"Actor: Robert Be"

• Charles Dickens Collection | DVD | (19/03/2012) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.91

  Great ExpectationsThe key ingredient in this modern-day version of Charles Dickens's classic is director Alfonso Cuarón, who made the glowing, estimable A Little Princess. If you saw that (and you should), understand that Expectations has those ingredients (great sense of time, place, and timing) but adds modern music and sex appeal; the latter personified by the long-legged Gwyneth Paltrow. Finnegan Bell (Ethan Hawke as an adult, Jeremy James Kissner at age 10) is the new version of Dickens's Pip. He's a child wise beyond his years, befriending an escaped convict (Robert De Niro) in the warm waters of Florida's Gulf Coast. Finn is also the plaything for Estella (Paltrow as an adult, Raquel Beaudene at age 10), the niece of the coast's richest and most eccentric lady, Ms. Dinsmoor (a fun and flamboyant Anne Bancroft). The prudish Estella likes Finn (catch the best first kiss scene in many a moon) but has been brought up to disdain men; she'll break hearts. As the object of Finn's desires, Estella unfortunately is a one-dimensional character, yet what a dimension! Clad in Donna Karan dresses and her long, sun-kissed hair, Paltrow is luminous. She and Hawke make a very sexy couple. Mitch Glazer's script does better by Finn. He's a blue-collar worker with a gift for drawing (artwork by Francesco Clemente). Following his Uncle Joe's (Chris Cooper) honest ways, Finn grows up as a fisherman, thoughts of Estella and art drifting away in the hard work. When a mysterious benefactor allows him to follow his dream, Finn finds himself in New York, preparing for a once-in-a-lifetime art exhibit--and in the arms of the engaged Estella. Filled with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's golden-drenched light, the film has an irresistible, wildly romantic look. Dinsmoor's place is certainly gothic, Estella and Finn's longing encounters glamorous. Cuarón uses an MTV-friendly soundtrack with a confident touch. Songs by Tori Amos and the band Pulp--along with Patrick Doyle's silky score--create passionate scenes. It all ends far too swiftly with a seemingly tacked-on ending (reflecting the book, as it happens) but the film is splendid storytelling. It's a stylish, sweet valentine. --Doug Thomas Oliver TwistIf Charles Dickens were alive to see Roman Polanski's faithful adaptation of Oliver Twist, he'd probably give it his stamp of approval. David Lean's celebrated 1948 version of the Dickens classic and Carol Reed's Oscar-winning 1968 musical are more entertaining in some ways, but Polanski's rendition is both painstakingly authentic (with superb cinematography and production design) and deeply rooted in the emotional context of the story. Both Polanski and Dickens had personal experiences similar to those of young Oliver (played here by Barney Clark)--Polanski in the Nazi-occupied ghettos of Poland during World War II, and Dickens during his hard-scrabble youth in Victorian London--and this spiritual kinship lends a certain gravitas to the tale of a tenacious orphan who escaped from indentured servitude in London society and is taken in by Fagin (Ben Kingsley) and his streetwise gang of pickpockets. As the evil Bill Sykes, who exploits Oliver for his own nefarious needs, Jamie Foreman is no match for Oliver Reed (in the '68 musical) in terms of frightening menace, but even here, Polanski's direction hews closer to Dickens, while the screenplay by Ronald Harwood (who also wrote Polanski's The Pianist) necessarily trims away subplots and characters for the sake of narrative economy. All in all, this Oliver Twist rises above most previous versions, and with the benefit of Kingsley's nuanced performance, Polanski arrives at a compassionate conclusion that captures the essence of Dickens' novel in a way that viewers of all ages will appreciate for many years to come.-- Jeff Shannon Nicholas NicklebyWhile it necessarily streamlines the Charles Dickens classic, this delightful adaptation of Nicholas Nickelby captures the essence of Dickens in all of its Victorian splendor and squalor. With Charlie Hunnam (the U.K. Queer as Folk) doing noble work in the title role, this quintessentially Dickensian tale begins with the death of Nicholas's father, and the subsequent scheme by his cruel uncle (Christopher Plummer, perfectly cast) to separate Nicholas from his now penniless sister and mother. Stuck in a squalid school run by the evil Mr. and Mrs. Squeers (Jim Broadbent, Juliet Stevenson), Nicholas escapes with his loyal friend Smike (Billy Elliott's Jamie Bell), whose lineage will determine the greedy uncle's fate. As he did with Jane Austen's Emma, writer-director Douglas McGrath has crafted a prestigious production that shifts effortlessly between comedy and tragedy without compromising its warm, inviting tone. His dialogue rings true throughout, inspiring a stellar cast including Nathan Lane, Alan Cumming, Edward Fox, and Timothy Spall. Dickens himself would almost certainly have approved. --Jeff Shannon

