"Actor: Robert Hard"

• Batman - The Animated Series - The Legend Begins | DVD | (26/07/2004) from £3.99   |  Saving you £7.00 (175.44%)   |  RRP £10.99

  He rules the night as Gotham City's shadowy protector - a crusading Dark Knight defending the innocent and striking fear into the hearts of evildoers. The legend of Batman begins in this thrilling collection of the first five landmark episodes of the Emmy award-winning 'Batman: The Animated Series'. From the perilous punchlines of The Joker's latest pranks to the nightmarish Scarecrow and Poison Ivy's deadly embrace this is Batman at his action-packed best! Episodes comprise: O

• Network | DVD | (17/03/2003) from £17.11   |  Saving you £-1.12 (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Media madness reigns supreme in screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky's scathing satire about the uses and abuses of network television. But while Chayefsky's and director Sidney Lumet's take on television may seem quaint in the age of "reality TV" and Jerry Springer's talk-show fisticuffs, Network is every bit as potent now as it was when the film was released in 1976. And because Chayefsky was one of the greatest of all dramatists, his Oscar-winning script about the ratings frenzy at the cost of cultural integrity is a showcase for powerhouse acting by Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway and Beatrice Straight (who each won Oscars), and Oscar nominee William Holden in one of his finest roles. Finch plays a veteran network anchorman who's been fired because of low ratings. His character's response is to announce he'll kill himself on live television two weeks hence. What follows, along with skyrocketing ratings, is the anchorman's descent into insanity, during which he fervently rages against the medium that made him a celebrity. Dunaway plays the frigid, ratings-obsessed producer who pursues success with cold-blooded zeal; Holden is the married executive who tries to thaw her out during his own seething midlife crisis. Through it all, Chayefsky (via Finch) urges the viewer to repeat the now-famous mantra "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" to reclaim our humanity from the medium that threatens to steal it away. --Jeff Shannon

• Flight of the Navigator | Blu Ray | (19/11/2012) from £15.99   |  Saving you £4.00 (28.59%)   |  RRP £17.99

  Flight of the Navigator is the action-packed classic '80s adventure into another world. It's 1978 and 12-year old David Freeman is knocked unconscious while playing. He wakes up and discovers it's now 1986 and he's been missing for eight years. NASA believes he's been abducted by aliens and want to use him for their research. But with the guidance of a strange unseen entity he discovers a hidden spaceship and with the help of MAX the computer sets off on an incredible mission to get ba...

• The Ref | DVD | (13/04/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Caustic wit gets a full-body workout in this 1994 comedy (known as The Ref in the US), in which a cat burglar (Denis Leary) gets trapped in an affluent Connecticut neighbourhood and is forced to hold a bickering couple hostage on Christmas Eve, only to discover that their Yuletide spirit is anything but cheerful. Caroline (Judy Davis) and her husband, Lloyd (Kevin Spacey), have been at each other's throats for so long that they've developed domestic arguments into an art form, and the would-be kidnapper turns into a reluctant mediator, even after he's got the battling couple wound up in bungee cords. The situation grows even more complicated when the couple's smart-aleck son comes home from military school, but it's not the plot here that's a top priority. Instead it's the sheer pleasure of witnessing a three-way verbal jousting match, written with razor-sharp skill and delivered by actors who are perfect for their roles. The movie's got a dark edge, but it never gets too dark--you know that it's not going to slide into more seriously damaging territory, so you can sit back and enjoy the volleys of scathing insults and sarcasm the way you would a Bill Hicks performance. If that sounds like your idea of entertainment, Hostile Hostages will serve it up with style. --Jeff Shannon

• Red Corner | DVD | (01/02/2000) from £9.43   |  Saving you £6.56 (69.57%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Using a faulty thriller for his soapbox as an outspoken critic of China, a devout follower of the Dalai Lama, and an influential supporter of Tibetan freedom, Richard Gere resorts to the equivalent of propagandistic drama to deliver a heavy-handed message. In other words, Red Corner relies on a dubious strategy to promote political awareness, but director Jon Avnet appeals to the viewer's outrage with such effective urgency that you're likely to forget you're being shamelessly manipulated. Gere plays a downtrodden TV executive who sells syndicated shows on the global market, and during a business trip to China he finds himself framed for the murder of the sexy daughter of a high Chinese official. Once trapped in a legal system in which his innocence will be all but impossible to prove, Gere must rely on a Chinese-appointed lawyer (played by Bai Ling) who first advises him to plead guilty but gradually grows convinced of foul play. Barely attempting to hide its agenda, Red Corner effectively sets the stage for abundant anti-Chinese sentiment, and to be sure, the movie gains powerful momentum with its tale of justice gone awry. It's a serious-minded, high-intensity courtroom drama with noble intentions, but one wonder if it has to be so conspicuously lacking in subtlety. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

