"Actor: James Hunt"

• The Sherlock Holmes Catalogue - The Sign Of Four | DVD | (28/04/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  The Sign of Four is a 1987 feature-length version of Conan Doyle's second Sherlock Holmes novel, and is faithful to the original story except in one important detail: Dr Watson (Edward Hardwicke) does not get the girl. Otherwise, the familiar tale of the death of Bartholomew Sholto and the theft of the Agra treasure is all here, featuring a snappy performance by Jeremy Brett as Holmes doing some of the finest investigative work of his career. The famous climax, a chase on the Thames in which Holmes is almost struck dead by an exotic weapon, is handled very well. Sherlockians may have a hard time not seeing Watson's romantic pursuit of Mary Morstan (Lila Kaye), his first wife according to Doyle's book, but it would hardly have been practical in the context of the long-running Granada Television series. The rest is to be enjoyed, however. --Tom Keogh

• General Hospital: Series One | DVD | (20/08/2012) from £16.90   |  Saving you £23.09 (136.63%)   |  RRP £39.99

  A huge success for ITV throughout the 1970s, General Hospital carried on in the tradition of Emergency - Ward 10 and other medical shows of the 1960s. This highly popular series offers a dramatic insight into life at a busy hospital, featuring both compelling medical storylines and those highlighting the often strained personal lives of the doctors, nurses and consultants. General Hospital initially ran for 270 half-hour episodes as a twice-weekly soap-style afternoon serial before being reformatted into a series of hour-long, self-contained dramas in 1975. Out of this first series, only a comparative handful remain in the archive and this set contains all episodes known to exist.

• The Luzhin Defence | DVD | (19/02/2001) from £5.99   |  Saving you £14.00 (233.72%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A lush historical drama from Marlene Gorris director of the Oscar-winning 'Antonia's Line'. The year is 1929 and in the beautiful Italian lakeside town of Como Alexander Luzhin a talented Russian chess player arrives for the World Chess Championship. The beautiful socialite Natalia is also visiting Como to meet her mother at an affluent lakeside hotel. Vera wants Natalia to marry a wealthy French count. However Natalia instead sets her sights on Luzhin who returns her affecti

• The Simple Life - Season 1 | DVD | (19/04/2004) from £5.92   |  Saving you £10.07 (63.00%)   |  RRP £15.99

  The hook of The Simple Life is irresistible: two wealthy, pampered young women go from upper-crust Los Angeles to an Arkansas farm to prove that they can survive without their mobile phones and credit cards. As hotel heiress Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie (daughter of pop star Lionel) blithely move in with a farm family, the Ledings, the culture clash immediately becomes a train wreck; when asked to pluck chickens, Richie declares, "I'm not plucking anything but my eyebrows." They try to work a series of jobs (at a dairy farm, a fast-food joint and a livestock auction), but they possess not a jot of work ethic, nor any sense of the consequences of failure. Like the girls themselves, this 2003 reality show becomes fascinating and repellent, comic and horrifying. It's like watching alien beings trying to masquerade as people. --Bret Fetzer

• All Or Nothing | DVD | (28/04/2003) from £6.85   |  Saving you £13.14 (191.82%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A 2002 Mike Leigh drama, All or Nothing is at times almost unbearably bleak and poignant, yet funny, truthful and richly rewarding. The film's revolves around Timothy Spall's mini-cab driver, his family and the various characters and acquaintances on the South-east London estate where he lives. It's perhaps even better than Secrets and Lies, in which Spall also starred, which was marred a little by some of the tearful excesses of Brenda Blethyn's bravura performance. It's evidence that Leigh has matured and improved with age, rather than mellowed and softened. He's developed into a highly distinctive but rounded and humane filmmaker. Spall's cabbie is too gentle and thoughtful to be described as a slob, but his lack of even the most basic ambition and stoic non-resistance to life has created an unspoken rift between him and wife Penny (Lesley Manville). Working on a supermarket checkout, she must cook dinner and fend off insults from her fat, frustrated, obnoxious 18-year-old son Rory. She receives only passive sympathy from her older daughter Rachel. Only when Rory is taken ill is Phil snapped out of his torpor as the family pull together. A host of minor characters also feature; fatuous cabbie Ron (Paul Jesson) his alcoholic wife and sluttish daughter, as well as the wonderfully good-humoured and resilient Maureen, Penny's best friend, concerned at her daughter's relationship with a violent boyfriend. Once accused of caricaturing his "lower class" characters, here Leigh (with the collaborative assistance of his actors) exhibits them in all their authentic complexity, neither idealising nor sentimentalising them. On the DVD: All or Nothing's extras include the original trailer, as well as interviews with several members of the cast. Timothy Spall is interesting on the unnerving process of collaboration favoured by Leigh, whereby characters are "built from zero" by the actors. The smart and rather posh Lesley Manville strikes quite a contrast in real life with her mousey, put-upon character. There's also a meticulous and absorbing commentary from Mike Leigh, who talks about filming in Greenwich and how he has moved away from some of the more dogmatic ideas about filmmaking of his earlier, avant-garde days. --David Stubbs

