"Actor: David L"

• The Missionary | DVD | (29/07/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Fallen women? Does it mean they've hurt their knees? After a decade of soul-saving in Africa Charles Fortescue is asked to minister to the ladies of the night in 1906 London. So Fortescue feeds them shelters them and not infrequently provides them a bed: his! A naive man of the cloth becomes a man of the sheets in this playfully naughty yet always tasteful comedy that stars Monty Python's Michael Palin (who also wrote the script) as Fortescue and features a colourful array of cockeyed characters: a blissful airhead (Phoebe Nicholls) a lusty mission sponsor (Maggie Smith) a bewildered butler (Michael Hordern) an earthy bishop (Denholm Elliott) a cantankerous John Bull (Trevor Howard) and more. Jolly good fun!

• Blazing Saddles | DVD | (02/10/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Mel Brooks scored his first commercial hit with this raucous Western spoof starring the late Cleavon Little as the newly hired (and conspicuously black) sheriff of Rock Ridge. Sheriff Bart teams up with deputy Jim (Gene Wilder) to foil the railroad-building scheme of the nefarious Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman). The simple plot is just an excuse for a steady stream of gags, many of them unabashedly tasteless, that Brooks and his wacky cast pull off with side-splitting success. The humour is so juvenile and crude that you just have to surrender to it; highlights abound, from Alex Karras as the ox-riding Mongo to Madeline Kahn's uproarious send-up of Marlene Dietrich as saloon songstress Lili Von Shtupp. Adding to the comedic excess is the infamous campfire scene involving a bunch of hungry cowboys, heaping servings of baked beans and, well, you get the idea. --Jeff Shannon

• Platoon | DVD | (10/09/2001) from £6.10   |  Saving you £13.89 (227.70%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Winning a raft of awards, not least of which four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, Oliver Stone's Platoon was a box-office smash heralding Hollywood's second wave of Vietnam war films. Where predecessors The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) were elaborate epics, Platoon simply showed the daily reality of the war from the point of view of ordinary soldiers. Stone's own service in Vietnam gives his work a unique authenticity. Charlie Sheen gives his best performance to date, enduring a series of increasingly large-scale and bloody battles which retrospectively make one wonder why Saving Private Ryan was hailed as so new. Against this gruelling verity the film falters over the symbolic conflict between good and evil sergeants played by Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger. Even though this was also based in real life, it strikes a too conventionally Hollywood-like note in a film which otherwise maintains much of the raw power of Stone's other film from 1986, Salvador. Johnny Depp fans should look out for an early appearance by the star. Stone would return to Vietnam with the more sophisticated Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Heaven and Earth (1993). On the DVD: The 50-minute documentary "Tour of the Inferno" goes beyond the usual "making-of" to present a personal account both of the film and of Stone's own time in Vietnam. Likewise the two audio commentaries--one by Stone, the other by Captain Dale Dye, fellow veteran and military technical advisor--range between the making of the film and the degree to which the actors came to inhabit their parts, to their own wartime experiences. Both commentaries bring a fresh level of appreciation and understanding to the film. Also included is the original trailer and three TV commercials, together with well-presented stills galleries of behind-the-scenes photos and poster art. Following a credit sequence marred by dirt on the print, the anamorphically enhanced 1.77:1 image is sharp and clear. The many night scenes are very dark but remain easily comprehensible. The three-channel Dolby Digital sound is suitably raw and powerful, though an early sequence featuring rain in the jungle suffers from very distracting repeated drop-outs in the left channel. --Gary S Dalkin

• Kentucky Fried Movie | DVD | (22/03/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Twenty years before the Farrelly Brothers turned raunch into acceptable film comedy, the team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker exploited it first. The college threesome made it big with Airplane in 1980, but this 1977 cinematic version of their live theatre show was the ground zero for their talents. Kentucky Fried Movie is a mish-mash of sketches, fake commercials, and parodies with no central theme--except their crudeness and laugh-out-loud humour. Highlights include a commercial for "Scot Free", a board game based on the Kennedy assassination conspiracy; "The Wonderful World of Sex", in which a couple goes through foreplay with a self-help narrator instructing them step-by-step; and a 20-minute spoof of Bruce Lee films entitled "A Fistful of Yen". Brazen to a fault, the movie will reach for any punchline, no matter how crude (and those who flocked to the film's initial release looking for R-rated sex will remember the final sketch and the infamous trailer for "Catholic High School Girls in Trouble".) Directed by then-unknown John Landis (who went on to make The Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London) on a shoestring budget, the film has aged. But crassness, when this funny, is forever. --Doug Thomas, Amazon.com

• Swing Kids | DVD | (15/03/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  It's wartime Germany and a group of kids calling themselves the Swing Kids get together at their local dance and swing to the sounds of the American 30's...

