"Actor: Hugh Owens"

• Midnight Cowboy | DVD | (01/02/2000) from £7.19   |  Saving you £5.80 (80.67%)   |  RRP £12.99

  The first, and only, X-rated film to win a best picture Academy Award, John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy seems a lot less daring today (and has been reclassified as an R), but remains a fascinating time capsule of late-1960s sexual decadence in mainstream American cinema. In a career-making performance, Jon Voight plays Joe Buck, a naive Texas dishwasher who goes to the big city (New York) to make his fortune as a sexual hustler. Although enthusiastic about selling himself to rich ladies for stud services, he quickly finds it hard to make a living and eventually crashes in a seedy dump with a crippled petty thief named Ratzo Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman, doing one of his more effective "stupid acting tricks," with a limp and a high-pitch rasp of a voice). Schlesinger's quick-cut, semi-psychedelic style has dated severely, as has his ruthlessly cynical approach to almost everybody but the lead characters. But at its heart the movie is a sad tale of friendship between a couple of losers lost in the big city, and with an ending no studio would approve today. It's a bit like an urban Of Mice and Men, but where both guys are Lenny. --Jim Emerson

• The Ruling Class | DVD | (25/06/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Based on Peter Barnes' hit play this caustic hilarious and irreverent black comedy has rightly become a cult classic. The House of Gurney has a family problem - namely the 14th Earl of Gurney (Peter O' Toole) who thinks he is Jesus Christ and when restored to `normalcy' turns into Jack the Ripper. Unfortunately the young earl is also the sole heir to the family fortune so his relatives go to great lengths to trick him into siring a new heir. Then they can institutionalise him and