With Tim Roth as Oliver Cromwell and Dougray Scott as Sir Thomas Fairfax, the film explores how the love and loyalty between two of the most fasicnating figures of the English Civil War turned to betrayal and political intrigue.
Get ready to laugh with Mork & Mindy the insanely popular Happy Days spin off that crash-landed onto television in 1978. Fans went wild for this wacky off-the-wall sitcom featuring a misfit alien who departs from the faraway planet of Ork to come study “crazy” earthling customs. After touching down near Boulder Colorado Mork (Robin Williams) encounters the beautiful college student Mindy (Pam Dawber). The two strike up a charming and entertaining friendship that is full of good times and unexpected surprises. Revisit the hilarious sitcom that launched Robin Williams’ career into warp drive with this four-season 15-disc collection. Included are 95 episodes filled with riotous humour that transcend the boundaries of time and space.
The great improvisational comedy team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May reunited to (respectively) direct and write this update of the French comedy La Cage Aux Folles. Robin Williams stars as a gay Miami nightclub owner who is forced to play it straight and ask his drag-queen partner (Nathan Lane) to hide out when Williams's son invites his prospective--and highly conservative--in-laws and fiancée to a meet-and-greet dinner party. Gene Hackman and Dianne Wiest play the straight-laced senator and his wife, and Calista Flockhart (from television's Ally McBeal) plays their daughter in a culture-clash with outrageous consequences. May's witty screenplay incorporates some pointed observations about the political landscape of the 1990s and takes a sensitive approach to the comedy's underlying drama. Topping off the action is Hank Azaria in a scene-stealing role as Williams's and Lane's flamboyant housekeeper, "Agador Spartacus." --Jeff Shannon
Stephen Graham stars as Joseph, a moral yet troubled man who's lost everything he ever held dear. Joseph finds himself compelled to travel to Ireland to confront the demons that continue to haunt him from a childhood spent in the care system, a journey that will have savage and brutal consequences. His path soon crosses with that of Dinah, played by Niamh Algar. She's fiery and more than able to stand up for herself, but like Joseph she's also deeply guarded, holding close a secret she's hiding from all those around her. Joseph and Dinah's lives spiral intensely in and out of control as they both try to ground themselves, torn between morality and self-indulgence, defined by drug-induced self destruction, traumatised by their own harrowing histories, and yet enlightened by their dual faith in companionship. Survival instincts kick in as they pave their way to an unnerving and tormented future. Neither of them thought their lives would ever tangle into a delicate love story.
Final season of the Emmy® Award-winning hit HBO drama series Game of Thrones an epic story of duplicity and treachery, nobility and honor, conquest and triumph. This 4K + Blu-ray disc set in Steelbook packaging includes all new bonus content exclusive to the Season 8 release.
One of the last decent Carry On movies, Carry On Abroad is a 1972 venture into the world of package holidays. After this, the series descended into unfunny coarseness as opposed to camply laboured double entendre, culminating in the dreadful Carry On Emanuelle. Here, publican Sid James and dutiful mother's son turned sex maniac Charles Hawtrey are among a brace of Brits heading for the "paradise island" of Elsbels. Kenneth Williams is the out-of-his-depth tour operator, reverting to the sort of effete types he played in the 1950s, Peter Butterworth a pre-Manuel-style manager of a half-built hotel. A series of disasters ensue, with the entire gang landing up in jail following a fracas in a brothel at one point, but everyone finds romantic and sexual fulfilment in a quaint disco finale. This includes a gay character who is "dissuaded" from his homosexuality in a typical example of the thoroughly reactionary subtext that constitutes the really naughty bit of most Carry On films. Nonetheless, this throwback to an imaginary time when the lewdest innuendo of a dirty old man was greeted by young females with a flirty "Ooh, saucy!" is enjoyable on condition that you enter into its seaside-postcard spirit. June Whitfield is fine as a sexually uptight wife, Kenneth Connor a model of red-faced frustration as her wimpish husband. On the DVD: Sadly, no extra features except scene selection. The picture is a 4:3 ratio full-screen presentation. --David Stubbs
Sharper and deeper than Robin Williams's previous road material, Live on Broadway is a mature comedian's view of all things to do with power, prejudice and paranoia in the 21st century. On the anthrax scare of 2001: "The Senate cleared out of their building but told the rest of us 'Get on with your normal lives'!" On his solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over Jerusalem: "Time share!" On the pitfalls of America's deepening alliance with Britain: "The House of Commons is like Congress with a two-drink minimum". A viewer may have to slog through Williams's tedious breast fetishism, but patience is quickly rewarded with bitchy takes on Martha Stewart facing prison, solid satire about French existentialist judges at the Olympics and subversive op-eds about the Bush administration's inability to clarify terrorist threats to the public ("Has the CIA become the Central Intuitive Agency?"). --Tom Keogh
From the vaults of British television comes a comedy gem starring two consummate actors who were also a couple in real life: Dame Judi Dench and her husband Michael Williams. They play a pair of middle-aged dating-game dropouts as wary of romance as they are perfect for each other. Laura a brainy translator and Mike a shy landscape gardener are introduced by Laura's glamorous younger sister who is intent on finding a mate for her spinsterish sibling. Awkward and rumpled Mike
Carry On favourite Barbara Windsor makes her debut in this outrageous send-up of the James Bond movies. Fearless agent Desmond Simpkins and James Bind aided and abetted by the comely Agent Honeybutt and Agent Crump battle against the evil powers of international bad guys STENCH and their three cronies.
