"Actor: John Blake"

• O Brother Where Art Thou? | DVD | (17/04/2019) from £3.84   |  Saving you £6.15 (160.16%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Only Joel and Ethan Coen, masters of quirky and ultra-stylish genre subversion, would dare nick the plotline of Homer's Odyssey for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, their comic picaresque saga about three cons on the run in 1930s Mississippi. Our wandering hero in this case is one Ulysses Everett McGill, a slick-tongued wise guy with a thing for hair pomade (George Clooney, blithely sending up his own dapper image) who talks his chain-gang buddies (Coen-movie regular John Turturro and newcomer Tim Blake Nelson) to light out after some buried loot he claims to know of. En route they come up against a prophetic blind man on a railroad truck, a burly one-eyed baddie (the ever-magnificent John Goodman), a trio of sexy singing ladies, a blues guitarist who's sold his soul to the devil, a brace of crooked politicos on the stump, a manic-depressive bank robber, and--well, you get the idea. Into this, their most relaxed film yet, the Coens have tossed a beguiling ragbag of inconsequential situations, a wealth of looping, left-field dialogue and a whole stash of gags both verbal and visual. O Brother (the title's lifted from Preston Sturges' classic 1941 comedy Sullivan's Travels) is furthermore graced with glowing, burnished photography from Roger Deakins and a masterly soundtrack from T-Bone Burnett that pays loving homage to American 30s folk-styles: blues, gospel, bluegrass, jazz and more. And just to prove that the brothers haven't lost their knack for bad-taste humour, we get a Ku Klux Klan rally choreographed like something between a Nuremberg rally and a Busby Berkeley musical. --Philip KempOn the DVD: This two-disc set duplicates the original single-disc release of the film which included a handful of cast and crew interviews, and adds an additional disc with more interviews, two brief behind-the-scenes featurettes about the production design and the post-production digital colouring of the film, a couple of storyboard-to-scene comparisons and a music video of "Man of Constant Sorrow". There's also a 16-minute documentary to promote the companion Down from the Mountain concert. Frankly there's not a lot here to justify spreading it across two discs: a more pleasing not to say generous offering would have been to cram all these extras onto Disc 1 and give us Down from the Mountain as the second disc. --Mark Walker

• Shaft 1-3: Shaft/Shaft's Big Score!/Shaft in Africa | Blu Ray | (27/07/2020) from £21.85   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  When Harlem P.I John Shaft first appeared on the movie scene, he was a 'shut your mouth' detective to reckon with, a fact underscored by Isaac Hayes' Oscar - winning Best Original Song (1971). Richard Roundtree plays the hard-hitting, street- smart title role, hunting for a kidnap victim in Shaft (1971) and seeking a friend's murderer in Shaft's Big Score! - mixing it up with mob thugs each time. Finally, there's Shaft in Africa, with our hero bringing down a slavery cartel. Shaft's the name. Excitement's the game! Special Features: Behind The Scenes Documentary Soul In Cinema: Filming Shaft On Location Shaft: The Killing (1973 TV Episode) Theatrical Trailers

• Anne Of The Thousand Days | DVD | (06/03/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  He was King. She was barely 18. And in their thousand days they played out the most passionate and shocking love story in history! This lush perfectly cast 1969 drama concerns both a doomed royal love affair and a pivotal moment in British history. Based on Maxwell Anderson's 1948 play Anne of the Thousand Days concerns the mess that surrounded King Henry VIII's decision to rid himself of his first wife Catherine of Aragon (Irene Papas) and marry the young Anne Boleyn (G

• O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2 Disc Set) | DVD | (05/11/2001) from £7.74   |  Saving you £12.25 (158.27%)   |  RRP £19.99

  George Clooney stars in the latest film from the Coen brothers, a musical about a con on the run in the Deep South of the 1930s.

• Heartbeat - The Complete Series 18 | DVD | (03/02/2014) from £30.76   |  Saving you £19.23 (62.52%)   |  RRP £49.99

  Set in rural North Yorkshire during the 1960s, Heartbeat's combination of crime and medical storylines, charismatic regular characters and wonderfully nostalgic soundtrack made it staple Sunday-night viewing for two decades, with the series' many prestigious awards including Best Performing Peak-Time Drama and several ITV Programme of the Year awards. Attracting a peak audience of 14 million, Heartbeat garnered a devoted following and remains prime-time viewing world-wide. Thi...

