"Actor: Janet Jones"

• The Beastmaster | DVD | (29/11/1999) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  The Beastmaster is an epic scale adventure - an extraordinary tale of a mythical hero in a life and death struggle with the forces of evil that unfolds in the distant mists of time. His amazing powers meant animals succumbed to his every order. From earliest childhood Dar finds the animals do his bidding. Then his idyllic life is shattered when an army of Jun barbarians led by the high priest Maax rides from the outlands on a crusade of destruction. All but Dar are slaughtered and alone he sets out to track the Jun warriors. His falling in love with a beautiful slave girl spells a warning to the evil sorcerer Maax.

• Fat Friends - Series 1 | DVD | (21/03/2005) from £20.19   |  Saving you £4.80 (23.77%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Kay Mellor's comedy drama series following a collection of characters whose personal life struggles are relayed to each other during their weekly slimming class... Series 1 episodes comprise: 1. Love Me Slender 2. Fat Chance 3. Fat Free 4. Growing Pains 5. Face The Fat 6. When The Fat Lady Sings

• School For Scoundrels | DVD | (30/10/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Enrol at the wacky College of Lifemanship where a senior host of great British comedians teach a completely uproarious course on how to come out tops in any social situation! Study with Alistair Sim and learn his valuable hints on the art of comic One-upmanship. Follow his expert advice to victimised Ian Carmichael about romance fully equipped to cope with life's hilarious humiliations without really cheating. Based on the books by Stephen Potter.

• Fat Friends - Series 3 | DVD | (18/04/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Kay Mellor's comedy drama series following a collection of characters whose personal life struggles are relayed to each other during their weekly slimming class... Episodes comprise: 1. Eat Your Heart Out 2. Leggs Over Easy 3. Food For Thought 4. Bacon Bagels And The Bishop 5. Afters 6. Food Of Love

• A Chorus Line | DVD | (06/10/2008) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  An adaptation of one of the most successful and unusual musicals of all time. A group of Broadway hopefuls auditioning for a place in the chorus line of a new show relate the stories of their lives -- their disappointments their dreams and the professional rejections and successes. Among the dancers trying to make the grade is the director's former lover a woman who once made it big and now would be grateful just to dance in the chorus.

• School For Scoundrels / The Green Man | DVD | (14/04/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £16.99

  In School for Scoundrels wimpy Ian Carmichael wants to impress girls and get one over on all-round show-off and cad Terry Thomas (playing gloriously to type). Discovering Alastair Simms' unorthodox school Carmichael happily enrols and learns the quaint tricks of the day for securing the admiration of a fair lady. Ultimately as a star pupil he teaches the Master a thing or two about true love when everything turns out just fine in the end. Appealing to all male sensibilities is the idea of a magical set of simple rules for winning someone's affections. Set in the tweed-rich environment of an English boarding school makes this an even quainter notion. To watch this classic comedy is to cock one's snoot at womanisers everywhere while unavoidably making a mental list of anything that might actually work! The three central performances are brilliantly realised, particularly the role reversal between Carmichael and Thomas. Try playing a tennis match after a viewing without calling "hard cheese". -Paul Tonks

• Police Academy Complete | DVD | (07/06/2004) from £20.15   |  Saving you £49.84 (247.35%)   |  RRP £69.99

  Police Academy The call went out. The recruits came in. No longer would police cadets have to meet standards of height weight or other requirements. Brains were optional too. Can't spell IQ? Don't know the number 911? No matter. Police Academy grads are ready to uphold law and disorder! Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment When the newly graduated misfits in blue tangle with these pinheaded punks the result is an open-and-shut case of nonstop hilarity!. Steve Gu

• Handel: Julius Caesar -- ENO | DVD | (21/06/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Dame Janet Baker in one of her greatest roles leads a cast of some of Britain's finest interpreters of baroque opera under the baton of Sir Charles Mackerras. John Copley's acclaimed English National Opera production was restaged in studio skilfully using all the technical advantages offered to create this top quality recording.

• Police Academy 5 (DVD) | DVD | (30/04/2007) from £6.96   |  Saving you £4.02 (101.26%)   |  RRP £7.99

  Sun fun and babes in shades. Where else but Miami Beach? Buffoons blockheads and party-hearty animals. Who else but the Police Academy gang? Put them all together for Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach the caper that takes our klutzy cops on the road. Our badge-carrying bunglers are in Miami for a convention honoring Cmdt. Lassard. But crime doesn't take a vacation even if our heroes do. Lassard is kidnapped. And not even the lure of limbo beach parties will stop the intrepid troopers' uproarious rescue attempts. So join your armed and hilarious favorites. If there's a Most Wanted List for laughter these loony coppers have just gotta be on it.

