Brand new comedy written by and starring Jack Whitehall. Alfie Wickers likes to think of himself as a maverick teacher, a charmer and cool dude who has a unique relationship with his pupils. In reality though, Alfie has joined Abbey Grove School straight from teacher training and is making it up as he goes along - relying on his misguided sense of cunning and his poorly developed ability to lie and cheat. When he's not bluffing his way through teaching a class of dunces, Alfie's attentions are directed to the attractive Head of Biology, Miss Gulliver. And, though the fiercesome Deputy Head, Miss Pickwell, definitely has his card marked, at least he has an ally - the Head Teacher...
When a sacred jewel that is imbued with the pagan power of the Egyptian gods is stolen from the tomb of Professor Morlant the deceased man rises from his grave and seeks out the precious stone. However the Professor has no idea who stole the jewel and neither do you...
William Shakespeare's As You Like It: Globe Theatre 2009
Howard Hawks's final film once again teams him with John Wayne with a script by Leigh Brackett (who also wrote his 'El Dorado' and 'Rio Bravo'). The time is just after the end of the Civil War. Wayne is Union Colonel Cord McNally who is teamed with two Confederate soldiers he captured during the war in order to take down a thieving bootlegger. Their travels take them to a small town being held in terror by an evil Sheriff. McNally and his crew decide to help the townspeople with
The 1959 Newport Jazz Festival was a true musical watershed, as Jazz on a Summers Day reveals. This 75-minute film captures an event poised on the cusp of a new era, as the cool jazz of Jimmy Guiffre and the effortless scat of Anita ODay intermingle with the hard bop of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet and the smouldering fusion overtones of the Chico Hamilton Quintet. Theres a crisp contribution from Chuck Berry, a typically feel-good set from Louis Armstrong--including a hilarious duo with Jack Teagarden--and, as evening shades into night, a heartfelt performance from Mahalia Jackson, closing with a melting rendition of "The Lords Prayer". Bert Stern has assembled all these and more into a satisfying sequence, complete with footage of an enthusiastic and informal audience. Shots of the yachting line-up from the Americas Cup round out a blissful and what now seems blissfully naïve occasion. On the DVD: Colour picture quality has worn well, whereas sound has deteriorated notably at times: Thelonius Monks quarter-tones could easily be a semitone flat! Even so, its worth putting up with this to enjoy a tour through music-making whose relaxed spontaneity would be impossible to emulate today. --Richard Whitehouse
Vera Cruz was only director Robert Aldrich's second Western (his first, made a few months earlier, was the revisionist, pro-Native-American Apache), but it's such an assured, stylish affair that he might have been roaming the sagebrush for decades. In the aftermath of the American Civil War two lone adventurers make their way south of the border, where Mexico is fighting a civil war of its own to rid the country of the French-imposed Emperor Maximilian. Neither the dour Benjamin Trane (Gary Cooper) nor the grinning, devil-may-care Joe Erin (Burt Lancaster) has much in the way of idealism, but Trane still retains a thin bitter edge of integrity, a quality quite alien to the cheerfully amoral Erin. In uneasy alliance, constantly looking to outwit or double-cross each other, the two find themselves escorting a beautiful French countess (Denise Darcel) and a shipment of gold across country. Cooper and Lancaster create a superb double-act, using their contrasted screen personas to point up the humour and the cynicism of the two mercenaries' relationship. Darcel makes less than she might of the femme fatale role, but there are relishable cameos from Cesar Romero as a suavely duplicitous aristo and Ernest Borgnine as another gringo with an exceptionally vicious streak. The script, according to Aldrich, was written on the run, "always finished about five minutes before we shot it", but you wouldn't guess it from the laconic wit of the dialogue. It looks great, too--Ernest Laszlo's widescreen photography makes the most of the handsome Mexican locations. With its irreverent take on the accepted moral conventions of the genre, Vera Cruz ushered in a new kind of Western, and its central love-hate relationship would be replayed in Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962) and Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). On the DVD: Not much in the way of extras but the mono sound has been expertly remastered to the benefit of Hugo Friedhofer's spirited score. Above all, the film's presented in its full Superscope ratio (16:9), a blessed relief after all those years when it showed up panned-and-scanned on BBC1. If ever a movie needed widescreen, it's this one--if only to fit in all Burt's teeth. You can see why they called him "Crockery Joe". --Philip Kemp
The Jackal is filmmaking by numbers: take two huge stars, Richard Gere and Bruce Willis, and pit them opposite each other in a plot that's already been audience tested. That director Michael Caton Jones' film is based not on Frederick Forsyth's novel but on the script for the 1973 original starring James Fox is the first clue that something here is amiss. Fred Zinneman's The Day of the Jackal was a genuinely taut and claustrophobic thriller; the remake is like a Rocky & Bullwinkle take on international terrorism disguised as an action movie. Dashing IRA terrorist, Declan Mulqueen (Richard Gere), is sprung from jail to help the FBI Deputy Director Carton Preston (Sidney Poitier) track down The Jackal, an amoral international terrorist who is a master of disguise. The FBI believes he is about to assassinate a US political bigwig and is engaged in a race against time to discover exactly who the target is and where they will be felled. Throughout the film Gere sports an Irish accent as ill-fitting and phoney as the bushy lip-wig that Willis adopts at one point as a disguise. The usually warm-hearted Willis plays the steel-jawed terrorist with a cool reserve, but he doesn't have much character development to work with (apart from a misguided attempt to introduce a gay subtext). At over two hours of running time with plenty of exposition and precious few action sequences, this film is a test of will for the audience as well as the protagonists.On the DVD: The DVD includes a lengthy "making of" featurette, several deleted scenes and an alternate ending with some small dialogue changes. There is also an exceedingly dry director's commentary by Michael Caton Jones which muses on such mind-numbingly dull details as the colour of the subway platform in the film's climactic sequence. The film is presented in a clear print in 2.35:1 anamorphic format with 5.1 Dolby Digital sound. --Chris Campion
Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin star in this classic 1992 movie from director James Foley.