• Very Important Person | DVD | (15/08/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Sir Ernest Pease KBE FRS (James Robertson Justice) is a cantankerous and crotchety old professor. Testing one of his new radar inventions (and travelling incognito as Lt. Farrow RN) the plane he is travelling is shot down and he is incarcerated as a POW. His overbearing and abrasive manner leads his fellow inmates into believing he is a German spy but when they discover who he actually is they realise that his escape is vital to the war effort. Written by Henry Blyth (The Bul

• The Young Stranger | DVD | (30/06/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  A story of teenage tearing-away in 1950s America, The Young Stranger fails to make a serious, gripping narrative of the events that follow the somewhat innocuous pivotal moment when 16-year-old Harold "Hal" Ditmar (James MacArthur) punches a cinema manager. Adapted from a TV play and released two years after the benchmark for delinquency movies, Rebel Without a Cause, it has none of that film's raw urgency, seeming staid and inconsequential in comparison. The primary problem is that Hal makes an unconvincing hoodlum. His misdemeanour is less an act of rebellion than a brief misunderstanding. Far from articulating the angst of a generation, his angry tirades against his parents (Kim Hunter and James Daly) and the police set him apart from his peers and feel more like the self-pitying whines of a privileged individual. This sensation is further exacerbated by the fact that all of his problems are swiftly resolved in an all-too-neat ending. Still, The Young Stranger is an interesting period piece, not least for an amusingly tame car chase from first-time feature director John Frankenheimer. --Paul Philpott

• Grand Prix - The Golden Years | DVD | (12/04/2005) from £12.84   |  Saving you £-3.86 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  The late 60's 70's and 80's were regarded by many as the most exciting and historically significant period in the history of modern Grand Prix racing. It was a time when the sport saw major investment from significant motor manufacturers. A time when technology leapt forward with turbo charged engines six wheel cars advanced braking/handling packages and the very best of early aerodynamic styling. Today's legends were in full flight. Drivers such as Graham Hill Jackie Stewart James Hunt and Niki Lauda were carving themselves a place in motor racing history...

• Cold Feet - Series 1 | DVD | (20/03/2006) from £9.03   |  Saving you £10.96 (121.37%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Cold Feet is the fast and funny ITV comedy drama about a group of friends which has gripped the nation. Immersing us in the lives of 3 couples who are coping with life love careers marriage friendship infidelity and of course sex. It gets to the heart of 30-something relationships like no other programme of its kind. Pilot Episode: Pete and Jenny are trying desperately to have a baby. As they have had little success Jenny begins to plot their lives around her ovulation

• Battle Cry | DVD | (21/07/2003) from £15.99   |  Saving you £-2.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £13.99