• The Draughtsman's Contract | DVD | (23/02/2004) from £18.75   |  Saving you £1.24 (6.61%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A stunning new print of Peter Greenaway's acclaimed first feature a satisfying complex Jacobean murder mysery set in an English country garden during the height of a late 17th century summer. A draughtsman hired to execute 12 drawings of an estate negotiates terms to include the sexual favours of his employer (Janet Suzman). But when a corpse is dragged from the moat the draughtsman's designs may reveal more than he realised. ""Exotic Erotic and Utterly Enigmatic"" - Time Out

• The Hundred Year Old Man | DVD | (27/10/2014) from £4.99   |  Saving you £13.00 (260.52%)   |  RRP £17.99

  Based on the internationally best-selling novel by Jonas Jonasson the unlikely story of a 100-year-old man who decides it's not too late to start over. After a long and eventful life Allan Karlsson ends up in a nursing home believing it to be his last stop. The only problem is that he's still in good health and in one day he turns 100. A big celebration is in the works but Allan really isn't interested and decides to escape. He climbs out the window in his slippers and embarks on a hilarious and entirely unexpected journey.

• Charles Dickens 200th Anniversary Collection | DVD | (23/01/2012) from £22.85   |  Saving you £22.14 (96.89%)   |  RRP £44.99

  The engaging characters, compelling action and intriguing plot twists of Charles Dickens' great novels provide the perfect material for screen adaptation. Lavishly-filmed with a galaxy of stars, but retaining all the tension, emotion and drama of the novels, these BBC series have received both critical and popular acclaim.Great ExpectationsRay Winstone, Gillian Anderson and David Suchet are among a fabulous cast bringing out the very best of Dickens' masterpiece - part thriller, part mystery, with a powerful love story at its heart.Little DorrifThis stunning TV adaptation weaves Dickens' tale of 1820's London into life with a sumptuous production and all-star cast - including Matthew Macfadyen, Tom Courtenay and Andy Serkis.Oliver TwistWith a stellar cast including Timothy Spall, Edward Fox and Rob Brydon, this gripping adaptation delivers a modern, thrilling, tragic and occasionally comic edge to Dickens' classic tale.Bleak HouseThe murder mystery, love story and tantalising scandal of Dickens' literary masterwork are transformed into fast-moving, daring and compelling television in this acclaimed adaption starring Gillian Anderson, Dennis Lawson and Charles Dance.

• Bones - Season 9 | Blu Ray | (20/10/2014) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  All the episodes from the ninth season of the hit TV show about Temperance Brennan (known as Bones) a highly skilled forensic anthropologist who works at the Jeffersonian Institute in Washington D.C. When the standard methods of identifying a body are useless (i.e. the remains are too badly decomposed burned or destroyed) law enforcement calls on Brennan for her uncanny ability to read clues left behind in the victim's bones. While most people can't handle Brennan's intelligence her drive for the truth or the way she flings herself headlong into every investigation Booth is an exception. A member of the FBI's Homicide Investigations Unit and a former Army sniper Booth mistrusts science and scientists - the 'squints ' as he calls them - who pore over the physical evidence of a crime. But even he cannot deny that the combination of his people-smarts and Brennan's scientific acumen makes them a formidable duo both professionally and personally.

• Goldstone | DVD | (06/11/2017) from £8.85   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Indigenous Detective Jay Swan arrives in the frontier mining town of Goldstone on a missing persons enquiry. What seems like a simple light duties investigation soon opens into a web of crime and corruption implicating the local Mayor, mining boss and Aboriginal Land Council. Writer/Director Ivan Sen follows up the critically acclaimed MYSTERY ROAD with this masterful outback thriller, featuring outstanding performances from a stellar cast, including Aaron Pedersen, reprising his role from MYSTERY ROAD, Alex Russell (CHRONICLE), Oscar-nominee Jacki Weaver (SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK, ANIMAL KINGDOM), David Wenham (THE LORD OF THE RINGS), David Gulpilil (THE PROPOSITION) and Cheng Pei-Pei (CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON).