That wild and crazy guy Steve Martin makes his acting debut in this wild and crazy comedy hit The Jerk. Steve portrays Navin Johnson adopted son of a poor black sharecropper family whose crazy inventions lead him from rags to riches and right back to rags. Along the way he's smitten with a lady motorcycle racer survives a series of screwball attacks by a deranged killer becomes a millionaire by inventing the ""opti-grab"" handle for eyeglasses - and shows why he's the hottest comic performer in America today.
The L-Shaped Room, adapted by writer-director Bryan Forbes from Lynne Reid Banks' novel, unfolds in a dank, depressing London boarding house. Leslie Caron plays Jane Fosset, a 27-year-old French woman, down on her luck, who takes a room. There are bugs in her mattress. The taps drip. The landlady ("the lovely Doris") is a drunken, malicious busybody. Forbes doesn't paint the English in a flattering light. They're covetous, eccentric and xenophobic. "I never close my door to the nigs," Doris tells Fosset, as if to prove that she is no racist. When Fosset reveals that she's pregnant and unmarried, everybody turns against her. The one real friend Fosset makes is Toby (Tom Bell), an impoverished would-be writer who lives in the room downstairs. She starts an affair with him, but for all his protestations to the contrary, he too turns out to be moralistic and conservative--he can't accept the idea that she is having another man's baby.Forbes' dialogue sometimes grates, the film risks running into a dead end (Fosset is stuck with nowhere to go and no prospects), but this is compelling fare all the same. Cameraman Douglas Slocombe (who went on to shoot Raiders of the Lost Ark) makes the boarding house seem as gloomy and oppressive as a Gothic mansion. Forbes doesn't sentimentalise at all. The London he portrays is nothing like the swinging, hedonistic city shown in later British movies of the 60s. --Geoffrey Macnab
The year is now 1954 and the sleepy Cotswold village of Kembleford sees new faces join Father Brown's team of sleuths. The dashing Chief Inspector Sullivan is back and proves a pleasant distraction for Mrs Devine, Father Brown's lively new Parish Secretary, while plucky new housekeeper Brenda helps the priest's crime solving. With royal visits, kidnappings and notorious gangsters to contend with, Father Brown also faces his old adversary Flambeau who returns to Kembleford after being accused of murder. Father Brown risks his own life to prove his innocence but is his faith in Flambeau misplaced?
Ryan Gosling (The Notebook, Half Nelson) and Michelle Williams (Shutter Island, Brokeback Mountain) star in Blue Valentine, a honest portrait of a relationship on the rocks.
