"Actor: James R"

• Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen -- Metropolitan/Levine | DVD | (14/10/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £45.99

  The James Levine cycle of Wagners Der Ring des Nibelungen is humane and emotionally powerful rather than monumental or spiritual; Levine is more interested in finding our sympathy for the characters than inspiring pity or terror. These are very traditional productions in which you see a rock where you need to see a rock, a dragon where the libretto says a dragon (the Metropolitan Opera has never been a place for experiment). What Levine and the Met can and do offer is excellent orchestral playing and some of the best singers in these roles in the world. Siegfried Jerusalem is boyish and naive and touching as Siegfried, and he is also surprisingly good as the detached mischievous Loge of Das Rheingold. James Morris is uniformly impressive as Wotan and makes the character evolve from the young ruthless god of the first opera to the tired old god of Siegfried, who seeks nothing more than his own necessary defeat and death. As Brunnhilde, Hildegard Behrens makes a convincing shift from goddess to woman, from callousness to tenderness and on to vindictiveness and self-sacrificing wisdom. Overall, this is an attractive Ring cycle, well-cast and beautifully played; others have greater strengths in some areas, but Levine is reliable across the board. On the DVD: Der Ring des Nibelungen has all four operas, which are also available individually, contained in a single box. All the DVDs come with a photo gallery of the Metropolitan Opera productions and with menus and subtitles in German, French, English, Spanish and Chinese. Its a little disappointing, though, that they are presented in American NTSC format, not European PAL, and the picture ratio is standard TV 4:3. On the plus side, they all have an excellent clear acoustic in the three audio options: PCM stereo, Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1. --Roz Kaveney

• Insurgent - 2 Disc Limited Edition (Exclusive to Amazon.co.uk) | DVD | (03/08/2015) from £4.99   |  Saving you £13.00 (260.52%)   |  RRP £17.99

  Tris (Shailene Woodley) and Four (Theo James) are now fugitives on the run and hunted by Jeanine (Kate Winslet) the leader of the power-hungry Erudite elite. Racing against time they must find out what Tris’s family sacrificed their lives to protect and why the Erudite leaders will do anything to stop them. Haunted by her past choices but desperate to protect the ones she loves Tris with Four at her side faces one impossible challenge after another as they unlock the truth about the past and ultimately the future of their world.

• Line of Duty Complete Series 1 and 2 | DVD | (15/02/2016) from £4.90   |  Saving you £25.09 (512.04%)   |  RRP £29.99

  All eleven episodes from the first two series of the British crime drama starring Martin Compston, Vicky McClure and Lennie James. In series one, Detective Sergeant Steve Arnott (Compston) is transferred to AC-12, a unit assigned to investigate corruption within the police force. Working with Detective Constable Kate Fleming (McClure), he quickly finds himself immersed in a case involving Detective Chief Inspector Tony Gates (James). With Gates a slippery and resourceful adversary, the pair will have to have their wits about them if they are to crack the case. In series two, an ambush of a police convoy sparks alarm when three officers are killed and a witness in protective custody is seriously injured. With only one survivor, Detective Inspector Lindsay Denton (Keeley Hawes), the police anti-corruption department is brought in to solve the case.

• Journey To The Centre Of The Earth | DVD | (01/08/2005) from £19.79   |  Saving you £-6.80 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Danger and wonder at the Earth's core! The accent is on fun and fantasy in this film version of Jules Verne's classic thriller stars James Mason Pat Boone and Arlene Dahl. With spectacular visuals as a backdrop the story centres on an expedition led by Professor Lindenbrook (Mason) down into the Earth's dark core. Members of the group include the professor's star student Alec (Boone) and the widow (Dahl) of a colleague. Along the way lurk dangers such as kidnapping death sabotag

• Battlestar Galactica: Season 3 | Blu Ray | (10/05/2010) from £12.91   |  Saving you £40.07 (403.93%)   |  RRP £49.99

  Sci Fi's greatest TV series blasts onto Blu-Ray with Battlestar Galactica Season 3 in Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound! The season opens with the stranded Colonials struggling to survive under the heavy handed Cylon rule on New Caprica. Follow Tigh Tyrol and Anders as they lead the Resistance with increasing and shocking violence towards the Cylons and Admiral Adama's personal struggles while leading Galactica to save the survivors and resume its quest to find Earth. Featuring a bonus disc with The Story So Far this Season will leave you clinging to the edge of your seat. Will Number Six formulate a truce between the Humans and the Cylons? Who are the Final Five and where will they place their loyalties? Who will find Earth first? Where will you stand?

