"Actor: Oleg Menchikov"

• Burnt By The Sun | DVD | (31/03/2008) from £20.63   |  Saving you £-0.64 (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  It's 1936 and respected hero of the Bolshevik Revolution Colonel Segui Kotov is living an idyllic life in the Russian countryside with his wife Maroussia and daughter Nadia. One glorious summer's day his serenity is interupted by the arrival of the mysterious Dimitri a former lover of Maroussia who had disappeared from her life ten years earlier. With songs and stories their new guest charms everyone but Kotov soon begins to suspect more sinister motives for his re-appearance. Set against the growing threat of Stalin's regime of terror Nikita Mikhalkov's poignant Oscar-winning film lingers in the memory long after viewing.

• East West | DVD | (24/03/2003) from £20.00   |  Saving you £-4.01 (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  East West is, fortunately, more than the colour-by-numbers melodrama that the packaging makes it seem. On the cover, a pair of haunted eyes gaze into the middle distance above a superb example of that absurd movie poster copywriting that reads much the same wherever you put the nouns: "In a land without freedom, escape was her only hope", which is hardly more meaningful than, say, "In a land without hope, freedom was her only escape". East West deserves better. A French-Russian production, the film tells the story of a Russian doctor, his French wife and their child. In 1946 they accept Stalin's invitation to exiled Russians to return to the motherland and help rebuild the country; swiftly they discover that the reality doesn't quite match the advertising. The film follows the stresses the situation places on the central couple's marriage and focuses on the wife's dreams of escape, which revolve around an intervention by a grand dame of French theatre (played, appropriately, by Catherine Deneuve). East West suffers slightly from several disorientating lurches forward in time, but is otherwise a superior thriller and a convincing period piece. On the DVD: East West offers two different trailers, filmographies of the stars and director and scene selection. The film is in French with English subtitles. –-Andrew Muller

• Burnt By The Sun | DVD | (10/04/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Colonel Serguei Kotov, a military hero of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, is enjoying a contented life in his country home with his wife Maroussia and young daughter Nadia. Into this idyllic setting enters Dimitri, a ruthless man on an evil mission, whose affair with Maroussia ten years earlier ended with his mysterious disappearance.