"Actor: L 225"

• Mefistofele - Boito | DVD | (30/06/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  An exceptional performance of Arrigo Boito's 'Mefistofele' conducted by Maurizo Arena.

• Vacas | DVD | (24/06/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £29.99

  With Vacas, his first feature, the Basque director Julio Medem set out all the elements of his audacious and idiosyncratic approach to filmmaking: intricate, circular plots; richly sensual imagery and highly stylised camerawork; a deft interweaving of fantasy and reality; and a thoroughly subversive attitude to Spanish tradition and folklore. Vacas takes a staple Spanish genre--the epic historical melodrama with all its bombast and macho posturing--and kicks the stuffing out of it while pelting it with cowpats. The action unrolls between two Spanish civil wars--the Second Carlist War of 1874-5, and the rather better-known conflict that started in 1936. An incident in the first of these sets up a feud between two farming families in a Basque valley, and the story leapfrogs down the decades taking in star-crossed lovers, log-chopping contests (a staple Basque competitive sport, it seems), mutilation, madness, incest, photography and any number of cows, through whose placidly bemused gaze we view a good deal of the action. Though Medem is dealing with all the solemn Hemingway-esque elements of romantic Spanishry--honour, blood and death--his approach is too playful to admit any real sense of tragedy. Much of the time the tone is closer to myth, and there's more than a touch of magic realism: axes fly miles through the air, and a tree in the woods can apparently eat people alive. In the end, of course, love triumphs over all. Medem's films have since gained greatly in sophistication and technique, but there's exuberance about this debut work that's irresistible. On the DVD: Vacas on disc has trailers for all five of Medem's features to date; filmographies for Medem and his two lead actors, Emma Suárez and Carmelo Gómez; and useful written notes on the movie by film historian Robert Stone. The transfer's clean and clear, doing justice to Carles Gusi's rich photography, with good sound and in the original ratio. --Philip Kemp

• Il Ritorno D'Ulisse In Patria (REGION 1) | DVD | (10/09/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £29.99

  Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria from the Theatre du Jeu de Paume, July 2002.

• Killer Love | DVD | (07/04/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

• Paradise Lost | DVD | (01/09/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £1.99

  A company sprays a chemical onto a forest to make space for a holiday village. When Dr. Maurier discovers a child is born with defects she fights to close the project down.

• Linda Di Chamounix - Donizetti | DVD | (03/03/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £29.99

  A performance of Donizetti's 'Linda Di Chamounix' from the Zurich Opera House.

• The Versace Murder | DVD | (11/08/2003) from £12.99   |  Saving you £-9.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £3.99

  July 15 1997. The world is shocked at the news that Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace has been tragically and brutally murdered execution style on the steps of his Ocean Drive Villa in the famous South Beach section of Miami Beach Florida. Shortly thereafter the authorities led by FBI Special Agent John Jacoby announce a nationwide manhunt for their only suspect alleged spree killer Andrew Phillip Cunanan from San Diego California. Destiny or design? Follow the steps of both Versace and Cunanan from the time of Cunanan's farewell dinner party in San Diego to the aftermath of both the murder of Versace and Cunanan's alleged suicide on a Miami Beach houseboat.

• Face Of Terror | DVD | (04/04/2005) from £4.99   |  Saving you £15.00 (300.60%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Nothing's more deadly than a man with nothing to lose... A police officer searching for his missing sister in Spain mistakenly uncovers a terrorist cell and must dismantle their operation if he is to survive!

• Gounod: Romeo et Juliette -- film version | DVD | (04/02/2003) from £19.18   |  Saving you £5.81 (30.29%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Shakespeare's lovers never looked and sounded so good as in this romantic new film adaptation of Charles Gounod's beloved opera starring one of classical music's most popular and successful duos Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu. A spectacular medieval castle and its surrounding countryside provide the setting for this timeless tale of warring families and star-crossed lovers. Conductor Anton Guadagno leads the Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra through the opera's best-loved arias and duets in this fresh interpretation of Gounod's masterwork.

• Full Moon In Paris | DVD | (22/03/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Full Moon in Paris, the fourth of Eric Rohmer's Comedies and Proverbs, is also the most ironic and, in many ways, the most judgmental of his films. Louise (Pascale Ogier), a restless designer bored with sleepy suburban life outside of Paris, lives with her lover, Remy (Tcheky Karyo), a stable architect happy with a calm home life and a long-term relationship. The independent Louise decides to move back into her old Paris apartment during the week, losing herself in the bustle of dinner parties and nightclubs and single men, while spending her weekends back with Remy. Louise becomes briefly entangled with another man, a spontaneous musician who is the opposite of Remy, but in a neat twist on the formula, Remy himself drifts to another--at the suggestion of Louise herself. Willowy Ogier's kittenish sexuality and zest for life are wrapped in a self-absorbed determination that borders on indifference, but for the most part this is another wryly witty look at modern love from the master of the sophisticated romantic comedy. Fabrice Luchini plays Louise's best friend and conniving confidante, Octave, and Laszlo Szabo appears as a café patron who pontificates on the magical effects of the full moon. Ogier, who died shortly after the film's release, designed many of the handsome sets. Rohmer followed this with perhaps his most generous character study, the modestly magical romantic adventure Summer. --Sean Axmaker

• Liquid Dreams | DVD | (06/03/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £3.99

  Set in the future world of Neurovoid where no-one is safe and there is no escape. Eve Black a stranger is shocked to discover her sister's body in her apartment. Despite all the hallmarks of a drug overdose she senses that something far more sinister has happened.