• 21 Bridges (STX) | Blu Ray | (30/03/2020) from £8.48   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  21 Bridges follows an embattled NYPD detective (Chadwick Boseman), who is thrust into a citywide manhunt for a pair of cop killers after uncovering a massive and unexpected conspiracy. As the night unfolds, lines become blurred on who he is pursuing, and who is in pursuit of him. When the search intensifies, extreme measures are taken to prevent the killers from escaping Manhattan as the authorities close all 21 Bridges to prevent any entry or exit from the iconic island.

• Frank Herbert's Dune--TV series | DVD | (26/11/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £39.99

  Frank Herbert's Dune is a three-part, four-and-a-half-hour television adaptation of the author's bestselling science fiction novel, telling a more complete version of the Dune saga than David Lynch's 1984 cinema film. The novel is a massive political space-opera so filled with characters, cultures, intrigues and battles that even a production twice this length would have trouble fitting everything in. While television is good at setting a scene, it loses the novel's capacity to explain how the future works, and as with Lynch's film, Frank Herbert's Dune focuses on Paul Atreides, the young noble betrayed who becomes a rebel leader--an archetypal story reworked everywhere from Star Wars (1977) to Gladiator (2000). Top-billed William Hurt is only in the first of the three 90-minute episodes, and while he gives a commanding performance, carrying the show falls to the less charismatic Alec Newman. This version is at its strongest in the ravishing Renaissance-inspired production and costume design and gorgeous lighting of Vittorio Storaro (The Last Emperor). The TV budget special effects range from awful painted backdrops to excellent CGI spaceships and sandworms. The performances are variable, from the theatrical camp of Ian McNeice as Baron Harkonnen to the subtlety of Julie Cox's Princess Iruelan. John Harrison's direction is less visionary than Lynch's, but he tells the story more coherently and ultimately the tale's the thing. --Gary S. Dalkin

• Solomon Kane | DVD | (28/06/2010) from £4.27   |  Saving you £16.98 (564.12%)   |  RRP £19.99

  "Solomon Kane" is an epic adventure adapted from the classic pulp stories by Robert E. Howard, creator of "Conan the Barbarian."

• Elvis Presley - Aloha From Hawaii | DVD | (12/07/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £27.99

  Elvis Presley's performing career, punctuated by its extra-musical achievement as the first global satellite broadcast devoted to a single entertainer. Both the broadcast and its companion album captured the King in his most grandiose persona, fuelled by Hollywood scale and Vegas glitz, as a caped pop superhero.He may have looked trim, but posthumous accounts (especially Peter Guralnick's Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, the second volume in his definitive biography) confirm what a second look suggests--on this evening, Elvis was alternately overwhelmed and distracted, bravura renditions of signature songs (most triumphantly, the "American Trilogy" medley originated by Mickey Newbury) offset by less-focused readings. Fans may still savour a generous and diverse song list, but viewed beside Presley's earlier, more consistent performances (including a rehearsal the previous night, since released as The Alternate Aloha Concert), this legendary concert anticipates Presley's imminent decline.In this remastered version, three songs have been deleted due to music clearance issues, while four songs taped after the actual show have been inserted. A fifth bonus track, "No More," makes its first appearance on video. --Sam Sutherland

• The Preacher's Wife | DVD | (12/02/2001) from £4.75   |  Saving you £10.24 (215.58%)   |  RRP £14.99

  This tedious remake of the classic Christmas movie The Bishop's Wife falls on its face by significantly altering the careful design of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert E Sherwood's story for the original film. In Sherwood's version, a rather wooden, inept bishop and his lonely wife unknowingly take into their lives a heaven-sent angel who aids the former and ends up falling in love with the latter. In this unnecessary update, an inner-city preacher (Courtney B. Vance) and his estranged spouse (Whitney Houston) are visited by a celestial goof (Denzel Washington), whose unsolicited offer of help is enough to galvanise Vance's character to fix his own problems. What that means is this: by the second act, there's no reason to have Washington's angel in the story. Even his infatuation with the missus isn't enough to warrant his hanging around this movie; the change is a colossal blunder by director Penny Marshall. Vance ends up stealing the film from Washington, but it's a Pyrrhic victory; for the most part this movie just seems like a series of random scenes between opportunities for Houston to belt out songs. --Tom Keogh