• O Brother Where Art Thou? | Blu Ray | (12/08/2013) from £9.59   |  Saving you £5.40 (56.31%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Only Joel and Ethan Coen, masters of quirky and ultra-stylish genre subversion, would dare nick the plotline of Homer's Odyssey for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, their comic picaresque saga about three cons on the run in 1930s Mississippi. Our wandering hero in this case is one Ulysses Everett McGill, a slick-tongued wise guy with a thing for hair pomade (George Clooney, blithely sending up his own dapper image) who talks his chain-gang buddies (Coen-movie regular John Turturro and newcomer Tim Blake Nelson) to light out after some buried loot he claims to know of. En route they come up against a prophetic blind man on a railroad truck, a burly one-eyed baddie (the ever-magnificent John Goodman), a trio of sexy singing ladies, a blues guitarist who's sold his soul to the devil, a brace of crooked politicos on the stump, a manic-depressive bank robber, and--well, you get the idea. Into this, their most relaxed film yet, the Coens have tossed a beguiling ragbag of inconsequential situations, a wealth of looping, left-field dialogue and a whole stash of gags both verbal and visual. O Brother (the title's lifted from Preston Sturges' classic 1941 comedy Sullivan's Travels) is furthermore graced with glowing, burnished photography from Roger Deakins and a masterly soundtrack from T-Bone Burnett that pays loving homage to American 30s folk-styles: blues, gospel, bluegrass, jazz and more. And just to prove that the brothers haven't lost their knack for bad-taste humour, we get a Ku Klux Klan rally choreographed like something between a Nuremberg rally and a Busby Berkeley musical. --Philip KempOn the DVD: This two-disc set duplicates the original single-disc release of the film which included a handful of cast and crew interviews, and adds an additional disc with more interviews, two brief behind-the-scenes featurettes about the production design and the post-production digital colouring of the film, a couple of storyboard-to-scene comparisons and a music video of "Man of Constant Sorrow". There's also a 16-minute documentary to promote the companion Down from the Mountain concert. Frankly there's not a lot here to justify spreading it across two discs: a more pleasing not to say generous offering would have been to cram all these extras onto Disc 1 and give us Down from the Mountain as the second disc. --Mark Walker

• Contact | DVD | (25/09/1998) from £7.19   |  Saving you £6.80 (94.58%)   |  RRP £13.99

  The opening and closing moments of Robert (Forrest Gump) Zemeckis's Contact astonish viewers with the sort of breathtaking conceptual imagery one hardly ever sees in movies these day--each is an expression of the heroine's lifelong quest (both spiritual and scientific) to explore the meaning of human existence through contact with extraterrestrial life. The movie begins by soaring far out into space, then returns dizzyingly to earth until all the stars in the heavens condense into the sparkle in one little girl's eye. It ends with that same girl as an adult (Jodie Foster)--her search having taken her to places beyond her imagination--turning her gaze inward and seeing the universe in a handful of sand. Contact traces the journey between those two visual epiphanies. Based on Carl Sagan's novel, Contact is exceptionally thoughtful and provocative for a big-budget Hollywood science fiction picture, with elements that recall everything from 2001 to The Right Stuff. Foster's solid performance (and some really incredible alien hardware) keep viewers interested, even when the story skips and meanders, or when the halo around the golden locks of rising-star-of-a-different-kind Matthew McConaughey (as the pure-Hollywood-hokum love interest)reaches Milky Way-level wattage. Ambitious, ambiguous, pretentious, unpredictable--Contact is all of these things and more. Much of it remains open to speculation and interpretation but whatever conclusions one eventually draws, Contactdeserves recognition as a rare piece of big-budget studio film making on a personal scale. --Jim Emerson

• Secret Agent | DVD | (07/07/2003) from £14.98   |  Saving you £-7.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £6.99

  One of Alfred Hitchcock's finest pre-Hollywood films, the 1936 Secret Agent stars a young John Gielgud as a British spy whose death is faked by his intelligence superiors. Reinvented with a new identity and outfitted with a wife (Madeleine Carroll), Gielgud's character is sent on assignment with a cold-blooded accomplice (Peter Lorre) to assassinate a German agent. En route, the counterfeit couple keeps company with an affable American (Robert Young), who turns out to be more than he seems after the wrong man is murdered by Gielgud and Lorre. Dense with interwoven ideas about false names and real identities, about appearances as lies and the brutality of the hidden, and about the complicity of those who watch the anarchy that others do, Secret Agent declared that Alfred Hitchcock was well along the road to mastery as a filmmaker and, more importantly, knew what it was he wanted to say for the rest of his career. --Tom Keogh

• O Brother, Where Art Thou? | DVD | (09/04/2001) from £5.21   |  Saving you £12.04 (304.81%)   |  RRP £15.99

  George Clooney stars in the latest film from the Coen brothers, a musical about a con on the run in the Deep South of the 1930s.