• Delivery Boys | DVD | (05/07/2005) from £11.95   |  Saving you £-7.96 (N/A%)   |  RRP £3.99

  A gang of boys under the Brooklyn Bridge are united by their common interest in break dancing. Some work as pizza delivery boys hence they call themselves the ""Delivery Boys"". They form a dance team and enter a local break dance contest sponsored by a woman's panty manufacturer. A rival gang's sponsor intimidates their employer into thinking she must keep the boys working so they won't be harmed. She gives the boys some ""specialized"" deliveries to make them late for the contest. The

• Meyerbeer: L'Africaine | DVD | (03/09/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £29.99

  Enormously popular and influential in its time, Meyerbeer's L'Africaine has become a rarity--the conventions of grand opera which it embodies so thoroughly are only familiar as adapted by Verdi and Wagner, so this work usefully reminds us of how radical they were. Meyerbeer and his librettist Scribe give us a five-act plot full of confrontations and threats of death, a shipwreck and the suicide of the Indian heroine Selika and her rejected suitor by inhaling the poisonous aromas of a deadly tree. The expedition of Vasco Da Gama round the Cape of Good Hope and up to the spice ports of India becomes less a story about the crusade for profit and more a matter of messy triangular love affairs. Heavy fathers, Brahmin priests and Grand Inquisitors are handled with much facility and no intensity. What L'Africaine really amounts to is a singers' display piece, and the two principals here--Shirley Verrett as Selika and Placido Domingo as Vasco--are entirely up to its demands. Domingo reminds us that Vasco's Act 4 aria "Oh Paradis" was for decades a standard tenor showstopper. The other principals, Ruth Ann Svenson and Justino Diaz, are entirely admirable and Marco Arena and the San Francisco Opera give the work as a whole both the grandeur it certainly possesses and rather more subtlety than one might have expected. On the DVD: The DVD, presented in 4:3 ratio, and in PCM stereo, has no features apart from instructions and subtitles in French, German, English and Spanish. This failure to provide extras, or even an especially informative leaflet, becomes especially regrettable with a work whose conventions are now far out of the operatic mainstream. --Roz Kaveney

• Sherrill Milnes: An All-Star Gala | DVD | (22/08/2005) from £16.39   |  Saving you £0.60 (3.66%)   |  RRP £16.99

  I PAGLIACCI: Prologue (Leoncavallo) Sherrill MilnesUP IN CENTRAL PARK: Close as Pages in a Book (Romberg/Fields) Julia Migenes and Sherrill Milnes.COSI FAN TUTTE: Un'aura amorosa (Mozart) Peter Schreier.O TOD WIE BITTER BIST DU: (Brahms) Sherrill Milnes with Jon Spong piano.LA TRAVIATA: Pura siccome un angelo (Verdi) Mirella Freni and Sherrill Milnes.DON CARLO: Dio che nell'alma infondere (Verdi) Placido Domingo and Sherrill Milnes.OTELLO: Credo in un Dio crudel (Verdi) Sherrill Milnes.

• The Element Of Crime | DVD | (29/07/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Way, way before he dreamt up his famous Dogme manifesto, Lars von Trier launched his feature-film career with The Element of Crime and proved that, 400 years after Hamlet, the Danes can still do melancholy like nobody else. Less a film noir than a film jaune sale, this ultra-enigmatic thriller is shot entirely in tones of grimy sepia in a world where nightfall seems to be an unceasing condition. A police detective, Fisher (Michael Elphick), is summoned from Cairo to "Europe" (the location never gets any more specific than that) to investigate a series of gory child-murders. He comes to suspect that the killer may be a mysterious character called Harry Grey and sets out to retrace Grey's movements. The film takes its title from a treatise written by Fisher's old mentor Osborne (Welsh actor Esmond Knight, a veteran of Powell and Pressburger's films), but it might as well refer to water. Von Trier conjures up a world not only permanently benighted, but dank, sodden and dripping both indoors and out, cluttered with mouldy, antiquated industrial machinery. There are echoes (or pre-echoes) here of half-a-dozen other movies--Blade Runner, City of Lost Children, Tarkovsky's Stalker, Welles' The Trial--and at times it feels as though von Trier has just set out to show he can do art house as well as anybody and possibly better. The plot makes no sense whatever and clearly isn't meant to, and Elphick's bemused expression, one suspects, derives from the actor as much as from the character he's playing. As always with von Trier you can't help wondering if whole thing isn't an elaborate put-on, especially since the director himself shows up, epicene and shaven-headed, playing a personage called "Schmuck of Ages". But what it lacks in coherence (either narrative or visual) Element of Crime makes up for in atmosphere, which it has, literally, by the bucketful. This release, incidentally, is the English-language version. --Philip Kemp

