of movie that was ever designed to benefit from DVD enhancement. Picture format is 4:3. As well as trailers, there are included here items entitled "About the film" and "About the stars", which turn out to be perfunctory text-only blurbs. --David Stubbs

• A Matter of Life and Death (The Criterion Collection) | Blu Ray | (24/07/2018) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Field Punishment No.1 | DVD | (20/04/2015) from £11.56   |  Saving you £1.43 (12.37%)   |  RRP £12.99

  They endured incarceration in hellish punishment camps even asylums for the insane. They were stigmatised and tortured in an attempt to break their spirit. And despite their courageous stance, they were shipped off from their native New Zealand to the front line of what is now judged by many to be the most terrible war in history. This powerful, moving and often brutal drama charts the true story of some of the men who refused to fight in World War I. It was a stance that tested their personal beliefs to the limit, but it also showed the human spirit at its most indomitable. Starring Fraser Brown (Harry, The Pretender).

• Life And Death of Colonel Blimp, The / A Matter Of Life And Death | DVD | (17/03/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Two masterpieces of British cinema are paired here--Powell and Pressburger's first Technicolor triumph, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and their even more ambitious A Matter of Life and Death (1946). Both pictures are transcendent examples of the filmmakers' craft, and remain models of great cinema long after their original wartime propaganda brief has expired. Based on a famously satirical cartoon strip that mocked outmoded attitudes of fair play at a time of "total war", Blimp subsequently became notorious as the film Churchill tried to have banned. Because the War Office objected to the screenplay, they refused to allow P&P's first choice for the role, Laurence Olivier, and the duo cast unknown stage actor Roger Livesey in his place. It is Livesey's sympathetic performance that transforms Clive "Sugar" Candy from an object of satire to one of warm affection, effectively reversing the film's intended message about old-fashioned decency versus wartime pragmatism. Anton Walbrook is a profound presence in a role that mirrored the actor's own plight as a German in Britain, while Deborah Kerr is a living leitmotif in the film, playing no fewer than three distinct but deliberately related roles. Briefed by the Ministry of Information to make a film that would foster Anglo-American relations in the post-war period, the duo, known as "the Archers", came up with A Matter of Life and Death, an extravagant and extraordinary fantasy in which David Niven's downed pilot must justify his continuing existence to a heavenly panel because he has made the mistake of falling in love with an American girl (Kim Hunter) when he really should have been dead. National stereotypes are lampooned as the angelic judges squabble over his fate. In a neat reversal of expectations, the heaven sequences are black and white, while earth is seen in Technicolor. Daring cinematography mixes monochrome and colour, incorporates time-lapse images, and even toys with background "time freezes" 50 years before The Matrix. Roger Livesey and Raymond Massey lead the fine supporting cast. On the DVD: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and A Matter of Life and Death are presented in reasonably sharp 4:3 ratio with good mono sound. Blimp comes with a 25-minute documentary feature that tells us nothing revelatory about making the film, but has good new interviews with cinematographer Jack Cardiff (then an apprentice) and eloquent admirer Stephen Fry. Text biographies and stills are also included. Life and Death has no extras. --Mark Walker

• The Twilight Zone - Vol. 3 | DVD | (29/05/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  In 1959 screenwriter Rod Serling first opened the door to the "dimension of imagination" that is The Twilight Zone, a show quite unlike anything that had gone before, and better than much that has followed in its wake. This original and daring television series ran for a magnificent five seasons from 1959 to 1964 and still looks as fresh as ever, particularly on DVD. What distinguished the series (and still does) is the quality of the scripts, many of which were penned by Serling, but with significant contributions from veteran sci-fi authors and screenwriters such as Richard Matheson. Actors of the calibre of Robert Redford, Burgess Meredith, Lee Marvin and William Shatner gave some of their best small-screen performances, while an unforgettable main title theme by Bernard Herrmann and musical contributions from young turks such as Jerry Goldsmith underlined the show's attraction for great creative talent both behind and in front of the cameras. Volume 3 contains another selection of four episodes from across the series. "Steel" (episode 122) stars Lee Marvin in a futuristic Richard Matheson story concerning a penniless boxing manager who is forced into the ring when his robot boxer breaks down. Matheson is concerned to illustrate the lengths to which people are forced to go when desperate, but his moral is undermined a little by setting the story in the far future of 1974; Marvin, however, is a magnetic presence. In the tense and tautly written "A Game of Pool" (episode 70), Jack Klugman (The Odd Couple, Quincy) is a boastful pool player who challenges champion "Fats" Brown (Jonathan Winters) to a match in which the stakes are his life. "Walking Distance" is a slice of wistful, semi-autobiographical nostalgia from Serling in which a burned-out media exec returns to the town of his childhood (watch out for a very young Ron Howard as one of the kids). Bernard Herrmann's masterful score for this episode was composed not long after his music for Hitchcock's Vertigo, and has a similar tragi-romantic streak. Finally, "Kick the Can" (episode 86) is the story of the residents of a retirement home who discover (or rediscover) Peter Pan's secret for staying permanently young: it's easy to see why Steven Spielberg decided to adapt this episode for the 1983 movie. On the DVD: A neat animated menu with a winking eye guides the viewer "Inside the Twilight Zone", which consists of digests of background information on the individual episodes, as well as a general history of the show, season-by-season breakdown and a potted biography of Serling. --Mark Walker