• Contact | DVD | (25/09/1998) from £8.95   |  Saving you £5.04 (56.31%)   |  RRP £13.99

  The opening and closing moments of Robert (Forrest Gump) Zemeckis's Contact astonish viewers with the sort of breathtaking conceptual imagery one hardly ever sees in movies these day--each is an expression of the heroine's lifelong quest (both spiritual and scientific) to explore the meaning of human existence through contact with extraterrestrial life. The movie begins by soaring far out into space, then returns dizzyingly to earth until all the stars in the heavens condense into the sparkle in one little girl's eye. It ends with that same girl as an adult (Jodie Foster)--her search having taken her to places beyond her imagination--turning her gaze inward and seeing the universe in a handful of sand. Contact traces the journey between those two visual epiphanies. Based on Carl Sagan's novel, Contact is exceptionally thoughtful and provocative for a big-budget Hollywood science fiction picture, with elements that recall everything from 2001 to The Right Stuff. Foster's solid performance (and some really incredible alien hardware) keep viewers interested, even when the story skips and meanders, or when the halo around the golden locks of rising-star-of-a-different-kind Matthew McConaughey (as the pure-Hollywood-hokum love interest)reaches Milky Way-level wattage. Ambitious, ambiguous, pretentious, unpredictable--Contact is all of these things and more. Much of it remains open to speculation and interpretation but whatever conclusions one eventually draws, Contactdeserves recognition as a rare piece of big-budget studio film making on a personal scale. --Jim Emerson

• The Politician's Wife | DVD | (06/09/2004) from £13.21   |  Saving you £-3.22 (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Flora appears to be the perfect politician's wife running her husband's constituency and country home with ease while he pursues his career as Minister for the Family at Westminister. Until a sex scandel involving her husband changes Flora's life forever. Political intrigue adultery and betrayal is just the beginning until Flora takes her revenge.

• Sink the Bismarck / The Enemy Below (Double Pack) | DVD | (02/06/2003) from £14.35   |  Saving you £0.64 (4.46%)   |  RRP £14.99

  The Enemy Below and Sink the Bismarck! form a double feature of semi-classic CinemaScope-era WWII naval dramas sailing from the Fox vault onto DVD for the first time. In The Enemy Below Robert Mitchum and Curt Jurgens are respectively captains of a US destroyer and a German U-boat whose vessels come into conflict in the South Atlantic. Both are good men with a job to do, the script noting Jurgens' distaste for Hitler and the Nazis and engaging our sympathy with the German sailors almost as much as the Americans. Made at the height of the Cold War of the 1950s, the film delivers a liberal message of cooperation wrapped inside some spectacular action scenes and a story that builds to a tense and exciting, moving finale. Sink the Bismarck! is a British film dating from three years later and adopts a more documentary style in recounting the race against time to track and destroy what was in 1941 the most powerful battleship then built, the Bismarck. Shot in gleaming black and white so as to make use of genuine WWII archive footage, the film is held together by the introduction of a fictional naval officer in overall command of the operation, played excellently by Kenneth More. To add some human warmth he is given a tentative romantic subplot with a WREN played by the luminous Dana Wynter. Though initially slow to gather steam, Sink the Bismarck! finally delivers an epic, thoroughly horrifying conclusion. On the DVD: The Enemy Below and Sink the Bismarck! come as a two-disc set with multiple language and subtitle options, including English for Hard of Hearing, but no extras other than the original trailers. These are presented at 16:9 and 2.35:1. Both are rather faded, but are fine examples of an era when watching the previews didn't guarantee a migraine. Both films are anamorphically enhanced in their original 2.35:1 CinemaScope, and, bar a little grain in some shots and the inevitably inferior archive footage, the picture quality is excellent. The Enemy Below boasts sturdy three-channel sound (left, front, right) while Sink the Bismarck! is in very well mixed stereo. --Gary S Dalkin

• Dawn of the Dead | Blu Ray | (01/03/2010) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £29.99

  When there's no more room in hell the dead will walk the earth! As a blend of horror action tension and humour Dawn of the Dead stands in a class of its own as the only true zombie epic of all time. A National Emergency grips the US as the zombie population grows at an alarming rate. Two S.W.A.T. officers a helicopter pilot and his girlfriend escape the city and take refuge in an abandoned shopping mall after securing it following a series of flesh-shredding confrontations with the undead. Their survival is threatened when a band of looters leave a door open allowing the zombies access to the mall once more and a final stand-off for survival must play out. With near unbearable tension throughout George A Romero's Dawn of the Dead is a work of zombie film-making genius.