• Trapped / Identity / The Bone Collector | DVD | (17/05/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £18.99

  Trapped: When Will and Karen Jennings are held hostage and their daughter is abducted a relentless 24-hour plan is set in motion that will challenge everything they took for granted. Joe Hickley (Kevin Bacon) has orchestrated and mastered the foolproof plan to extort money from wealthy families. As the plan escalates and unravels Will and Karen who are trapped in different cities are pushed to the limit to get their daughter back alive... Identity: Caught in a savage rainstorm ten travellers are forced to seek refuge at a strange desert motel. They soon realize they've found anything but shelter. There is a killer among them and one by one they are murdered. As the storm rages on and the dead begin to outnumber the living one thing becomes clear: each of them was drawn to the motel not by accident or circumstance but by forces beyond imagination forces that promise anyone who survives a mind-bending and terrifying destiny. Bone Collector: He takes his victims' lives and leaves behind mysterious pieces of a bizarre puzzle. And the only person who may be able to make sense of the serial killer's deranged plan is Lincoln Rhyme (Denzel Washington) once a top homicide investigator. After a tragic accident changes his life forever Rhyme can only watch as other cops bungle the case until he teams up with a young rookie Amelia Donaghy (Angelina Jolie) but as the killer senses the cops closing in Rhyme realizes that he and his partner are on the trail of a vicious sadistic murderer who will stop at nothing on his deadly mission. At any moment Rhyme and Amelia could become his next targets; their first case together could become their last...

• Revenge In The House Of Usher | DVD | (18/10/2004) from £17.53   |  Saving you £-7.54 (-75.50%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Jess Franco directs this low budget slice of Euro horror under the name J.P. Johnson. Revenge in the House of Usher is a chilling tale based on the Edgar Allan Poe classic The Fall of the House of Usher. When Allen comes upon a sinister house clinging to a high cliff he is plunged into the macabre world of the Usher last descendent of a family plagued by madness. Usher leads Allen down a whirlpool of evil where Ushers' murdered wives are vampires and living corpses. Allen is

• Paisiello: Nina | DVD | (19/05/2003) from £33.21   |  Saving you £-8.22 (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Live recording of Giovanni Paisiello's opera 'Nina' which follows the tale of a woman traumatised by the death her lover Lindoro.

• Puccini: Tosca -- 1976 film version | DVD | (15/10/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Opera is an inherently theatrical medium that does not lend itself readily to the realism of film treatment. The shining exception is Puccini's Tosca, an action-packed melodrama that unfolds in three taut and gripping acts, like the meatiest of Hollywood films noir. And unlike most operas, these three acts are set in three very specific Roman locales. Thus this 1976 film takes place in the church of Sant'Andrea della Valle (Act 1), the Palazzo Farnese (Act 2) and the Castel Sant'Angelo (Act 3). The evocative settings, however, would be mere window-dressing if the cast wasn't just right; fortunately here Placido Domingo is at his virile peak in the heroic tenor role of Cavaradossi; Raina Kabaivanska is a sultry, vocally beautiful Tosca; while a more infamous and domineering Scarpia than that of Sherrill Milnes can hardly be imagined. Bruno Bartoletti and the New Philharmonia Orchestra give lustily dramatic support. Here the music and vocals are pre-recorded and the singers mime to the playback. Occasionally the result is a little unnatural, but overall the cast are good enough actors to bring off the conceit even in the close-ups. It all pays off triumphantly with the gripping realism of the rooftop finale, the one place where film can improve on stage. With the authenticity of the settings assured and such distinguished leads singing so well, this is an almost ideal filmed Tosca. On the DVD: Tosca on disc is presented in 4:3 ratio with a choice of Dolby 5.1 or LPCM Stereo. The picture is adequate but a little flat (possibly because the format is NTSC not PAL) and the same can be said for the sound, which does what it should but is never revelatory. Subtitles are provided in the main European languages and Chinese. --Mark Walker

• Di Que Si | DVD | (05/09/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  An unlikely pair is duped into competing in a reality dating show only to surprise the show's producers by stealing the public's heart with their total incompatibility. The couple advances to round two by faking true love and agreeing to marry in exchange for a hefty cash prize. However on the day of the wedding the show's producers stage a practical joke that summons the police and threatens to land the bride and groom in jail. To avoid capture the couple devises a plan that help