"Actor: Philip Dore"

• High Hopes | DVD | (13/04/2015) from £10.98   |  Saving you £7.00 (77.86%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Mike Leigh writes and directs this class struggle comedy drama which portrays the intertwined lives of an extended working class family in London during the Thatcher years. The story follows left-wing bike messenger Cyril Bender (Philip Davis), his girlfriend Shirley (Ruth Sheen) and Cyril's conservative mother (Edna Dore), who lives in the last council house on her street next to the appallingly upper class Boothe-Braines (Lesley Manville and David Bamber). Cyril's consumerist sister Valerie (Heather Tobias) and her car salesman husband Martin (Philip Jackson) join the family to throw a surprise 70th birthday party for Mrs. Bender but, despite their best intentions, the event descends into disaster.

• High Hopes | Blu Ray | (13/04/2015) from £14.83   |  Saving you £5.16 (34.79%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Mike Leigh writes and directs this class struggle comedy drama which portrays the intertwined lives of an extended working class family in London during the Thatcher years. The story follows left-wing bike messenger Cyril Bender (Philip Davis), his girlfriend Shirley (Ruth Sheen) and Cyril's conservative mother (Edna Dore), who lives in the last council house on her street next to the appallingly upper class Boothe-Braines (Lesley Manville and David Bamber). Cyril's consumerist sister Valerie (Heather Tobias) and her car salesman husband Martin (Philip Jackson) join the family to throw a surprise 70th birthday party for Mrs. Bender but, despite their best intentions, the event descends into disaster.

• Combat America | DVD | (18/12/2006) from £4.99   |  Saving you £3.00 (60.12%)   |  RRP £7.99

  '1st Lieutenant Clark Gable' provides the voice-over for this World War II US Army Airforces Film that tells the story of the 351st Bombardment Group AAF. Amongst remarkable footage taken from the combat planes in action 'Combat America' provides a rare portrait of the planes and the men that flew them both working and at rest.

• High Hopes (Mike Leigh's) | Blu Ray | (28/02/2011) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  A film by one of Britain's most celebrated film makers and multi-award winning director of Life Is Sweet Naked Secrets and Lies Topsy Turvy and most recently Vera Drake. Fabulous Films presents for the first time on DVD this critically acclaimed slice of life dark comedy Mike Leigh's High Hopes. Wayne left home because of an argument about pies. Cyril would like to machine gun the Royal family. Rupert and Laetitia Boothe-Brain play yuppie sex games while deep in suburbia Valerie fails to arouse her husband Martin with a suggestion that he be Michael Douglas and she a virgin. Mrs Bender gets locked out of her house and is criticised by her neighbour for selfishly occupying a whole house in an increasingly fashionable area. And Cyril's girlfriend Shirley wants to start a family but gets no encouragement from Cyril who feels that the world should be spared more babies until everyone already here has a job a place to live and enough to eat. This disparate cast of characters swim in and out of each others lives against a background of London and its suburbs seamlessly orchestrated by director Mike Leigh.

• Creepshow 2 | DVD | (11/02/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  For Creepshow 2, the quickie 1987 sequel to the Stephen King-scripted/George Romero-directed 1982 original, Romero shifted jobs to become the screenwriter, earning King (who also has a goony cameo as a trucker) a "based on stories by" credit. Cinematographer Michael Gornick stepped up to make an uninspiring directorial debut, turning out a conventional TV-look picture unlike the sometimes striking Creepshow. A frame story mixes live action and cartoon as a small boy leafs through the latest issue of his favourite horror comic while plotting revenge against neighbourhood bullies. A pun-dropping host called the Creep (played by Tom Savini when not a cartoon) introduces three anecdotes. In "Old Chief Wooden Head", George Kennedy and Dorothy Lamour are kindly Western shopkeepers killed by tearaways and avenged by the wooden Indian which stands outside the place. In "The Raft", four obnoxious teens are terrorised on a lake by a hungry slime-monster. And in "The Hitch-Hiker", hit-and-run driver Lois Chiles is haunted by her squashed victim, who keeps reappearing in a progressively battered forms. Though King and Romero deliver a good mix of cynical and melodramatic dialogue, the stories are disappointingly thin and predictable, with especially weak punch-lines. Of the performers, only Chiles really works up the hysterical attack needed to play a comic book character. On the DVD: just a trailer. The picture is a fullscreen print that cuts off crucial details in the comic book panels. --Kim Newman