"Actor: John Curry"

• The Shout | DVD | (28/07/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  During a cricket match at a lunatic asylum patient Crossley relates a strange story to a composer Anthony Fielding and his wife Rachel. Crossley once lived with Australian aborigines who taught him the secret of a deadly shout which has the power to kill anyone within earshot. Crossley moves in with the couple and starts an affair with Rachel. Meanwhile Anthony wants to harness the energy of the shout for his music and will not rest until he has discovered the truth about his guest's stange powers...

• Home Alone/Home Alone 2/Home Alone 3 | DVD | (06/09/2004) from £22.97   |  Saving you £-2.98 (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Home Alone.Eight-year-old Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) has become the man of the house overnight! Accidentally left behind when his family rushes off on a Christmas vacation Kevin gets busy decorating the house for the holidays. But he's not decking the halls with tinsel and holly. Two bumbling burglars are trying to break in and Kevin's rigging a bewildering battery of booby traps to welcome them!Home Alone 2.Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) is back! But this time he's in New York City - with enough cash and credit cards to turn the Big Apple into his own playground! But Kevin won't be alone for long. The notorious Wet Bandits Harry and Marv (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern) still smarting from their last encounter with Kevin are bound for New York too plotting a huge holiday heist.Home Alone 3.A band of international crooks has hidden a military computer chip inside a toy car but an airport mix-up lands it in the hands of whiz-kid Alex Pruitt (Alex D. Linz) who's home alone with the chicken pox. When the criminals zero in on Alex's house with their high-tech gadgetry madness and mayhem kick into high gear as the pint-sized hero defends himself against the bumbling bad guys - armed with an outrageous array of ambushes and booby traps!

• Next Friday | UMD | (17/04/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £17.99

• Annie / Pollyanna / Return To Oz | DVD | (04/10/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Annie (Dir. Rob Marshall 1999): As seen on The Wonderful World of Disney this new production of the classic musical features an all-star cast belting out the beloved songs. Original Broadway Annie Andrea McArdle makes and appearance too! Fun for the whole family. Pollyanna (Dir. David Swift 1960): The heartwarming story of a young girl who brings goodwill and happiness to the residents of a New England town. Hayley Mills won an honorary Academy Award for her performance. Return To Oz (Dir. Walter Murch 1985): In 1899 Dorothy Gale returns to the land of Oz only to find the enchanting Emerald City in ruins and all her old friends have been captured by the Nome King and the evil Princess Mombi...

• 4 Dogs Playing Poker | DVD | (14/05/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  An entry in the recent rash of crooks-falling-out cynical crime-comedy noirs, Four Dogs Playing Poker opens with a robbery at a wedding in Buenos Aires. Five friends pose as staff and guests to penetrate the secret collector's vault of lecherous father-of-the-bride George Lazenby and walk away with a valuable dancing-girl statue. Back in Los Angeles, the team are visited by their sponsor, hefty guest-star crook Forrest Whitaker, who tells them there's a question as to whether the statue is on the ship that's supposed to be smuggling it into the country. If it doesn't show up they'll have to cough up a million dollars between them or get killed. To underline the point and in the first of many "it-just-doesn't-make-sense" plot turns, Whitaker has his men shoot Tim Curry, organiser of the gang, in the leg and then, to show that trying to leave town is a bad idea, has him hung up dead in a meat locker with his feet chain sawed off (offscreen) by the comedy British double-act thugs. An unbelievably complicated scheme is hatched between the surviving four, two couples, whereby they each take out insurance policies that benefit the rest and pick cards and safety-deposit box-keys that identify one of them as the designated murderer and another as a victim. Naturally, suspicions simmer (one character, when asked if she distrusts her friends, replies "all my friends are thieves") and triple-crosses are hatched. The prolific Olivia Williams, in Lulu wig and American accent, emerges as the star, walking a knife-edge between imperilled heroine and cynical manipulator but she is ably supported by druggie, computer savvy Daniel London, hunky bartender Balthazar Getty and jittery insurance functionary Stacy Edwards. Familiar, if watchable. --Kim Newman

