"Actor: Kathryn Bigelow"

• A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies | DVD | (05/06/2000) from £4.99   |  Saving you £15.00 (300.60%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Scorsese's invigorating history of American movies avoids the straitjacket of chronology. Although he makes dutiful nods in the direction of Edwin S. Porter, D.W. Griffith and Orson Welles, he is equally interested in figures working at the margins, film-makers such as Andre De Toth, Ida Lupino, Sam Fuller and Edgar Ulmer, "who circumvented the system to get their vision onto the screen". He describes them as "illusionists", "smugglers", con artists who managed to hoodwink the money men into allowing them to make the films they wanted. Some worked in B-movies ("less money, more freedom") others (like Scorsese himself) struck their own Faustian bargains with the studios, making "one movie for them, one for yourself"His heroes are the outsiders, the film-makers who chafe against the assurances of the American dream. He offers a vivid, guilty vignette of himself as a four-year-old child, sitting in a darkened auditorium watching in amazement as Gregory Peck overpowers Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun, one of the first films his mother took him to. "The savage intensity of the music, the burning sun, the overt sexuality ... it seems that the two could only consummate their passion by killing each other". There's a certain irony in Scorsese, who once seriously considered becoming a priest, succumbing to a David O. Selznick Technicolor extravaganza which had already been condemned by the church.While often sounding like a serious-minded apprentice who watches old movies to pick up tips which will help him in his own work ("study the old masters, enrich your palette, expand the canvas-there's always so much more to learn") he never overlooks the illicit pleasure that cinema can bring. "I don't really see a conflict between the church and the movies, the sacred and the profane". --Geoffrey Macnab

• Cartel Land | DVD | (26/10/2015) from £6.98   |  Saving you £9.01 (129.08%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Produced by Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) and with unprecedented access Cartel Land is an explosive look at the journeys of two modern-day vigilante groups and their shared enemy - the murderous Mexican drug cartels. In the Mexican state of Michoacán Dr. Jose Mireles a small-town physician known as "El Doctor" leads the Autodefensas a citizen uprising against the violent Knights Templar drug cartel that has wreaked havoc on the region for years. Meanwhile in Arizona's Altar Valley - a narrow 52-mile-long desert corridor known as Cocaine Alley - Tim "Nailer" Foley an American veteran heads a small paramilitary group called Arizona Border Recon whose goal is to stop Mexico's drug wars from seeping across our border. Filmmaker Matthew Heineman embeds himself in the heart of darkness as Nailer El Doctor and the cartel each vie to bring their own brand of justice to a society where institutions have failed. Cartel Land is a chilling meditation on the breakdown of order and the blurry line between good and evil.