Collateral Damage: A firefighter (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is plunged into the complex and dangerous world of international terrorism after he loses his wife and child in a bombing. Frustrated by the government's stalled investigation and haunted by the thought that the man responsible for murdering his family might never be brought to justice he takes matters into his own hands and tracks the bomber to Columbia... Swordfish: John Travolta stars as Gabriel Shear a sinister mastermind with an elite criminal crew who are desperately trying to access information locked inside a complicated computer system that contains government secrets and if they can hack it a billion payday... Driven: Sylvester Stallone plays a talented veteran driver who confronts the lost potential of his past when called out of retirement to mentor a talented but unfocused rookie contender (Kip Pardue) whose destructive behavior pursuing the girlfriend (Estella Warren) of his primary racing rival (Til Schweiger). Start your engines!
Golden Balls (1993): Ruthless stud Benito Gonzalez (Javier Bardem wants wealth women and to erect a skyscraper in his own honour. In order to achieve this he marries a sophisticated daughter of a rich banker Marta (Maria De Medeiros) but keeps mistress Claudia (Maribel Verdu) on the side. When Marta and Claudia realise they are both victims of Benito's greed things for Benito begin to crumble. Has Benito's luck finally left him? Jamon Jamon (1992): Headstrong senorita Silvia (Penelope Cruz) becomes pregnant to village Mummy's-boy Jose (Jordi Mulla). Silvia's father has left town and her mother Carmen (Anna Galiena) is forced to become the town prostitute. Jose's overbearing mother Conchita (Stefania Sandrelli) fears her son will marry the daughter of a scarlet woman and takes action...she hires sexy young Raul (Javier Bardem) who works in the ham factory and enjoys nude bullfighting to seduce Silvia. What ensues is a series of chaotic and frantic couplings testosterone overload breasts that taste of ham and a duel to the death with a side of bacon. Tit & The Moon (1994): Completing Bigas Luna's saucy Spanish trilogy that began with Jamon Jamon and Golden Balls The Tit and the Moon tells of a young boy's search for the perfect breast. Set in a colourful Catalan resort this exhuberant tale of lust and love is a coming of age story with a differnce. Tete is a nine year old boy who is consumed with jealousy at his baby brother's monopoly of his mum's nipples. After asking the moon for a breast of his own his prayers are answered with the arrival of Estrellita (Mathilda May) a beautiful French dancer. But the course of true love doesn't run smooth and Tete finds stiff competition for her affection. She is deeply in love with her cabaret partner Maurice the flatulent motorbike rider and is also being pursued by Miguel the hunky flamenco-singing teenager. Ages of Lulu (1990): The story of a young woman's descent into the kinky and dangerous sexual underground in Madrid.
This is classic Jess Franco in a genre that he almost created single-handedly - Women in Prison or WiP! Here three women amongst them the beautiful Maria Schell (The Odessa File) and Luciana Paluzzi (James Bond - Thunderball) are sent to a kind of Devil's Island prison. Here aside from the sinister Herbert Lom (Mark of the Devil The Pink Panther series) the inhabitants are either sex-crazed female prisoners or sex-crazed female guards who also happen to be sadists! 99 Women features copious amounts of lesbian rape torture and sex along with numerous displays of semi-naked women making this a true sleaze epic!
The slasher massacre of eight innocent nurses! A psychotic killer is brutally murdering the women from within their asylum... but who will be his next victim?
This film offers an account of Bellini from his days as a student at the Naples conservatory through the premiere of Norma.
