Drama

• Birdy | DVD | (17/04/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Based on William Wharton's transcendent novel of the same name, this film is about many things: friendship, war, and, of course, birds. The framing device is an effort by a horribly scarred combat soldier (Nicolas Cage) to break through to his best friend, Birdy (Matthew Modine), hospitalised after seemingly being driven mad by fighting in the Vietnam War. Cage then flashes back to their boyhood, where Birdy, a canary aficionado, was considered the school weirdo but managed to be a solid companion none the less. Directed by Alan Parker, it works best as a coming-of-age story, but misses the bizarre psychological transferences of the book, in which Birdy imagines himself within the world of canaries he creates in his bedroom at his parents' house. Modine is fine as an out-of-it misfit enraptured by his own little universe. --Marshall Fine

• Deep Freeze | DVD | (14/04/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £2.99

  A scientific expedition to the frozen wastes of the Antarctic promises many riches for the oil exploration company Geotek. When a scientist discovers the frozen remains of a prehistoric creature they decide to transport the unknowm species to Geotek's lab in America for a detailed examination. As the creature slowly thaws they discover that they have imported a vampire-like prehistoric menace that thrives on death and destruction on it's quest for human blood.

• A Long Way From Home | DVD | (31/03/2014) from £4.69   |  Saving you £13.30 (73.90%)   |  RRP £17.99

  Joseph and Brenda have done what many only dream of and retired to the South of France to live out the rest of their days as if they were permanently on holiday. But retirement is not what Joseph imagined and when a young attractive couple Suzanne and Mark choose their favourite bistro for dinner everything Joseph thought he knew about himself and his world is turned upside down.

• Closer/Scenes Of A Sexual Nature/Cruel Intentions | DVD | (21/01/2008) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Scenes Of A Sexual Nature: Seven couples. Seven Stories. One Common Ground... Sex and love. Some seek it some need it some spurn it and some pay for it but we're all involved in it. Set on one afternoon on Hampstead Heath London the film investigates the minutiae of seven couples. The film is a comedic and erotically charged look at what makes us tick and it seems that what makes us tick is complex dark and ludicrously funny. Cruel Intentions: Kathryn Merteuil (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Sebastian Valmont (Ryan Phillippe) are two gorgeous filthy rich manipulative step-sibblings from Manhattan's upper east side. Bored of the girls he has so easily seduced in the past Sebastian has set his sights on the ultimate challenge - the beautiful virginal headmasters' daughter Annette Hargrove (Reese Witherspoon). Kathryn sees the perfect opportunity for a wager. If Sebastian fails to lure Annette into his bed he will have to surrender his priceless vintage Jaguar; if he succeeds he will win the most tempting prize of all - Kathryn. Sparks fly in this wickedly sexy tale of seduction as Kathryn and Sebastian play a dangerous game of sex and betrayal... Closer: If you believe in love at first sight you'll never stop looking... Writer Patrick Marber adapted the screenplay from his own scathing stageplay in which a chance meeting between Englishman Dan (Jude Law) and American visitor Alice blossoms into a troubled relationship bringing together and then affecting a second couple involving Larry (Clive Owen) and Anna (Julia Roberts). Sex and love are explored capturing all the vulnerability and brutality of people falling in and out of love...

• Warm Water Under A Red Bridge | DVD | (25/08/2003) from £10.87   |  Saving you £10.88 (119.43%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Based on the novel by Henmi Yo this is the story of Yosuke who finds himself down on his luck after he loses his job and is separated from his wife. He is told that a priceless item is to be found at a house on the Noto Peninsula and travels there to retrieve it. On his arrival at the house he is welcomed by a young lady called Saeko who has a very strange secret....

• Good Cop Bad Cop | DVD | (06/02/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Mace is a street wise ex-cop who now tracks down criminals that have jumped bail. The mayor hires him to locate and shadow the person who murdered his daughter. Mace enlists the help of Sarah a hooker and Mitch the man who was unlucky enough to have been Donna's last date and now the prime suspect in her murder. When they get close to discovering the identity of the killer they find themselves hunted by the police.

