"Actor: Ed Crowley"

• Network | DVD | (17/03/2003) from £17.11   |  Saving you £-1.12 (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Media madness reigns supreme in screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky's scathing satire about the uses and abuses of network television. But while Chayefsky's and director Sidney Lumet's take on television may seem quaint in the age of "reality TV" and Jerry Springer's talk-show fisticuffs, Network is every bit as potent now as it was when the film was released in 1976. And because Chayefsky was one of the greatest of all dramatists, his Oscar-winning script about the ratings frenzy at the cost of cultural integrity is a showcase for powerhouse acting by Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway and Beatrice Straight (who each won Oscars), and Oscar nominee William Holden in one of his finest roles. Finch plays a veteran network anchorman who's been fired because of low ratings. His character's response is to announce he'll kill himself on live television two weeks hence. What follows, along with skyrocketing ratings, is the anchorman's descent into insanity, during which he fervently rages against the medium that made him a celebrity. Dunaway plays the frigid, ratings-obsessed producer who pursues success with cold-blooded zeal; Holden is the married executive who tries to thaw her out during his own seething midlife crisis. Through it all, Chayefsky (via Finch) urges the viewer to repeat the now-famous mantra "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" to reclaim our humanity from the medium that threatens to steal it away. --Jeff Shannon

• Clan Of The Cave Bear | DVD | (14/03/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  In the last days of the Neanderthals, Ayla, a young orphan, must overcome prejudice when she joins a new tribe.

• Running On Empty | DVD | (21/11/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  After antiwar activists Annie and Arthur Pope (Chistine Lahti and Judd Hirsh) blew up a napalm lab in 1971 they became lifelong fugitives. They and their children have stayed just one step ahead of the law running from state to state job to job identity to identity. But now elder son Danny (River Phoenix) wants to stop running from a past not his. And to do so he might never see his on-the-lam family again...

• Garbo Talks | DVD | (12/04/2005) from £11.49   |  Saving you £-5.50 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  As a middle aged protestor faces a terminal illness her one desire is to meet Greta Garbo. The search for this reclusive star proves to be an hilarious quest.