• Zachariah | DVD | (08/04/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Advertised in 1970 as "the first electric Western", Zachariah is an endearingly pretentious effort that prefigures such genre oddities as Jodorowsky's El Topo and Alex Cox's Straight to Hell. The story is the archetypal one about two friends who become gunslingers and must inevitably face off against each other in the finale, but it's treated here as if it Meant Something Deeper--which means that after enjoying 75 minutes of violence we can all agree that peace and love and harmony is on the whole better for children and other living things. Curly haired farmboy Zachariah (John Rubinstein) and eternally grinning apprentice blacksmith Matthew (Don Johnson) are the fast friends who run away from home to join up with a gang of outlaws known as the Crackers (played by hippie folk-rock collective Country Joe and the Fish). These apparent 19th-century Westerners tote electric guitars and are given to staging free festival freak-outs at one end of town to distract from the bank robbery at the other. The boys soon hook up with Job Cain (Elvin Jones), an all-in-black master gunfighter who is also an ace drummer (his solo is impressive), but then drift apart as Zachariah has a liaison with Old West madame Belle Starr (Pat Quinn) in a town that consists of fairground-style brightly painted wooden cut out buildings (a gag reused in Blazing Saddles), then gets rid of his outrageous all-white cowboy outfit to settle down on a homestead and grow his own dope and vegetables. Matthew, of course, goes for the black leather look after outdrawing Cain, and comes a gunning for the only man who might be faster than him, but the hippie-era message is once these kids have killed everyone else they can still make peace with each other and the desert or something, man. Aside from a Beatle-haired teenage Johnson making a fool of himself by over-emoting to contrast with Rubinstein's non-performance, the film offers a lot of beautiful "acid Western" scenery and excellent prog rock and bluegrass music from the James Gang, White Lightnin' and the New York Rock Ensemble. Comedy troupe the Firesign Theatre (huge on album in 1970) provided the script, which explains satirical touches like the horse-and-buggy salesman (Dick Van Patten) spieling like a used car dealer and the madame's claim to have had affairs with gunslingers from Billy the Kid to Marshal McLuhan. The DVD extras are skimpy, but the print quality is outstanding. --Kim Newman

• Two In Clover - The Complete Series | DVD | (03/05/2004) from £6.99   |  Saving you £18.00 (257.51%)   |  RRP £24.99

  The comedy series about self-sufficiency written by Harry Driver and Vince Powell (""Nearest and Dearest"" ""Love Thy Neighbour"") from 1969 which pre-empted ""The Good Life"" by six years. All the episodes from the comedy series starring Carry On stalwart Sid James.

• Arthur Christmas | DVD | (19/11/2012) from £3.99   |  Saving you £16.00 (401.00%)   |  RRP £19.99

  How CAN Santa deliver billions of presents to the whole world in just one night? With an army of one million combat-style Field Elves and a vast, state-of-the-art control center under the ice of the North Pole!

• Gimme, Gimme, Gimme - The Complete Third Series | DVD | (11/11/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Gimme, Gimme, Gimme took situation comedy to new peaks of vulgarity when it returned for a third and final series in 2001, thanks to the full-on performances of James Dreyfus (Tom) and Kathy Burke (Linda) who suck up Jonathan Harvey's innuendo-laden scripts and spit them out like a couple of thespian tornados. "I don't think anything could relax my lips, baby," leers Burke, milking the endless supply of double entendres. "Mind you, after a couple of vodkas they're usually flapping around like flip-flops." Tom's descent into self-parody--when he looks in the mirror, he sees the new Noel Coward--can have only one logical conclusion: the offer of a bit-part in Crossroads which eventually splits up this dysfunctional friendship. Sex-crazed Linda is deluded beyond all reason--when she looks in the mirror, she sees Catherine Zeta Jones--and here we finally get some insight into the reasons behind her grotesque traits: visits from her old Borstal wing governor (the excellent Ann Mitchell, sending up her Widows character), and the long-lost son she gave up for adoption. Like all successful comedy, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme has its dark side. It also becomes increasingly surreal as the episodes pass: Tom fails miserably in a walk-on role in a conceptual Japanese drama presented in a fire station; and Linda turns the back garden into a campsite. Sophisticated it isn't, but it's often wickedly hilarious and occasionally brilliant. On the DVD: Gimme, Gimme, Gimme is presented in standard 14:9 format with a stereo soundtrack, replicating the sitcom viewing experience. Apart from the episode index, there are no extras. At the very least biographies of Harvey, Burke and Dreyfus would have been useful. --Piers Ford