• The Longest Day | DVD | (31/05/2004) from £14.95   |  Saving you £8.04 (53.78%)   |  RRP £22.99

  The Longest Day is Hollywood's definitive D-day movie. More modern accounts such as Saving Private Ryan are more vividly realistic, but producer Darryl F Zanuck's epic 1962 account is the only one to attempt the daunting task of covering that fateful day from all perspectives. From the German high command and front-line officers to the French Resistance and all the key Allied participants, the screenplay by Cornelius Ryan, based on his own authoritative book, is as factually accurate as possible. The endless parade of stars (John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Sean Connery, and Richard Burton, to name a few) makes for an uneasy mix of verisimilitude and Hollywood star-power, however, and the film falls a little flat for too much of its three-hour running time. But the set-piece battles are still spectacular, and if the landings on Omaha Beach lack the graphic gore of Private Ryan they nonetheless show the sheer scale and audacity of the invasion. --Mark Walker

• Beat The Devil | DVD | (23/08/2004) from £8.48   |  Saving you £4.51 (53.18%)   |  RRP £12.99

  'Beat The Devil' is a wacky comedy that's played as straight as any film noir and is even funnier as a result. Five men (Bogart Lorre Morley Barnard and Tulli) are out to garner control over East African land which they believe contains a rich uranium ore lode. Billy Dannreuther (Bogart) is married to Maria (Gina Lollobrigida) the other four are their ""business associates"" and Jones and Underdown are added to the mix for some interesting diversification. As the boat leaves from

• Guilty By Suspicion | DVD | (30/06/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  A witch hunt has begun. The hunters are politicians sitting before clicking cameras in HAUC hearing rooms. Hollywood is on trail. An David Merrill is asked to 'name names'. This powerful directorial and screenwriting debut of veteran producer Irwin Winkler vividly recreates the creative community's infamous Blacklist era. De Niro plays Merrill an A-list director who can revive his stalled career by testifying against friends who are suspected communists. Annette Bening is Merrill's e

• Sneakers | Blu Ray | (11/06/2013) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  A group of security experts from a variety of backgrounds are enlisted by National Security to recover a mysterious black box that contains a device that can penetrate the computer systems of the Federal Reserve and other vital government services.

• The Proposition | DVD | (17/07/2006) from £6.49   |  Saving you £13.50 (208.01%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A brother is faced with an impossible proposition in this period Australian thriller.

• Life (2 disc BD & 4K UHD) | 4K UHD | (31/07/2017) from £24.98   |  Saving you £-3.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Lifeis a terrifying sci-fi thriller about a team of scientists aboard the International Space Station whose mission of discovery turns to one of primal fear when they find a rapidly evolving life form that caused extinction on Mars, and now threatens the crew and all life on Earth. Bonus Features: Deleted Scenes Claustrophobic Terror: Creating A Thriller In Space featurette Life: In Zero G featurette The Art and Reality of Calvin featurette Astronaut Diaries Click Images to Enlarge

• Lion King 3: Hakuna Matata | DVD | (16/02/2004) from £6.03   |  Saving you £13.96 (231.51%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The Lion King 3: Hakuna Matata is an ingenious sequel that retells the original film's story from the perspective of best pals Timon the meerkat (voiced by Nathan Lane) and Pumbaa the warthog (Ernie Sabella). Anyone who has wondered how this odd couple met will find out here, beginning with Timon's flight from home following disgrace and his chance encounter with the sweet but lonely Pumbaa. With the arrival of young Simba (Shaun Flemming), The Lion King's familiar tale is reborn via a fresh angle, fleshed out by returning characters Rafiki the wise monkey (Robert Guillaume), Shenzi (Whoopi Goldberg), and Simba's love interest, Nala (Moira Kelly). While the retooled narrative proves a novel experience, The Lion King 3 is really a vehicle for voice actors Lane and Sabella, whose comic performances are shamelessly, broadly funny. Matthew Broderick, Julie Kavner, and Jerry Stiller are also in the vocal cast. The film was released in the US with the title The Lion King 1½--Tom Keogh

• All Creatures Great And Small - Series 2 - Part 2 | DVD | (15/09/2003) from £10.49   |  Saving you £14.50 (138.23%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Based on James Herriot's autobiographical best sellers 'If Only They Could Talk' and 'It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet' the long running TV series 'All Creatures Great and Small' continued to satisfy the Herriot hysteria of the British public. Episode titles: 'Tricks Of The Trade' 'Pride Of Possession' 'The Name Of The Game' 'Puppy Love' 'Ways And Means' 'Pups Pigs And Pickle' 'A Dog's Life' 'Merry Gentlemen'.

