"Actor: Williams"

• New Jack City | DVD | (01/06/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Some pundits called it a flawed, exploitative action film that glamorised drug dealing and the luxury of a lucrative criminal lifestyle, spawning a trend of films that attracted youth gangs and provoked violence in cinemas. Others hailed it as a breakthrough movie that depicted drug dealers as ruthless, corrupt, and evil, leading dead-end lives that no rational youth would want to emulate. However you interpret it, New Jack City is still one of the first and best films of the 1990s to crack open the underworld of cocaine and peer inside with its eyes wide open. It's also the film that established Wesley Snipes as an actor to watch, with enough charisma to bring an insidious quality of seduction to his role as coke-lord Nino Brown, and enough intelligence to portray a character deluded by his own sense of indestructible power. Director Mario Van Peebles stretched his otherwise-limited talent to bring vivid authenticity and urgency to this crime story, and subplots involving a pair of tenacious cops (Ice-T, Judd Nelson) and a recovering coke addict (Chris Rock) provide additional dramatic tension. Although some critics may hesitate to admit it, New Jack City deserves mention in any serious discussion about African American filmmakers and influential films. --Jeff Shannon

• Khartoum | DVD | (31/03/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Set in the expanse of the Sudan desert in the midst of holy war, Khartoum (1966) plays like an attempt to work the Lawrence of Arabia magic on the (mostly) true story of eccentric British general Charles "Chinese" Gordon in 1884 North Africa. The magnificent opening desert battle suggests David Lean's epic sweep, at least until the film settles into a more modest story of political games, military standoffs, and a battle of wits and wiles between two fierce leaders. Charlton Heston plays the Christian soldier as cocky, unconventional maverick, and Laurence Olivier (behind heavy make-up and a thick black beard) is almost as good as his cagey nemesis the Mahdi, the Islamic holy warrior on a mission of annihilation. More talk than spectacle, the film falls short of Lawrence but is nonetheless a compelling story of colonial politics, cynical manoeuvring and the unconventional heroics of another colourful British maverick abroad. --Sean Axmaker

• The Postman | DVD | (25/09/1998) from £13.98   |  Saving you £0.01 (0.07%)   |  RRP £13.99

  Falling from the Oscar-winning glory of Dances with Wolves to the opposite end of the critical and box-office scale, Kevin Costner must have been deeply humbled when this three-hour postapocalyptic tale--his sophomore effort as a director--was greeted with a critical thrashing and tepid audience response. One of the most conspicuous flops of its decade, the 1997 release must have seemed like a sure thing on paper: a kind of futurist Western starring Costner as a charismatic drifter-turned-hero who leads the resistance against a military tyrant (Will Patton) by reviving the long-dormant postal system to reunite isolated communities in their fight for freedom. The movie bombed, but, like many audacious failures, it's got qualities that make it at least partially endearing, and its earnestness (although bordering on corny) keeps it from being entirely silly. Faint praise, perhaps, but Costner's ode to patriotism is occasionally stirring and visually impressive. --Jeff Shannon

• To Kill a King | DVD | (01/09/2008) from £9.98   |  Saving you £8.00 (100.13%)   |  RRP £15.99

  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.

• Mork And Mindy: The Complete Series | DVD | (15/12/2014) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £30.41

  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 Birdcage | DVD | (01/02/2000) from £11.83   |  Saving you £4.16 (35.16%)   |  RRP £15.99

  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

• The Virtues | DVD | (12/08/2019) from £10.86   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  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.

• Game of Thrones: Season 8 Steelbook | Blu Ray | (02/12/2019) from £29.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  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.

• Carry On Abroad | DVD | (17/02/2003) from £9.36   |  Saving you £3.63 (38.78%)   |  RRP £12.99

  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

• Robin Williams - Live on Broadway | DVD | (03/11/2003) from £14.99   |  Saving you £-9.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  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

• A Fine Romance - Series 1 | DVD | (08/04/2013) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  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 Spying | DVD | (29/01/2007) from £6.99   |  Saving you £6.00 (85.84%)   |  RRP £12.99

  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.

• The Jerk | DVD | (03/11/2008) from £8.97   |  Saving you £1.02 (11.37%)   |  RRP £9.99

  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 (Digitally Restored) | DVD | (27/11/2017) from £7.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  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

• Father Brown Series 10 | Blu Ray | (13/03/2023) from £16.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  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?

• Blue Valentine | DVD | (09/05/2011) from £7.55   |  Saving you £10.44 (138.28%)   |  RRP £17.99

  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.

• Brain Of Blood | DVD | (14/07/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  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 | DVD | (30/05/2007) from £14.13   |  Saving you £-11.14 (N/A%)   |  RRP £2.99

  The Odyssey

• Bicentennial Man | DVD | (03/07/2000) from £16.94   |  Saving you £-12.95 (N/A%)   |  RRP £3.99

  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

• Blood On Satan's Claw | DVD | (22/03/2010) from £26.24   |  Saving you £-11.25 (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  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.