• Romeo Is Bleeding | DVD | (19/05/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Romeo Is Bleeding is the flawed black comedy from director Peter Medak (The Krays) about a bad cop who slowly gets his due. Gary Oldman plays yet another quirky character, this time a New York detective on the take. His life goes haywire as he squares off with a Russian hit woman. Despite an intriguing cast and great dialogue, the movie becomes a bit too eccentric for its own good as several actors have nothing to do. The high point is Lena Olin, who finally has a role she can sink her teeth into: her zesty, monstrous assassin, Mona Demarkov, is one of the great movie villains. --Doug Thomas

• Queens of Mystery S1 | DVD | (29/11/2021) from £21.01   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Rocketeer | DVD | (05/02/2001) from £4.75   |  Saving you £10.24 (215.58%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Based on a retro-styled comic book hit of the 80s, this Disney film was meant to launch a whole line of Rocketeer films--but the series began and ended with this one. That's too bad because this underrated Joe Johnston film has a certain loopy charm. The story centres on a pre-World War II stunt pilot (Bill Campbell) who accidentally comes into possession of a rocket-propelled backpack much coveted by the Nazis. With the aid of his mechanic pal (Alan Arkin), he gets it up and running, then uses it to foil a plot by a gang of vicious Nazi spies (is there any other kind?) led by Timothy Dalton. Jennifer Connelly is on hand as the love interest but the real fun here is when the Rocketeer takes off. There's also a nifty battle atop an airborne blimp. --Marshall Fine

• Standing In The Shadows Of Motown | DVD | (26/01/2004) from £10.09   |  Saving you £9.90 (98.12%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Based on Allan Slutsky's award-winning book of the same name 'Standing In The Shadows Of Motown' tells the Funk Brothers' story for the first time by combining exclusive interviews archival footage and re-enactments. Completing this fantastic musical and social journey is a live concert which saw the Funk Brothers reunited on stage in Detroit with the help of contemporary vocalists Ben Harper Joan Osborne Meshell Ndegeocello and Montell Jordan and R&B greats Chaka Khan Gerald L

• James Bond - The Man With The Golden Gun (Ultimate Edition 2 Disc Set) | DVD | (17/07/2006) from £5.20   |  Saving you £11.79 (226.73%)   |  RRP £16.99

  James Bond (Roger Moore) may have met his match in Francisco Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) a world-renowned assassin whose weapon of choice is a distinctive gold pistol. When Scaramanga seizes the priceless Solex Agitator energy converter Agent 007 must recover the device and confront the trained killer in a heart-stopping duel to the death!

• Waking Ned | DVD | (12/06/2000) from £5.95   |  Saving you £7.04 (118.32%)   |  RRP £12.99

  When local wag Jackie O'Shea (Ian Bannen) discovers that one of his neighbours in the village of Tulaigh Mohr is a lottery winner he sees a chance to share in the wealth. Things get complicated when Jackie and his pal Michael O'Sullivan (David Kelly) discover that the winner, Ned Devine, died of shock at the very moment he learned of becoming a millionaire. Undaunted, Jackie and Michael dispose of the lucky stiff and hatch a plot to impersonate him and claim the prize. Soon the whole village is involved and the plot rapidly thickens. This film has been compared to The Full Monty, but it lacks the vein of desperation that added depth to that film. Instead, Waking Ned is closer in tone to classic British comedies like Whisky Galore!, with its cast of eccentrics gleefully conspiring to outwit the authorities. Those with a low tolerance for twinkly eyed Irish charm might be tempted to steer clear, although the movie is saved, for the most part, by its central performances. Bannen is superb as an old man who is clearly hungry for any excitement he can drum up and David Kelly is remarkable as his scrawny sidekick. Kelly has had a long career as a character actor in film and television, but here he has a chance to really let loose. His naked motorcycle ride is a marvellous set-piece and in all of his other scenes his twitchy, perfectly timed performance quite simply steals the movie. --Simon Leake, Amazon.com