• Barefoot In The Park | DVD | (07/05/2001) from £7.81   |  Saving you £2.18 (27.91%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Based on Neil Simon's own play, 1967's Barefoot in the Park is a perennially joyous film starring carefree Jane Fonda and staid lawyer Robert Redford as young newlyweds setting up home in Greenwich Village. Although the opening credits are fragrantly idyllic (aided by Neal Hefti's soundtrack, you can almost smell the blossom in Central Park), the film doesn't idealise apartment living in New York, à la Friends, far from it: Fonda and Redford's apartment is up several flights of stairs; there's a hole in the skylight and the bedroom is the size of a cupboard. All of this puts some strain on the marriage. When Fonda introduces fellow free spirit and ageing, behind-on-the-rent Lothario (Charles Boyer) to her somewhat inhibited mother (Mildred Natwick), the hapless Redford in particular is forced to come to terms with his own inhibitions. Although the second half of the film moves at a less cracking pace than the first, Barefoot in the Park is as exhilarating as a romantic weekend city break. Directo r Gene Saks, scriptwriter Neil Simon and composer Hefti would regroup in 1968 to make the similarly wonderful The Odd Couple. On the DVD: With the aid of filtering, the DVD recaptures the almost unreal colour quality common to films of this period, while the sound is faithful to the nuances of Hefti's soundtrack. The special features are miserly--subtitles, a choice of languages and the original trailer, though this at least conveys the engaging naiveté of the period--("The rarest, unsquarest, happiest motion picture in many a year!"). --David Stubbs

• The Pale Face | DVD | (02/01/2006) from £9.91   |  Saving you £0.08 (0.80%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Like Merry Xmas and Happy New Year...They belong together! The Wild West has never been wilder - or funnier - than in this classic six-shootin' farce which introduced the Academy Award winning song ""Buttons and Bows."" In one of his most popular roles Bob Hope plays ""Painless"" Peter Potter a timid correspondence school dentist earninga shaky living in the lawless West. When ""Painless"" is seduced into agreeing to a quickie marriage by the voluptuous Jane Russell he thinks h

• Heat | DVD | (01/11/1999) from £5.39   |  Saving you £13.60 (252.32%)   |  RRP £18.99

  Having developed his skill as a master of contemporary crime drama, writer-director Michael Mann displayed every aspect of that mastery in Heat, an intelligent, character-driven thriller from 1995, which also marked the first onscreen pairing of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. The two great actors had played father and son in the separate time periods of The Godfather, Part II, but this was the first film in which the pair appeared together, and although their only scene together is brief, it's the riveting fulcrum of this high-tech cops-and-robbers scenario. De Niro plays a master thief with highly skilled partners (Val Kilmer and Tom Sizemore) whose latest heist draws the attention of Pacino, playing a seasoned Los Angeles detective whose investigation reveals that cop and criminal lead similar lives. Both are so devoted to their professions that their personal lives are a disaster. Pacino's with a wife (Diane Venora) who cheats to avoid the reality of their desolate marriage; De Niro pays the price for a life with no outside connections; and Kilmer's wife (Ashley Judd) has all but given up hope that her husband will quit his criminal career. These are men obsessed, and as De Niro and Pacino know, they'll both do whatever's necessary to bring the other down. Mann's brilliant screenplay explores these personal obsessions and sacrifices with absorbing insight, and the tension mounts with some of the most riveting action sequences ever filmed--most notably a daylight siege that turns downtown Los Angeles into a virtual war zone of automatic gunfire. At nearly three hours, Heat qualifies as a kind of intimate epic, certain to leave some viewers impatiently waiting for more action, but it's all part of Mann's compelling strategy. Heat is a true rarity: a crime thriller with equal measures of intense excitement and dramatic depth, giving De Niro and Pacino a prime showcase for their finely matched talents. --Jeff Shannon

• Caught | DVD | (08/09/2008) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Max Ophuls is widely regarded to be one of the greatest and most revered directors in the history of cinema. His trademark array of lavish fluid camera movements would influence generations of filmmakers to come. Among the many who have had praised his genius are Francois Truffaut Jean-Luc Goddard Martin Scorsese Stanley Kubrick who believed 'his camera could pass through walls' and more recently directors such as Todd Haynes (Velvet Goldmine Far From Heaven) and Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights Magnolia) who called him his 'idol'. Idealistic Leonora is looking for the dream life and believes she's found it when introduced to millionaire Smith Uhlrig. Quickly married she soon discovers him to be a domineering tyrant. In trying to escape this loveless existence she finds hope in the arms of a caring doctor but her psychotic husband doesn't give up his possessions so easily. Ophul's film noir classic is an intense melodrama played to perfection by the fine casting of James Mason Robert Ryan and Barbara Bel Geddes.