• The Flamingo Kid | DVD | (08/04/2002) from £14.98   |  Saving you £-8.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  As The Flamingo Kid amply demonstrates, there's always room for one more rites of passage film if it's made with care and affection. Garry Marshall's 1984 study of a young Brooklyn poker player who thinks the grass is greener at a Long Island beach club, nails the bad guy, realises he got it wrong and returns to the bosom of his "humble" family certainly satisfies on both counts. It also has a strong cast: Matt Dillon as Jeffrey, whose niggling aspirations create the inevitable barrier between himself and his parents; Richard Crenna as his prospective role model who turns out to have feet of clay; and Hector Elizondo as his bemused father. But Jessica Walter (Clint Eastwood's stalker from hell in Play Misty for Me) almost steals the show as an acid-tongued beach-club wife. If the whole thing lacks the depth and warmth of, say, Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs, it succeeds on its own merits as an homage to a more innocent time when a young man didn't need to stray far from his own tenement block in order to find himself, with the help of a suitably nostalgic early-1960s soundtrack of course. On the DVD: As far as extras go, this is a budget offering. There are detailed actor biographies but precious little on the film itself, apart from the snippet that Richard Crenna earned a Golden Globe award nomination. There is an adequate scene index and, for those who want to study Dillon in detail, a reasonable stills gallery. The picture is presented in standard format, and hardly distinguishable from ordinary VHS or telecast quality, but the stereo audio certainly helps pump out the period soundtrack. --Piers Ford

• Velvet Goldmine | DVD | (07/06/2004) from £19.99   |  Saving you £-14.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Somewhat misleadingly described by many as a mock-biopic based on the life of David Bowie, Velvet Goldmine is so much more than that. Journalist Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) who sets out to discover whatever happened to Ziggy Stardust-like Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), the famous bisexual glam star who crashed and burned spectacularly, but in the process helped Arthur awaken his own sexuality. It's an insane homage to 1970s glam rock in the UK as only American, who knew the movement from a distance, would make; it's a tribute to film director Nicolas Roeg's best work, particularly Performance and the Bowie-vehicle The Man Who Fell to Earth; it's a sci-fi movie about an alternative reality (the film's "present" is a 1984 that never existed and frustratingly never clearly explained); it's a queer Citizen Kane with lashings of eye-glitter, a complete mess, an absolute delight and a chance to see Ewan McGregor naked in case you didn't catch him in The Pillow Book as the Iggy Pop-like Curt Wild, Slade's lover/protégé.Director Todd Haynes, who made the incredibly spare Safe and a biopic about Karen Carpenter with Barbie dolls, crams in everything--including the kitchen sink, all the washing-up and half the larder--as if terrified he'll never get another chance to shoot even a commercial again. The pacing drags like catwalk-queen's glittery taffeta train at times, but then glorious swooping musical numbers and clever bits of allusive business arrive that will brighten the day of many a pop-fan and film-buff. Never anything less than ruthlessly inventive and demanding of patience and an open mind, it's one for connoisseurs. Viewers who prefer easy-viewing eye candy are well advised to stick with fluff like Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. --Leslie Felperin

• George Washington | DVD | (22/04/2002) from £32.37   |  Saving you £-12.38 (-61.90%)   |  RRP £19.99

  For a first feature from a 24-year-old director, George Washington is an amazingly assured piece of work. The title’s misleading: this is no biopic of America’s first President, but a poetic, richly atmospheric rhapsody set in a rundown industrial town in the American South. Given this backdrop, and a predominantly black cast, you might expect an angry study of social deprivation and racial tension, but Green has no such agenda. Instead, he derives a shimmering, heat-hazed beauty from his images of rusting machinery, junkyards and derelict buildings, and if the overall tone is tinged with sadness, it’s mainly from a sense of universal human loss. The action, such as it is, moves at its own slow Southern pace, following a group of youngsters, black and white, over a few high-summer days. Things do happen--a couple decide to elope, one boy’s saved from drowning, another gets killed--but they’re presented in an oblique, understated fashion that owes nothing to conventional Hollywood notions of narrative. With one exception, the cast are all non-professionals, mainly youngsters who director-writer David Gordon Green found in and around the town where the film was made, Winston-Salem in North Carolina. Shooting in a semi-improvised fashion, Green draws from his young cast remarkably spontaneous performances and dialogue (often their own) full of unselfconscious poetry. Drawing on a wide range of influences--among other things he cites Sesame Street, documentaries and such 70s classics as Deliverance, Walkabout and especially Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven--Green has fashioned a film that’s fresh, tender and utterly individual. And it looks just gorgeous: belying the tiny budget, Tim Orr’s widescreen photography lavishes mellow softness on images of dereliction and small-town decay. Never has dead-end poverty been made to look so attractive. On the DVD: George Washington comes on a disc generously loaded with extras. Besides the obvious theatrical trailer we get two of Green’s early short films, Physical Pinball and Pleasant Grove (both clearly dry runs for the main feature), an 18-minute featurette about the film’s reception at the Berlin Film Fest and a deleted scene of a community meeting. This scene, the short Pleasant Grove and the movie itself also offer a director’s commentary--or rather a director’s dialogue, as Green shares the honours with one of his lead actors, Paul Schneider. Their laconic, unpretentious comments enhance the whole experience enormously. The film has been transferred in its full scope ratio (2.35:1) and looks great. --Philip Kemp

• American Siege | Blu Ray | (08/03/2022) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A