• Dire Straits - The Sultans Of Swing - The Very Best Of | DVD | (01/10/1999) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  1. Sultans of Swing 2. Lady Writer 3. Romeo and Juliet 4. Tunnel of Love 5. Private Investigations 6. Twisting by the pool 7. Love Over Gold (Live) 8. So Far Away 9. Money for Nothing 10. Brothers in Arms 11. Walk of Life 12. Calling Elvis 13. Heavy Fuel 14. On Every Street 15. Your Latest Trick (Live) 16. Local Hero - Wild Theme (Live)

• Lost Highway | DVD | (17/06/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  David Lynch's Lost Highway is one of the most puzzled over movies of the 1990s. After Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart audiences were prepared for more questions than answers. But this mystery is without doubt the most sinister and disturbing of all his work, which is to say it's arguably the most worthy of puzzling out. Bill Pullman goes to jail for murdering his wife Patricia Arquette the Brunette. He metamorphoses into Balthazar Getty who falls for Patricia Arquette the Blonde. They're involved in many bad things. Getty morphs back to Pullman who's left with neither girl, but a lot of explaining to do about how Robert Loggia was involved with both and who/what on earth Robert Blake is. There are no straight answers. It might just be possible to twist the film into a Moebius strip and work out half the chronology, but that would be missing the point. Lynch makes paintings that move and if they happen to tell a tale (thank you The Straight Story), that's just a happy by-product. This film is "about" a lot of things: obsession, the impossible notion of owning a partner, why tailgating is wrong. Beyond that, it's about nothing more than enjoying just how sensually delicious everything looks and sounds on Lynch's Highway. On the DVD: Lost Highway is presented on disc in Lynch's preferred 2.35:1 ratio (anamorphically enhanced), even if it isn't the cleanest of transfers. Sound however, is only two channel stereo, whereas 5.1 mixes do exist elsewhere. The teaser trailer is hardly worth the effort. --Paul Tonks

• Spitting Image - Series 8 - Complete | DVD | (19/10/2009) from £8.47   |  Saving you £4.52 (53.36%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Spitting Image: Series 8

• Watchmen S1 | DVD | (01/06/2020) from £11.98   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Set in an alternate history where masked vigilantes are treated as outlaws, this epic series from executive producer Damon Lindelof (Lost; HBO's The Leftovers) embraces the nostalgia of the original groundbreaking graphic novel of the same name, while attempting to break new ground of its own. Regina King (HBO's The Leftovers) leads the cast as Angela Abar, who wears two masks; one as a lead detective in The Tulsa Police Force and another as wife and mother of three. The cast also includes Jeremy Irons, Don Johnson, Jean Smart, Tim Blake Nelson, Louis Gossett Jr., Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Tom Mison, Frances Fisher and Sara Vickers.

• The Big Sleep | DVD | (06/11/2006) from £6.34   |  Saving you £0.65 (10.25%)   |  RRP £6.99

  Raymond Chandler's hard boiled novel is brought to the screen with sleuth Phillip Marlowe finding himself involved with murder blackmail and violence when hired to protect a General's young daughter.

• Mr Deeds | DVD | (05/09/2005) from £3.95   |  Saving you £6.04 (152.91%)   |  RRP £9.99

  A sweet-natured, small-town guy inherits a controlling stake in a media conglomerate and begins to do business his way.

• The Good Girl | DVD | (12/05/2003) from £5.26   |  Saving you £12.73 (242.02%)   |  RRP £17.99

  Jennifer Aniston stars as a young married woman whose mundane life takes a turn for the worse when she strikes up a passionate and illicit affair.