• Reeker 2 | DVD | (20/04/2009) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  When three fugitives fresh off a casino heist stop for gas at the Six Corners Cafe in Death Valley they encounter an unexpectedly hostile breakfast crowd. Gunshots erupt. An explosion destroys the gas station. As the fire burns down people are missing. Only six seem to have survived - a sheriff and his son two of the criminals a female doctor and a young waitress. It's a volatile and eclectic combination of survivors - the Godd the Bad and the Cute. The fire department never arrives. The highway is deserted. No one comes to help. No one living that is. The survivors discover they are trapped in an in between world in a supernatural plane between night and day light and dark the living and the dead. And they are not alone. Horribly mutilated dead people mysteriously appear and warn of an inescapable killer - an evil trailing a sickening force of decay and rot. In order to see another day the survivors must unite set their differences aside and combine their skills and resources to fight off the source of these deaths - the soul collecting terrifying killing machine known as the Reeker.

• Strauss - Elektra | DVD | (09/10/2006) from £15.54   |  Saving you £-1.55 (-11.10%)   |  RRP £13.99

  Strauss: Elektra (Levine Metropolitan Opera Orchestra)

• Tender Mercies | DVD | (03/06/2013) from £8.99   |  Saving you £7.00 (77.86%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Sometimes everything comes together in a movie and it becomes something so much greater than the sum of its parts that it can only be described as a miracle. That's the case with Tender Mercies, a quietly luminous character piece about an alcoholic, washed-up country singer named Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall in an Oscar-winning performance) who hits bottom in a motel room one night and then slowly finds his way back into the land of the living with the help of the widow (Tess Harper) and her young son. It's a low-key, contemplative film that feels like a rural American family comedy in the vein of the great Japanese director, Yasujiro Ozu. Tender Mercies was directed by Australian Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy, Breaker Morant), written by Horton Foote (To Kill a Mockingbird), who won an Oscar for his screenplay, and has an unbeatable cast. This is one of Duvall's most intimate and deeply personal performances, matched only by his debut 14 years later as actor-writer-director in The Apostle. --Jim Emerson

• The King Of Comedy | Blu Ray | (07/04/2014) from £9.99   |  Saving you £6.00 (60.06%)   |  RRP £15.99

  A struggling comedian gambles his uncertain future on a hare-brained scheme to ransom his way onto television by kidnapping a popular talk-show host.

• Suspected Person | DVD | (01/02/2016) from £11.98   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  The Power Game's Clifford Evans gives a strong performance as a man on the run in this suspenseful wartime drama co-starring Patricia Roc, David Farrar and William Hartnell. Written and directed by Lawrence Huntington, Suspected Person is presented here in a brand-new transfer from the original film elements, in its as-exhibited theatrical aspect ratio.After a $50,000 heist in New York, two of the suspected robbers walk free from the courtroom and they waste no time in heading to London in search of the missing loot. This means bad news for their former accomplice Jim Raynor, who has the money hidden away not least because they're not the only ones on his tail; Scotland Yard is also on the case...SPECIAL FEATURE:Image GalleryOriginal script PDF

• The Dark Half | DVD | (22/10/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Although it lacks the creepy subtleties of Stephen King's celebrated novel, George Romero's underrated adaptation of The Dark Half is among the best films based on King's fiction, with Romero taking care to honour the central theme while serving up some gruesome gore in the film's much-criticised finale. Inspired by King's own admission that he wrote several novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, The Dark Half explores the duality of a writer's impulse, ranging from literary respectability to the viscerally cathartic thrills of exploitative pulp fiction. Author and teacher Thad Beaumont (Timothy Hutton) finds himself torn between those extremes when he "kills" his profitable alter ego, George Stark (the bestselling dark half to Thad's light), who then assumes evil, autonomous form (again played by Hutton) to defend lethally his role in Thad's creative endeavours. Forced to wrestle with this evil manifestation of his own unformed twin, Thad must fight to protect his wife (Amy Madigan), their twin babies and himself. While Romero skilfully develops the twin/duality theme to explore the writer's dilemma, Hutton is outstanding in his dual roles, playing Stark (in subtly fiendish makeup) as a redneck rebel with a knack for slashing throats. Julie Harris adds class in a supporting role, and horror fans will relish Romero's climactic showdown, in which swarms of sparrows seal Stark's fate. It favours a pulp sensibility with clunky exposition to explain Stark's existence, but The Dark Half is a laudable effort from everyone involved. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

• The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires | DVD | (28/06/2013) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £17.99

  Hammer Horror! Dragon Thrills! The First Kung Fu Horror Spectacular! Count Dracula journies to a remote Chinese village in the guise of a warlord to support six vampires who are dispirited after the loss of a seventh member of their cult. At the same time vampire hunter Prof. Van Helsing happens to be lecturing in the country and is persuaded by villagers to help them fight this curse of the ages... Possibly the only film to combine the traditions of a vampire story with Kung Fu!