  The most interesting--and entertaining--aspect of Battle Cry, a long, episodic World War II drama, is that it marked the debut of one Justus E McQueen, who subsequently took the name of the good ol' Arkansas boy he played in the movie: LQ Jones. He's only one of eight or nine marine recruits who divide the screen time with commanding officer Van Heflin and James Whitmore as a lifer sergeant named Mac, "just Mac", who ramrods their squad and also delivers the movie's overbearing narration. Unfortunately, the narration is necessary to maintain continuity as the CinemaScope production galumphs its way from rounding up the melting-pot cast to seeing them through basic training and sundry, mostly amatory misadventures in San Diego, to further training in New Zealand and finally to baptism of fire on Guadalcanal. Trouble is, among the recruits only McQueen/Jones (whose job is mostly comic relief) and Aldo Ray (as a brawling lumberjack who's never known family life) have any charisma or acting chops--and that's not forgetting Tab Hunter, whose matinee-idol status at the time does not speak well for the 50s. Battle Cry is also a cardinal example of Hollywood's penchant for buying big, lusty, profane bestsellers (by Leon Uris, in this case) and then bowdlerising all the lustiness and profanity to appease the censors. Raoul Walsh, the poet laureate of lowdown gusto, does what he can in the circumstances, and as one of the first guys ever to direct a widescreen movie (1930's The Big Trail), he makes the battle scenes roar. --Richard T. Jameson

• Clive Barker's The Plague | DVD | (23/10/2006) from £6.73   |  Saving you £13.26 (197.03%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Ten years have passed since the world's children have fallen into a coma. Tonight they're waking up and all hell is breaking loose. An un-holy battle between the generations is being waged against all adults and time is not on their side.....

• New Best Friend | DVD | (03/02/2003) from £6.73   |  Saving you £13.26 (197.03%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Alicia a plain unpopular college student is paired with Hadley a beautiful privileged coed to work on a sociology project titled ""Lead Follow or Get Out of the Way."" At first rejected Alicia is finally accepted into Hadley's clique where she is introduced to a world of privilege recreational drugs and dangerous thrills. But Alicia's attempts to fit in ultimately land her in the hospital. As the local sheriff (Diggs) tries to determine the chain of events that led to Alicia's

• The Game | DVD | (01/10/1999) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  It's not quite as clever as it tries to be, but The Game does a tremendous job of presenting the story of a rigid control freak trapped in circumstances that are increasingly beyond his control. Michael Douglas plays a rich, divorced, and dreadful investment banker whose 48th birthday reminds him of his father's suicide at the same age. He's locked in the cage of his own misery until his rebellious younger brother (Sean Penn) presents him with a birthday invitation to play "The Game" (described as "an experiential Book of the Month Club")--a mysterious offering from a company called Consumer Recreation Services. Before he knows the game has even begun, Douglas is caught up in a series of unexplained events designed to strip him of his tenuous security and cast him into a maelstrom of chaos. How do you play a game that hasn't any rules? That's what Douglas has to figure out, and he can't always rely on his intelligence to form logic out of what's happening to him. Seemingly cast as the fall guy in a conspiracy thriller, he encounters a waitress (Deborah Unger) who may or may not be trustworthy, and nothing can be taken at face value in a world turned upside down. Douglas is great at conveying the sheer panic of his character's dilemma, and despite some lapses in credibility and an anticlimactic ending, The Game remains a thinking person's thriller that grabs and holds your attention. Thematic resonance abounds between this and Seven and Fight Club, two of the other films by The Game 's director David Fincher. -- Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

• Leonard Bernstein: Trouble In Tahiti | DVD | (20/01/2003) from £17.15   |  Saving you £2.84 (16.56%)   |  RRP £19.99

  This new film of Leonard Bernstein's music-theatre piece Trouble in Tahiti, produced by BBC Wales and Opus Arte and directed by Tom Cairns, makes a strong case for a neglected work. Bernstein wrote his satire on American materialism in 1952, drawing on elements of opera, revue and musical comedy to tell a story of a marriage that's turned sour amid the trappings of suburban prosperity. The brevity of the piece, which flashes by in 39 minutes, perhaps accounts for its rare appearances, making this version specially welcome. Tom Cairns directs with style and panache, moving the camera effortlessly to and fro between the seven scenes. Amir Hosseinpour's choreography recalls with affection the heyday of the MGM musical then at its zenith. The film opens with a Greek-style chorus singing in scat jazz fashion to a montage of 1950s imagery: flickering television adverts, manicured lawns and white picket fences. Characters within the narrative appear in flash-back in home video footage. This is all highly diverting and possibly a ruse to mask some dramatic weakness in the story written by Bernstein himself. The wife never offers an explanation for her visit to the cinema to see Trouble in Tahiti instead of attending her son's school play, nor do we see the boy again after witnessing his parents having a tiff. The two principals, Karl Daymond as Sam and Stephanie Novacek as Dinah, are well cast and sing in a natural and pleasing manner with clear diction. The scat vocal trio is well matched and the City of London Sinfonia under Paul Daniel catch the spirit of the jazz inflected score as if it were second nature. On the DVD: Trouble in Tahiti is shot in wide-screen, appropriate for the era that gave us CinemaScope. There are subtitles in German, Spanish and French. A full translation in English is printed in the booklet. The extras include an introduction that partly overlaps with "A Very Testing Piece", in which Paul Daniel touches on the parallel with Bernstein's own unhappy childhood. Humphrey Burton in "Not Particularly Romantic" elaborates on this theme and goes on to offer a further fascinating commentary on Bernstein, whom he knew well. --Adrian Edwards