Yes, he's back ... and he's still hungry. Hannibal is set 10 years after The Silence of the Lambs, as Dr Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter (Anthony Hopkins, reprising his Oscar-winning role) is living the good life in Italy, studying art and sipping espresso. FBI agent Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore, replacing Jodie Foster), on the other hand, hasn't had it so good--an outsider from the start, she's now a quiet, moody loner who doesn't play bureaucratic games and suffers for it. A botched drug raid results in her demotion--and a request from Lecter's only living victim, Mason Verger (Gary Oldman, uncredited), for a little Q and A. Little does Clarice realise that the hideously deformed Verger--who, upon suggestion from Dr Lecter, peeled off his own face--is using her as bait to lure Dr Lecter out of hiding, quite certain he'll capture the good doctor. Taking the basic plot contraptions from Thomas Harris's baroque novel, Hannibal is so stylistically different from its predecessor that it forces you to take it on its own terms. Director Ridley Scott gives the film a sleek, almost European look that lets you know that, unlike the first film (which was about the quintessentially American Clarice), this movie is all Hannibal. Does it work? Yes--but only up to a point. Scott adeptly sets up an atmosphere of foreboding, but it's all a build-up to the anticlimax, as Verger's plot for abducting Hannibal (and feeding him to man-eating wild boars) doesn't really deliver the requisite visceral thrills, and the much-ballyhooed climatic dinner sequence between Clarice, Dr Lecter and a third, unlucky guest wobbles between parody and horror. Hopkins and Moore are both first-rate, but the film contrives to keep them as far apart as possible, when what made Silence of the Lambs so amazing was their interaction. When they do connect it's quite thrilling but it's unfortunately too little too late. --Mark Englehart, Amazon.com On the DVD: The good-looking widescreen (1.85:1) anamorphic print is accompanied by a directorial commentary on the first disc. Ridley Scott is no stranger to DVD commentaries by now, and keeps up a pretty constant flow of enjoyable story exposition, although provides few specifics about the actual filmmaking process. He's obviously more than happy to talk about this movie, since on the second disc there are also "Ridleygram" interviews with Scott about the process of storyboarding and a huge chunk of deleted or alternate scenes (including the alternate ending) with optional directorial commentary. There's a wealth of other extras to dip into, including five "making-of" featurettes (73 minutes in all), plus two multi-angle "vignettes" of the film's opening sequences (the fish-market shoot-out and opening titles), and a marketing gallery of trailers, stills and artwork. Surround-sound enthusiasts can select either Dolby 5.1 or DTS soundtracks for the main feature. --Mark Walker
The Ages of Lulu is a gruelling sexual odyssey from Spanish director Bigas Luna, made immediately prior to his popular trilogy Jamón, jamón (1992), Golden Balls (1993) and The Tit and the Moon (1994). Starting as the somewhat queasy story of the young Lulu's affair with the manipulative Pablo (Oscar Ladoire), the movie takes a much darker turn once they are wed. It is conventional cinematic wisdom that there's no such thing as sex after marriage, but here Lulu's husband incomprehensibly leads her into blindfolded incest, then is heartbroken when she reacts with disgust. Soon Lulu (superbly played by Francesca Neri from ingénue to hardened 30-something), is paying gay men for group sex, eventually becoming an unwilling attraction in a commercial sado-machochistic orgy. The closest most UK audiences will have come to this before is in Ken Russell's The Devils (1971) and Crimes of Passion (1984), and it is surely one of the most gut-churningly nightmarish scenes ever passed for home viewing. While Ages of Lulu may function as a reactionary warning against the wilder shores of sex, Luna's intention remains unsatisfyingly enigmatic, since the script is under-written and psychologically unconvincing. The end result is pretentious, repellent pornography which degrades human beings of any sexual persuasion. On the DVD: The Ages of Lulu is transferred at an anamorphically enhanced 1.78:1 and image quality is very good, though in some scenes very slightly soft. The film can be watched with or without English subtitles, and the sound is unremarkable stereo. The main extras are a seven-page essay on Bigas Luna and five pages detailing the now restored 110 seconds of cuts made to the 1998 video release. The main title still contains 65 seconds of alternate footage to the cinema original for legal reasons. Also included are filmographies of Lunas and Oscar Ladoire, two trailers plus trailers for six other films. --Gary S Dalkin
Justine is one of the most lavish and bizarre erotic shockers ever made by the notorious Jess Franco bursting with wanton nudity sexual perversion and an all star cast... Romina Power (18 year old daughter of Tyrone power) stars as Justine a nubile young Virgin cast out of a French orphanage and thrust into a depraved world of Prostitution predatory lesbians a fugitive murderess (Mercedes McCambridge) bondage branding and one supremely sadistic monk (an outrageous performance
Director Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 movie The Battle of Algiers concerns the violent struggle in the late 1950s for Algerian independence from France, where the film was banned on its release for fear of creating civil disturbances. Certainly, the heady, insurrectionary mood of the film, enhanced by a relentlessly pulsating Ennio Morricone soundtrack, makes for an emotionally high temperature throughout. With the advent of the "war against terror" in recent years, the film's relevance has only intensified. Shot in a gripping, quasi-documentary style, The Battle of Algiers uses a cast of untrained actors coupled with a stern voiceover. Initially, the film focuses on the conversion of young hoodlum Ali La Pointe (Brahim Haggiag) to FLN (the Algerian Liberation Front.) However, as a sequence of outrages and violent counter-terrorist measures ensue, it becomes clear that, as in Eisenstein's October, it is the Revolution itself that is the true star of the film. Pontecorvo balances cinematic tension with grimly acute political insight. He also manages an even-handedness in depicting the adversaries. He doesn't flinch from demonstrating the civilian consequences of the FLN's bombings, while Colonel Mathieu, the French office brought in to quell the nationalists, is played by Jean Martin as determined, shrewd and, in his own way, honourable man. However, the closing scenes of the movie--a welter of smoke, teeming street demonstrations and the pealing white noise of ululations--leaves the viewer both intellectually and emotionally convinced of the rightfulness of the liberation struggle. This is surely among a fistful of the finest movies ever made. --David Stubbs
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