"Actor: James McCallion"

• Kiss Me Deadly | DVD | (04/08/2003) from £17.99   |  Saving you £-5.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  A terrific film noir full of skewed camera angles and mysterious whose-shoes-are-those shots, Kiss Me Deadly is about as dark and exciting as noir gets. A young woman (Cloris Leachman) in bare feet and a trench coat throws herself into the traffic to flag down help and the car she stops belongs to detective Mike Hammer. Not even 15 minutes into the film and there's already been a murder, a mysterious letter, an attempt to kill Hammer and, of course, a warning to stay out of it. Hammer, tired of lowlife divorce cases, smells something big and can't let it go. Mike Hammer is a detective so cool he can win a fight with nothing more than a box of popcorn as a weapon; he knows his opera singers as well as his amateur prize-fighters and he makes the ladies swoon--but he's far from a conventional hero. In fact, he's emphatically not a nice guy; Hammer happily whores out his secretary-girlfriend Velma to cinch up those divorce cases and has a penchant for slamming other people's fingers in drawers. Even the bad guys know he's a sleazebag ("What's it worth to you to turn your considerable talents back to the gutter you crawled out of?"). Ralph Meeker plays Hammer's ambivalence brilliantly, swinging easily between sexy and just plain mean. --Ali Davis

• Vera Cruz | DVD | (11/06/2001) from £12.94   |  Saving you £3.04 (30.55%)   |  RRP £12.99

  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

• Bloody Sunday | DVD | (16/06/2003) from £20.62   |  Saving you £-7.64 (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  If it was a piece of fiction, they'd say that it could never happen. Bloody Sunday is a dramatisation of one of the most shameful episodes in recent British history. Released to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Derry civil rights march and also the re-opening of enquiries into what really happened, the film is one of the most incisive, explosive works ever to emerge from British cinema. The premise is simple--to follow what took place in the city on 30th January 1972, when an anti-internment march descended into violence and left 13 unarmed civilians dead at the hands of the British army. Abandoning traditional filmmaking methods in favour of a more documentary style, Bloody Sunday is frighteningly realistic, especially when detailing the chaos into which the peaceful demonstration descended. Those who are only familiar with James Nesbitt through his lighter work (Cold Feet for example) may find this something of a shock, but he excels in the role of local politician Ivan Cooper. Admittedly there is a danger in presenting historical facts in a dramatic manner, no matter how painstaking the research, even though much of the dialogue here is taken straight from testimony and actual military transcripts. But if any question of bias arises, it’s worth remembering that this film was written and directed by an Englishman, stars a Derry protestant as well as a young man whose uncle was killed during the march, and was produced as an Anglo-Irish project. The result is an unforgettable and unflinching piece of cinema not to be missed. On the DVD: Bloody Sunday absolutely has to be seen on DVD. The slew of extra features not only complement the film, but place it in the overall context of the past, present and future of Northern Ireland. The various interviews with cast, director and producers paint a picture of a film that sets out to heal wounds and build bridges on all sides and to break the cinematic mould. Thus the majority of the cast were not actors but ordinary people from the Derry area, with the majority of the British soldiers played by ex-military personnel, some of whom had served in Northern Ireland themselves. As more and more of the story behind this remarkable film is revealed, so its impact becomes more intense and its aims and purpose more successful.--Phil Udell