In the face of an alien threat and a Viking clan's destruction, the tale of the Outlander becomes legend.
Romance at its most anti-romantic--that is the Billy Wilder stamp of genius, and this Best Picture Academy Award winner from 1960 is no exception. Set in a decidedly unsavoury world of corporate climbing and philandering, the great filmmaker's trenchant, witty satire-melodrama takes the office politics of a corporation and plays them out in the apartment of lonely clerk CC Baxter (Jack Lemmon). By lending out his digs to the higher-ups for nightly extramarital flings with their secretaries, Baxter has managed to ascend the business ladder faster than even he imagined. The story turns even uglier, though, when Baxter's crush on the building's melancholy elevator operator (Shirley MacLaine) runs up against her long-standing affair with the big boss (a superbly smarmy Fred MacMurray). The situation comes to a head when she tries to commit suicide in Baxter's apartment. Not the happiest or cleanest of scenarios, and one that earned the famously caustic and cynically humoured Wilder his share of outraged responses, but looking at it now, it is a funny, startlingly clear-eyed vision of urban emptiness and is unfailingly understanding of the crazy decisions our hearts sometimes make. Lemmon and MacLaine are ideally matched and while everyone cites Wilder's Some Like It Hot closing line "Nobody's perfect" as his best, MacLaine's no-nonsense final words--"Shut up and deal"--are every bit as memorable. Wilder won three Oscars for The Apartment, for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay (cowritten with long-time collaborator I A L Diamond). --Robert Abele
The fourth in the hilarious Bob Hope/Bing Crosby 'Road To...' series is a blizzard of laughs with Bob and Bing playing turn-of-the-century vaudevillians who search for Klondike gold - and find the beautiful Dorothy Lamour instead! After stealing the map to a gold mine from two Alaskan ne'er-do-wells Hope and Crosby assume the identities of the bad guys swagger into Skagway and meet saloon singer Lamour. A series of misadventures ensues as the boys Lamour the criminals and other c
Jack Dee returns for another series of this off the wall, hit sit-com as Rick Spleen, an over-the-hill and grumpier than most stand up comic.
20 years after Captain Hayes puts outlaw John Henry behind bars he is released and holds up a bank. Hayes takes up the chase once more...
The Army Game was a sitcom giant of its time and one of ITV's most popular shows. Created by Sid Colin it pre-dated the more famous Dad's Army by a number of years. A group of men serving out time as conscripts in the army are determined to dodge duty and derive maximum fun out of a situation they'd rather not be in. Because WWII was only 12 years passed and national service was very much a reality many viewers found they could identify with the characters and the situation they found themselves in.
Meet Will & Grace. Grace is a sassy and smart interior designer Will is a gorgeous and supercool lawyer. They're both looking for love and they're made for each other in every way except for one thing - Grace is straight Will is gay. Their lives are complicated even further by their outrageous friends Karen and Jack. This DVD box set comprises all the episodes from the gut-bustingly funny sixth season. Episodes comprise: 1. Dames At Sea 2. Last Ex To Brooklyn 3. Home
Drama based on the Catherine Cookson novel which tells the story of a young girl who discovers that her whole life has been based on a lie...
The sexiest drama to scorch the airwaves soars to arresting heights of lust, lies and manipulation as Emmy Award® winner Viola Davis lays down the law in ABC Studios' How To Get Away With Murder: The Complete Second Season. As the body count rises, Frank, Bonnie and the Keating Five dive into a docket of daunting new cases. Meanwhile, the shocking discovery of who killed Rebecca leads into the mystery of who shot Annalise. But instead of answers, this stunning development will set the stage for a series of shocking secrets, bitter betrayals and gasp-worthy revelations that will prove beyond all reasonable doubt, that under the right circumstances, anyone can be a killer. Savour every deliciously twisted moment with all 15 episodes. Plus, descend deeper into the labyrinth with exclusive, never- before-seen bonus features available only on DVD
When a young boy named Jake accidentally makes a new friend in an experiment gone wrong a troubled town is plunged into chaos. But with the creature rapidly evolving every day, Jake finds it increasingly difficult to keep his new pet secret. Jake's friends and new girl Abbie realize they are not the only ones interested in this strange, mischievous little dinosaur and soon discover that the only thing more mysterious than what it is, is who is looking for it.
It's the rockingly comedic Tenacious D in all their video glory. This collection compiles live concert footage at the Brixton Academy with some HBO shorts TV appearances concert videos and footage of the duo in the studio recording ""Wonderboy "" ""Tribute"" and others. Includes a making of ""Wonderboy"" video. Disc 1 - 'For The Fans' Live At Brixton Academy London Flash Wonderboy Explosivo Medley Karate Kyle Quit The Band Friendship Kielbasa Dio The Road T
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