• Grand Prix - True Racing Legends | DVD | (08/09/2014) from £12.13   |  Saving you £2.86 (23.58%)   |  RRP £14.99

• Planet of the Apes / Rise of the Planet of the Apes Double Pack | DVD | (17/06/2013) from £8.08   |  Saving you £4.91 (60.77%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Planet of the Apes (1968)Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowall star in this legendary science-fiction masterpiece. Astronaut Taylor (Heston) crash lands on a distant planet ruled by apes who use a primitive race of humans for experimentation and sport. Soon Taylor finds himself among the hunted his life in the hands of a benevolent chimpanzee scientist (McDowall). Winner of an honorary Academy Award for Outstanding Make-Up Achievement Planet of the Apes is grand entertainment from its visually arresting beginning to the chilling last moment. Rise of the Planet of the ApesOur greatest discovery will become the world's greatest threat when a scientist on the verge of a medical breakthrough begins testing on a young chimpanzee named Caesar. But when the chimp develops human-like intelligence and emotions an epic battle ensues to determine the dominant species of the planet!

• The Plague Dogs | DVD | (09/09/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £2.99

  An animated adventure from the artistic team behind 'Watership Down'. A pair of dogs Rowf (Christopher Benjamin) and Snitter (John Hurt) escape from an animal research facility situated in a remote part of the English countryside. Rowf is cynical and mistrusting of humans having only known the tortured existence of being a laboratory animal. Snitter on the other hand had previously enjoyed life as a domestic pet and longs to be loved and cared for by a human master once again. Unprepared for life in the wild the pair befriend a fox The Tod (James Bolam) who helps them learn to survive in the bleak environment by feeding on the area's livestock. As the authorities attempt to track down the escapees things take a turn for the worse when a deliberately leaked story suggests the dogs may be infected with the bubonic plague...

• Battle Cry / Objective Burma / Operation Pacific | DVD | (21/07/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £30.99

  Battle Cry: A tight-knit group of marines have adventures in both love and war as they progress from boot camp training to a New Zealand ops base and on to the hard-fought invasion of Saipan. Operation Pacific: 'Duke' Gifford an ultra devoted commander feeling guilty about the death of his former commanding officer and the failure of his marriage leads his submarine crew up into uncharted waters in the battle for the Pacific... Objective Burma: A crack squad of paratroopers parachute into Japanese-occupied Burma with a dangerous and important mission: to locate and blow up a radar station. When an ambush cuts off their only escape route his troop are forced into the swamp-infested hell of the Burmese jungle. The harrowing fight for survival begins in a realistic account of the grim hardships facing brave men in battle...

• The Young Stranger | DVD | (03/09/2018) from £9.09   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Hal Ditmar is a clean-cut kid, the son of a wealthy movie producer. When an argument at a theatre turns into a fight between Hal and the theatre manager, Hal finds no one, not even his father, will believe his actions were justified as self-defense. The police are concerned that Hal is a juvenile delinquent in the making, but the real problem lies in Hal's father's inattention to his son. It's up to Hal's mother to try to bridge the gulf between father and son.

• The Leopard Fist Ninja | DVD | (04/03/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £3.99

  Martial arts action. He's a loner who has travelled far seeking out chances to improve and finally perfect his fighting skills. Now he can fulfill his life's destiny: to kill the man who calls himself King Kong the man responsible for his parents death. But King Kong is waiting armed with the service of the sinister Falcon and his shadow warriors - The Ninja.