• The Hive - The Honeycomb Collection | DVD | (15/06/2015) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

• Power Rangers - The Movie | DVD | (22/03/2004) from £10.79   |  Saving you £2.20 (20.39%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Ivan Ooze the most sinister villain the universe has ever seen is planning to take over the world... and only the Power Rangers can stop him! In order to do so they must discover an ancient source of power - the like of which they've never used before. Filled with non-stop action and adventure state-of-the-art special effects all new Zords and great new songs from some of the hottest bands around 'Power Rangers The Movie' is a pulse-pounding thrill of a ride. They've never been stronger. Never been bolder. Never more fearless...until now.

• A League of Their Own | DVD | (04/07/2005) from £9.49   |  Saving you £-3.50 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Tom Hanks Geena Davis and Madonna star in this major-league comedy from the team that brought you Big. Hanks stars as Jimmy Dugan a washed-up ball player whose big league days are over. Hired to coach in the All-American Girls League of 1943 - while the male pros are at war - Dugan finds himself drawn back into the game by the heart and heroics of his ""all-girl"" team. Jon Lovitz adds a scene stealing cameo as the sarcastic scout who recruits Dottie Hanson (Davis) the ""baseball dolly"" with a Babe Ruth swing. Teammates Madonna Lori Petty and Rosie O'Donnell round out the roster taking the team to the World Series. Based on the true story of the pioneering women who blazed the trail for generations of athletes.

• Men Of Honour | Blu Ray | (27/05/2013) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  A military drama starring Robert De Niro and Cuba Gooding Jr that tells the true story of Carl Bashear who combated racism to become the US Navy's first African-American deep-sea diver.

• Conspiracy | DVD | (15/09/2003) from £29.93   |  Saving you £-15.94 (N/A%)   |  RRP £13.99

  Based on the only surviving record of the infamous 1942 Wannsee Conference, the BBC/HBO produced Conspiracy reconstructs the two-hour meeting during which leading members of the SS and the Nazi government made definitive plans for the genocide of Europe's Jews. Sixteen men sit around a table and politely discuss the mechanics and ramifications of murdering millions. As SS General Reinhard Heydrich, overall architect of the Final Solution, Kenneth Branagh is brilliant, charming, manipulative and threatening, a cultured man seemingly without a soul. As his aid, SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann, Stanley Tucci is the incarnation of the banality of evil, an efficient and self-effacing bureaucrat in a fine performance marred only by a hint of the actor's American accent. Colin Firth is a powerful foil for Branagh as Dr Wilhelm Stuckart, author of Nazi Germany's race laws and a stickler for the rule of law, no matter how insane the law may have become; while David Threlfall makes a striking impression as the one man who comes closest to taking a moral stand, Dr Wilhelm Kritzinger. Directed in an elegantly controlled style by Frank Pierson, Conspiracy is the Janus face of the 1957 classic 12 Angry Men and a chilling companion to the BBC/HBO Churchill drama The Gathering Storm (2002). On the DVD: Conspiracy comes to DVD with text profiles of the four leading actors and the director and two featurettes, one running two minutes, the other four, neither of which is any more than an electronic press-kit. Sound is clear, perfectly good Dolby Surround, while the picture, though anamorphically enhanced at 16:9, is no more than adequate. --Gary S Dalkin

• CSI Miami: The Complete Season 10 | DVD | (01/04/2013) from £39.99   |  Saving you £10.00 (25.01%)   |  RRP £49.99

  All 19 episodes from the tenth season of the Miami-based crime drama starring David Caruso as Lt Horatio Caine. In this series, Caine continues to be haunted by visions of his deceased wife. However, with a serial killer on the loose and numerous other crimes in need of attention, Horatio will need to have his mind on the job. The episodes are: 'Countermeasures', 'Stiff', 'Blown Away', 'Look Who's Taunting', 'Killer Regrets', 'By the Book', 'Sinner Takes All', 'Dead Ringer', 'A Few Dead Men', 'Long Gone', 'Crowned', 'Friendly Fire', 'Terminal Velocity', 'Last Straw', 'No Good Dead', 'Rest in Pieces', 'At Risk', 'Law and Disorder' and 'Habeas Corpse'.