• The Dam Busters | Blu Ray | (04/06/2018) from £10.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  A BRAND NEW RESTORATION COMMEMORATING THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ORIGINAL WWII RAID A much-loved British classic, Michael Anderson's 1955 drama captures the tension and bravery of an audacious raid on the center of Nazi Germany's industrial complex and the quintessentially English combination of inventiveness and dogged determination. Split into two distinct sections, the film deals first with the fraught, but the ultimately successful development of a new bomb, by Dr. Barnes N. Wallis (Michael Redgrave). The second deals with the mission itself during the British raid on the Ruhr Dams, and its associated costs for the enemy and for the British airmen. Adapted by R.C. Sherriff from Paul Brickhill's book Enemy Coast Ahead and featuring superlative special effects photography by Gilbert Taylor (to say nothing of Eric Coates' stirring theme tune), The Dam Busters was Britain's biggest box office the success of 1955

• Deep Impact - Special Edition | DVD | (02/07/2006) from £6.08   |  Saving you £13.91 (228.78%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Fourteen-year-old Leo Beiderman (Elijah Wood) did not expect to make an earth-shattering discovery when he joined his high school astronomy club. He didn't expect to make any discoveries at all; he simply hoped that classmate Sarah Hotchner (Leelee Sobieski) would discover him. Yet a photograph he takes through his small telescope makes him co-discoverer of Comet Wolf-Beiderman...a comet that scientists determine is on a fatal collision course with the Earth. What would you do if you

• Deep Impact | DVD | (27/11/2000) from £9.17   |  Saving you £12.08 (152.72%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A great big rock hits the earth, and lots of people die. That's pretty much all there is to Deep Impact, and most of that was in the trailer. Can a major Hollywood movie really squeak by with such a slender excuse for a premise? The old disaster-movie king, cheese-meister Irwin Allen (The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake), would have made a kitsch classic out of this, with Charlton Heston, rather than a resigned and mumbly Robert Duvall, as the veteran astronaut who risks several lives trying to blow up the comet that's headed right this way! As stiffly directed by Mimi Leder, this thick slice of ham errs on the side of solemnity. It may be the most earnest end-of-the-world picture since Stanley Kramer's atomic-doom drama On the Beach. There are a couple of classic melodramatic flourishes: an estranged father and daughter who share a tearful reconciliation as a Godzilla-sized tidal wave looms on the horizon; and an astronaut, communicating on video with his loved ones back on Earth, who follows whispered instructions from a buddy lurking just off camera--so that his little girl won't realise that he's been struck blind. Deep Impact stars Morgan Freeman as the president of the United States. --David Chute

• Supernatural (DVD) | DVD | (18/11/2013) from £22.19   |  Saving you £2.80 (12.62%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Werewolves vampires and ghosts haunt the living in this long-awaited double-disc presentation of the much sought-after BBC horror series Supernatural. Originally broadcast on BBC 1 in 1977 and rarely seen since this classic series ran for eight terrifying episodes. In each a different prospective member of the Club of the Damned is required to tell a story that will chill the blood of the club’s members and their application for membership would be judged on how frightening the story was. Failure to induce terror in all who attend would lead to the death of the storyteller… A timeless example of British Gothic horror at its best Supernatural boasts a superb cast of acting talent including Billie Whitelaw Jeremy Brett Robert Hardy Gordon Jackson Sinead Cusack Denholm Elliott and Ian Hendry. Content First ever DVD release of this much sought-after and highly acclaimed BBC TV series Disc One includes: 1. ‘Ghosts of Venice’ – with Robert Hardy and Sinead Cusack 2. ‘Countess Ilona’ – with Billie Whitelaw Ian Hendry and Edward Hardwicke 3. ‘The Werewolf Reunion’ – with Billie Whitelaw Ian Hendry and Edward Hardwicke 4. ‘Mr Nightingale’ – with Jeremy Brett and Lesley-Anne Down Disc two includes: 5. ‘Lady Sybil’ – with Denholm Elliott 6. ‘Viktoria’ – with Catherine Schell and Judy Cornwell 7. ‘Night of the Marionettes’ – with Gordon Jackson Kathleen Byron and Vladek Sheybal 8.’Dorabella’ – with Jeremy Clyde