• The Shadow | DVD | (25/05/2015) from £17.53   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Another masked avenger is reincarnated as a big budget movie. Idle playboy Lamont Cranston (Alec Baldwin), schooled in Tibetan mysticism, fights crime in late '30s New York while wearing a natty hat and false beak. He finds time to romance telepathic sweetie Margo Lane (Penelope Miller), whose crusty old scientist Dad (Ian McKellen) has just invented an atom bomb which is in danger of falling into the hands of Shiwan Khan (John Lone), conquest-happy last descendent of Genghis Khan.Director Russell Mulcahy turns out the regulation death traps (a locked chamber filling with water, a bomb timer which ticks away during the climax) and the Shadow breezes through via nifty "invisible" effects. It evokes the conventions and charms of 1930s' pulp fiction in rather more nostalgic mode than Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, and adds little of its own attitude, although a sly camp sensibility (notably in the extremely chi-chi Tim Curry and John Lone as the villains) goes for snickering at the expense of tension. A pleasant, eye-pleasing movie but, after the super-heroic likes of Batman, The Crow and The Mask, the merely mysterious Shadow seems somewhat grandfatherly and remote. --Kim Newman

• Home Alone 2 - Lost In New York | UMD | (02/03/2009) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

• Home Alone/Home Alone 2/Home Alone 3 | DVD | (19/09/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £7.99

  Home Alone: Eight-year-old Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) has become the man of the house overnight! Accidentally left behind when his family rushes off on a Christmas vacation Kevin gets busy decorating the house for the holidays. But he's not decking the halls with tinsel and holly. Two bumbling burglars are trying to break in and Kevin's rigging a bewildering battery of booby traps to welcome them! Home Alone 2: Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) is back. But this time he's in New York City - with enough cash and credit cards to turn the Big Apple into his own playground! But Kevin won't be alone for long. The notorious Wet Bandits Harry and Marv (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern) still smarting from their last encounter with Kevin are bound for New York too plotting a huge holiday heist. Home Alone 3: International crooks hide a top-secret computer chip inside a toy car but an airport mix-up lands it in the hands of eight-year-old Alex Pruitt who's home alone with the chicken pox. Madness and mayhem kick into high gear as the pint-sized hero defends his house against the bumbling bad guys armed with an outrageous array of ambushes and booby traps.

• Friday After Next | UMD | (01/01/1980) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £17.99

• Kinsey | DVD | (11/07/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Liam Neeson gives a bravura performance as the title character in KINSEY, which details the controversial and dramatic rise of sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey. Raised in a sexually repressed household with a preacher father (John Lithgow) who believes the zipper is the devil's work, young Kinsey goes against his father's wishes and studies biology, eventually becoming a leading authority on the gall wasp. His skill at classification, organization, and research, combined with his own burgeoning sexuality following his marriage to Clara McMillen (Laura Linney), leads him to begin investigating the nature of human sexuality. Working at Indiana University, Kinsey finds that sex is something many Americans have been waiting a long time to talk about. Unfortunately, others consider his work to be disgusting and want it ended. Writer-director Bill Condon (GODS AND MONSTERS) alternates between short black-and-white scenes of Kinsey answering his own sex survey questions, with longer colour scenes that flash back to the important moments of his life. Kinsey's boyhood through his formative years, and his obsessions with the gall wasp and human sexual behaviour, are thoroughly documented. The publication of the seminal books SEXUAL BEHAVIOUR IN THE HUMAN MALE (1948) and SEXUAL BEHAVIOUR IN THE HUMAN FEMALE (1953) mark his primary achievements. Interestingly, it is the second book that causes the biggest panic, as a repressed society refuses to believe that women have the same needs and desires as men. Neeson and Linney make a wonderfully refreshing couple, freely sharing each other for all to see. Peter Sarsgaard, Chris O'Donnell, and Timothy Hutton lend fine supporting work as Kinsey's staff. KINSEY is an enlightening, engaging, yet frightening film, revealing how far the understanding of American sexuality has come--and how far it still has to go.