• Earth vs The Flying Saucers | DVD | (14/10/2002) from £14.49   |  Saving you £-1.50 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Notable neither for its director nor its stars, Earth vs the Flying Saucers has been given the widescreen DVD treatment rather because of its special-effects man, the legendary Ray Harryhausen. A Twilight Zone styled voiceover introduces Dr Marvin Russell and his wife of two hours as they're buzzed by an overhead flying saucer--the first of many. When a translation device reveals the saucer-occupants' fiendish plan to take over the world, it's time for a good old army-alien punch-up. Cue screenfuls of avuncular patriarchs, loads of techno-flannel space-speak and plenty of gratuitous American-monument destruction. A by-numbers B-movie, this is only really notable for Harryhausen's stop-motion FX work--and though this, his fifth feature, isn't a patch on his later Technicolor masterpieces, his trick of demolishing facsimiles of recognisable landmarks is cited by many premier filmmakers as being hugely influential on their work. This is very much of its time, the saucer-people arousing few of the thrills engendered by his later creations (Sinbad's Cyclops, for example). And with Cold War fears now just a memory, the Ruskies, or rather aliens, can no longer prevail upon a zeitgeist of xenophobic paranoia for their power. On the DVD: Earth vs the Flying Saucers's black-and-white picture is clean and crisp in this anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen transfer and the Dolby digital mono soundtrack is clear enough. The theatrical trailer will please fans of kitsch, as will the featurette "This Is Dynamation" produced at the same time as the first Sinbad movie. The real corker here though is the generously proportioned documentary "The Harryhausen Chronicles": narrated by Leonard Nimoy, it features a stellar cast of devotees (George Lucas among them) waxing lyrical about the influence of Harryhausen's films, and allows the man himself to ramble fascinatingly over clips of his filmic canon. If you're a fan, it's Harryhausen heaven. --Paul Eisinger

• Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie | DVD | (08/04/2004) from £9.43   |  Saving you £3.56 (37.75%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Shift into turbo! The legendary Power Rangers must stop the evil space pirate Divatox from releasing the powerful Maligore...

• Victoria Wood - At The Albert Hall - Live | DVD | (25/11/2002) from £11.52   |  Saving you £5.73 (55.85%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Victoria Wood Live at the Albert Hall provides proof, if any were needed, that after two decades at the top of her profession, Wood is one of a small handful of British comedians of either sex capable of filling the country's largest venues. For the consistently high quality of her penetrating observations of the mundane she has no equal. Recorded in 2001, this performance has all the hallmarks of her microscopic examinations of life's perplexing minutiae and trivia. From her recent hysterectomy to Paul Daniels, from the NHS help line to wheelie bin covers, from Americans in Disneyworld to the ageism of catalogue mailing lists, nothing escapes Wood's attention. Not even in-vogue authors: she refuses to read "Captain Corelli's friggin' Mandolin" as it sits reproachfully at her bedside. Wood even provides her own interval act: a devastatingly accurate parody of a vulgar, second-rate cabaret singer shot to stardom on the wings of a cruise ship docu-soap. Jane McDonald's sense of humour will never face a harder test. More poignant are Wood's observations on parenthood and marriage, with all the physical ailments of middle age ("We've only got one fully operating leg between us"). She has since separated from her husband, the magician Geoffrey Durham. Fans will await the impact of that on her stand-up material with some interest. --Piers Ford

• In Cold Blood (1967) (Criterion Collection) UK Only | Blu Ray | (04/04/2022) from £17.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Truman Capote's best seller, a breakthrough narrative account of real-life crime and punishment, became an equally chilling film in the hands of writer-director RICHARD BROOKS (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). Cast for their unsettling resemblances to the killers they play, ROBERT BLAKE (Lost Highway) and SCOTT WILSON (The Great Gatsby) give authentic, unshowy performances as Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, who in 1959 murdered a family of four in Kansas during a botched robbery. Brooks brings a detached, documentary-like starkness to this uncompromising view of an American tragedy and its aftermath; at the same time, stylistically In Cold Blood is a filmmaking master class, with clinically precise editing, chiaroscuro black-and-white cinematography by the great CONRAD L. HALL (American Beauty), and a menacing jazz score by Quincy Jones. Special Features New 4K digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack New interview with cinematographer John Bailey on the film's cinematography New interview with film historian Bobbie O'Steen on the film's editing New interview with film critic and jazz historian Gary Giddins on the film's music by Quincy Jones New interview with writer Douglass Daniel on director Richard Brooks Interview with Brooks from 1988 from the French television series Cinéma cinemas Interview with actor Robert Blake from 1968 from the British television series Good Evening with Jonathan King With Love from Truman, a short 1966 documentary featuring novelist Truman Capote, directed by Albert and David Maysles Two archival NBC interviews with Capote: one following the author on a 1966 visit to Holcomb, Kansas, and the other conducted by Barbara Walters in 1967 Trailer PLUS: An essay by critic Chris Fujiwara