• Shackleton | DVD | (14/04/2003) from £6.99   |  Saving you £3.00 (42.92%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Shackleton is not a biopic of the great Anglo-Irish explorer but a dramatisation of the failed trans-Antarctic expedition of 1914-16. As written and directed by Charles (Longtitude) Sturridge the production, filmed on real ice floes in Greenland, stays remarkably close to the facts, capturing the look of the surviving expedition photos of Frank Hurley (collected in the book South With Endurance) with great fidelity. Kenneth Branagh makes no attempt at an authentic accent but otherwise gives a powerful impression of a most commanding personality. When the expedition ship Endurance became locked in the Antarctic ice Shackleton vowed to bring every man home alive, and against virtually impossible odds, including a 700-mile journey in an open boat through some of the worst seas in the world, he did just that. This superlative mini-series realises the story with production values and cinematography which would not disgrace a big-budget feature (Hurley's own 1919 documentary film can be seen on video in South). Intense physical drama, strong performances and Adrian Johnston's fine score combine here to deeply moving effect, marred only a little by a rushed conclusion. With Roland Huntford, author of the definitive Shackleton biography, as production advisor, this easily stands as the benchmark for all future comparable films. --Gary S Dalkin

• Change Of Habit | DVD | (18/08/2003) from £33.37   |  Saving you £-23.38 (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Elvis in his last scripted screen role plays a hip young doctor who sets up a clinic in the inner-city slums of New York. Three nuns forsake their habits to join forces with the doctor and help him out in his clinic full of abused children and stubborn parents. One of the nurses (Mary Tyler Moore) falls in love with the guitar-playing doctor and has to decide whether to stay with him or go back to the church.

• Jaws | DVD | (29/08/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  JAWS, the original, terrifying, summer blockbuster is digitally restored and back in cinemas for a limited time only from June 15

• The Score | DVD | (22/07/2002) from £6.36   |  Saving you £11.63 (182.86%)   |  RRP £17.99

  Robert DeNiro plays the ageing master thief persuaded to take on one final job by criminal mastermind Marlon Brando and young hotshot Edward Norton.

• The World Is Not Enough | Blu Ray | (17/04/2019) from £2.99   |  Saving you £15.00 (501.67%)   |  RRP £17.99

  In his 19th screen outing The World is Not Enough, Ian Fleming's super-spy is once again caught in the crosshairs of a self-created dilemma: as the longest-running feature-film franchise, James Bond is an annuity his producers want to protect, yet the series' consciously formulaic approach frustrates any real element of surprise beyond the rote application of plot twists or jump cuts to shake up the audience. This time out, credit 007's caretakers for making some visible attempts to invest their principal characters with darker motives--and blame them for squandering The World is Not Enough's initial promise by the final reel. By now, Bond pictures are as elegantly formal as a Bach chorale, and this one opens on an unusually powerful note. A stunning pre-title sequence reaches beyond mere pyrotechnics to introduce key plot elements as the action leaps from Bilbao to London. Pierce Brosnan undercuts his usually suave persona with a darker, more brutal edge largely absent since Sean Connery departed. Equally tantalising are our initial glimpses of Bond's nemesis du jour, Renard (Robert Carlyle), and imminent love interest, Elektra King (Sophie Marceau), both atypically complex characters cast with seemingly shrewd choices and directed by the capable Michael Apted. The story's focus on post-Soviet geopolitics likewise starts off on a savvy note, before being overtaken by increasingly Byzantine plot twists, hidden motives and reversals of loyalty superheated by relentless (if intermittently perfunctory) action sequences. Bond's grimmer demeanour, while preferable to the smirk that eventually swallowed Roger Moore whole, proves wearying, unrelieved by any true wit. The underlying psychoses that propel Renard and Elektra eventually unravel into unconvincing melodrama, while Bond is supplied with a secondary love object, Denise Richards, who is even more improbable as a nuclear physicist. Ultimately, this world is not enough despite its better intentions. --Sam Sutherland, Amazon.com On the DVD: There are three different documentaries on this disc, as well as a "Secrets of 007" featurette that cuts between specific stunt sequences, behind-the-scenes footage and storyboards to reveal how it was all done, and a short video tribute to Desmond Llewelyn ("Q"), who died not long after this movie was released. The first "making of" piece is presented by an annoyingly chirpy American woman and is aimed squarely at the MTV market (most fascinating is watching her interview with Denise Richards in which the two orthodontically enhanced ladies attempt to out-smile each other). "Bond Cocktail" gamely distils all the essential ingredients that make up the classic Bond movie formula--gadgets, girls, exotic locations and lots of action. Most interesting of all is "Bond Down River", a lengthy dissection of the opening boat chase sequence. Director Michael Apted provides the first commentary, and talks about the challenges of delivering all the requisite ingredients. The second commentary is less satisfactory, since second unit director Vic Armstrong, production designer Peter Lamont and composer David Arnold have little in common. There's also the Garbage song video, and the booklet has yet more behind-the-scenes info. The anamorphic CinemaScope picture and Dolby digital sound are as spectacular as ever. --Mark Walker