In the late 1960s and early 70s, a bizarre alliance between the Filippino movie company Hemisphere and the American exploitation outfit Independent International yielded a series of weirdly interconnected horror movies, most of which work the word Blood into the title. The Filippino items are strangely fascinating vampire and mad scientist pictures with oddball colour effects and a mix of naive serial-style thrills and extreme-for-the-era sex and gore; the American efforts, from director Al Adamson, are shoddier, thrown together from offcuts of previous pictures, and are lead-paced but nevertheless curiously appealing. Gaze in awe at mutant killer trees, slobbering hunchbacked servants, faded matinee idols, stripper-turned-actress heroines with concrete blonde hairdos, evil dwarves, John Carradine or Lon Chaney, footage cut in from completely different films, Dracula and Frankenstein meeting hippies and bikers, red filters when the vampires attack, chanting natives! Plus lots of exclamation marks! Plus lurid trailers! "A blood-dripping brain transplant turns a maniac into a monster!". Brain of Blood does exactly what it says on the tin. It was made in Hollywood when a Filippino blood movie fell through and the distributor needed a substitute. --Kim Newman
The Odyssey
Bicentennial Man was stung at the 1999 box office, due no doubt in part to poor timing during a backlash against Robin Williams and his treacly performances in two other, then-recent, releases, Jakob the Liar and Patch Adams. But this near-approximation of a science-fiction epic, based on works by Isaac Asimov and directed, with uncharacteristic seriousness of purpose, by Chris Columbus (Mrs Doubtfire), is much better than one would have known from the knee-jerk negativity and box-office indifference. Williams plays Andrew, a robot programmed for domestic chores and sold to an upper-middle-class family, the Martins, in the year 2005. The family patriarch (Sam Neill) recognizes and encourages Andrew's uncommon characteristics, particularly his artistic streak, sensitivity to beauty, humour and independence of spirit. In so doing, he sets Williams's tin man on a two-century journey to become more human than most human beings. As adapted by screenwriter Nicholas Kazan, the movie's scale is novelistic, though Columbus isn't the man to embrace with Spielbergian confidence its sweeping possibilities. Instead, the Home Alone director shakes off his familiar tendencies to pander and matures, finally, as a captivating storyteller. But what really makes this film matter is its undercurrent of deep yearning, the passion of Andrew as a convert to the human race and his willingness to sacrifice all to give and take love. Williams rises to an atypical challenge here as a futuristic Everyman, relying, perhaps for the first time, on his considerable iconic value to make the point that becoming human means becoming more like Robin Williams. Nothing wrong with that. -- Tom Keogh, Amazon.com
Eagerly awaited re-release of this seminal British horror film. Patrick Wymarks stars in his last role (Where Eagles Dare Repulsion and Witchfinder General) with Linda Hayden (Baby Love Expose) in this horror thriller set in 17th century England about the children of a village slowly converting into a coven of devil worshipers.
Quietly tucked away in a car-collection garage, Brum is only conspicuous by his size. When the owner turns his back at the start of the day however, Brum blazes into action; ready to fight crime and do good deeds in the "big town". TV has tried lots of ideas with cars that think for themselves, but never managed to convey the charm that this series offers. Whether it's thwarting the escape of some naughty bank robbers, or saving a newlywed bride who inadvertently steps on a runaway skateboard, the little car with the big heart is always the perfect gentleman. Each episode sets up a crime to solve or dilemma to resolve, and by way of handy ramps and elevators, Brum is cheerily applauded and waved at by the town's residents. Every so often there's an outburst of song that will unite good guys and bad guys alike, and then there's always the sing-along at the end to look forward to. Warning to parents: expect a look of abject disappointment on the face of the tot who discovers their toy cars won't do any of the tricks on TV. --Paul Tonks
Anyone doubting the layered, nuanced, and heartbreaking acting abilities of Michelle Williams will find My Week with Marilyn a tremendous revelation. And Williams fans will enjoy it even more. In My Week with Marilyn Williams takes on the formidable challenge of playing Marilyn Monroe, and does so with depth and assuredness, and without resorting to caricature. Williams's Marilyn commands the screen with pain and delicacy, and doesn't let go until the final credits. My Week with Marilyn focuses on a small time frame in Monroe's life, right after her marriage to Arthur Miller. Monroe, already "the world's most famous woman," still feels the need for validation as an actress. What better way to achieve that, she believes, than committing to costarring with Laurence Olivier in The Prince and the Showgirl, a film she firmly believed would finally cement her reputation as a serious actress. My Week with Marilyn is based on the short memoir of Colin Clark, a crew member on The Prince and the Showgirl, who quickly became the confidant of the wildly insecure Monroe and watched a train wreck of egos--mostly Olivier's and Monroe's--collide in a fiery near-disaster. Kenneth Branagh gives an uncharacteristically restrained performance as the exasperated Olivier, resentful of the "new blood" in Hollywood that the young Monroe represents, and disdainful of her cult-like devotion to Method acting. (And of Monroe's chronic tardiness, which threatens to undermine the veddy, veddy strict British work schedule.) Eddie Redmayne plays Clark with a sweet, gentle veneer, someone who grows to care genuinely about the complex Monroe. Julia Ormond is clipped and proper as Olivier's then-wife, Vivien Leigh, and Emma Watson shows a lovely gravitas as Lucy, Monroe's acting coach. But it's Williams who gives the revelatory performance, capturing with painful intensity the insecurity that begins to seep out of Monroe like a fearful sweat. "Excuse my horrible face," she blurts out, while looking nothing less than her usual radiant self. Where does this tragic insecurity come from? My Week with Marilyn doesn't attempt to answer the unanswerable, but instead shines a light on the very real woman who became lost in the giant shadow of legend. --A.T. Hurley
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