• Jeeves And Wooster - The Complete 2nd Series | DVD | (28/05/2001) from £24.92   |  Saving you £-4.93 (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  In the second hilarious series of Jeeves & Wooster, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse's immortal characters are once again brought to glorious life by Hugh Laurie as the chinless but charming Bertie Wooster and Stephen Fry as his valet and frequent saviour, Jeeves. Superb period detail, performers who seem to have been born for these roles, and a hearty helping of Wodehouse wit make these shows essential viewing for anyone in search of a sophisticated chuckle. All six episodes are included here: "Jeeves Saves the Cow-Creamer", "A Plan for Gussie", "Pearls Mean Tears", "Jeeves in the Country", "Kidnapped!" and "Jeeves the Matchmaker". --Simon Leake

• 3:10 To Yuma | DVD | (22/04/2002) from £4.99   |  Saving you £15.00 (300.60%)   |  RRP £19.99

  3:10 to Yuma is a tight, taut Western in the High Noon tradition. Struggling rancher and family man Van Heflin sneaks captured outlaw Glenn Ford out from under the eyes of his gang and nervously awaits the prison train. Adapted from an Elmore Leonard story, this tense thriller is boiled down to its essential elements: a charming and cunning criminal, an initially reluctant hero whose courage and resolution hardens along the way and a waiting game that pits them in a battle of wills and wits. Glenn Ford practically steals the film in one of his best performances ever: calm, cool and confident, he's a ruthless killer with polite manners and an honourable streak. Director Delmer Daves (Broken Arrow) sets it all in a harsh, parched frontier of empty landscapes, deserted towns and dust, creating a brittle quiet that threatens to snap into violence at any moment. --Sean Axmaker, Amazon.com

• The Amsterdam Kill | DVD | (15/08/2005) from £8.98   |  Saving you £7.00 (100.14%)   |  RRP £13.99

  In a world gone soft there's still one tough guy! Former DEA Agent Quinlan removed from the force some years earlier for stealing confiscated drug money is hired by Chung Wei a leader in the Amsterdam drug cartel who wants out of the business. Quinlan's job is to use Chung's information to tip DEA agents to drug busts thereby destroying the cartel. But when the first two ""tips"" go awry resulting in murdered DEA officers the feds must decide whether to trust Quinlan fur

• Town Without Pity | DVD | (16/03/2015) from £14.83   |  Saving you £-1.84 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Gottfried Reinhardt directs this grim courtroom drama set in West Germany. Four American GIs are accused of raping a German girl, but their wily defence lawyers seek to get them all acquitted. The cast includes Kirk Douglas, Robert Blake, Frank Sutton and Christine Kaufmann.

• 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

• Murphy's Law | DVD | (03/05/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Murphy's Law is a thoroughly unpleasant 1986 thriller stars Charles Bronson as a cop systematically framed for one murder after another. The killings, though, turn out to be the work of a female nutcase (Carrie Snodgress) he had once sent away to prison. Everyone involved in this leans on the atrocity-and-revenge formula, particularly Bronson and director J Lee Thompson (The Guns of Navarone), two Hollywood guys who once upon a time made plenty of classic films. Snodgress's performance is unhinged, interesting but hard to watch, as we never really got to know her onscreen after Diary of a Mad Housewife. Just think of this movie as having come from the same creepy planet as the Death Wish series. --Tom Keogh