• Kika | Blu Ray | (20/02/2017) from £9.14   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Kika, a young cosmetologist, is called to the mansion of Nicolas, an American writer to make-up the corpse of his stepson, Ramon. Ramon, who is not dead, is revived by Kika's attentions and she then moves in with him. They might live happily ever after but first they have to cope with Kika's affair with Nicolas, the suspicious death of Ramon's mother and the intrusive gaze of tabloid-TV star and Ramon's ex-psychologist Andrea Scarface.

• Emanuelle: Black Velvet - Blu-Ray | Blu Ray | (09/07/2021) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• September | DVD | (22/09/2003) from £9.47   |  Saving you £-7.48 (N/A%)   |  RRP £1.99

  Verena Steynton (Judy Parfitt) is holding a party for her daughter. All the aristocratic families of Strathcroy in the Scottish Highlands are attending with all their guilty secrets. Lord Archie Balmerino (Edward Fox) a crippled war veteran and his long suffering wife will be there. Edmund Aird (Michael York) a wealthy entrepreneur and his beautiful American wife have been invited. And Pandora (Jacqueline Bisset) Archie's exotic and mysterious sister who disappeared from the village twenty years ago is returning under a cloud of suspicion. Only Edmund and her brother know the secret of her flight from home. But the rumours are flying and the local families feel that Pandora's return can only bring bad luck. When a lifeless body is found in the loch the tension rises. Why has Pandora come back after so long? What are her motives? And has her return already had deadly consequences?

• The Low Down | DVD | (17/09/2007) from £4.49   |  Saving you £11.50 (71.90%)   |  RRP £15.99

  A wryly perceptive drama about Frank, a twenty something living in London, and growing up — when you're not even sure that's what you want to do.

• When Father Was Away On Business | DVD | (21/08/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Celebrated Balkan filmmaker Emir Kusturica won his first Palme d'Or the Cannes Film Festival's highest honour for this exuberant portrait of 1950s Yugoslavia as seen through the eyes of six year-old Malik. As the country resists the pressures of Stalinism many find themselves taken away ""on business"" by the police for making imprudent statements against the government. But Malik's father Manojlovic finds himself imprisoned for an altogether less noble reason when his affair with the mistress of a high-ranking party official is discovered. Naively believing his Papa to be away on business Malik must face up to life's sometimes poignant often comic tribulations without him.

• Gainsbourg | Blu Ray | (10/01/2011) from £18.29   |  Saving you £4.70 (25.70%)   |  RRP £22.99

  From visionary graphic artist and director Joann Sfar comes a completely original take on one of France's greatest mavericks, the illustrious and infamous Serge Gainsbourg.

• Coldwater | DVD | (31/12/2020) from £15.18   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  A teenage boy is sent to a juvenile reform facility in the wilderness. As we learn about the tragic events that sent him there, his struggle becomes one for survival with the inmates, counselors and the retired war colonel in charge.

• Va Savoir | DVD | (24/06/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  In matters of the heart it's anyone's guess. Va Savoir is an elegant and utterly charming comedy about the romantic misadventures of Camille and Ugo - a theater director and his leading lady - whose already complicated relationship becomes exponentially more difficult when they become entangled in the lives of four other people. As funny as it is touching as smart as it is silly Va Savoir is an endearing and delightful comedy of the heart and soul.

• Waking The Dead | DVD | (04/04/2005) from £12.45   |  Saving you £-6.46 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Waking the Dead, like director-writer Keith Gordon's earlier films (The Chocolate War, A Midnight Clear, Mother Night), is based on a well-regarded modern novel (by Scott Spencer) and has a great many quiet virtues: a genuine engagement with near-contemporary America, complicated characters well-played by a cast of perfectly selected not-quite-star performers and a questioning approach that sits ill with the too-easy answers of most contemporary films. The complex story opens in 1974 with the death in a car bomb explosion of Sarah Williams (Jennifer Connelly), a radical working with a faction of left-wing Catholics to rescue dissidents from Chile. This has a devastating effect on her straighter boyfriend, Fielding Pierce (Billy Crudup), who is working within the system with an eye on rising in the Democratic Party through the patronage of a senior figure (Hal Holbrook), the man who is eventually to become the President. We flash back to 1972 and Fielding's intense relationship with Sarah, marked by romantic and political differences that feel far more real than the contrived oppositional arguments in most political movies. Then skip 10 years forward to find a sleeker, hollow-faced Fielding running for Congress, tormented not only by memories of Sarah but her actual or phantasmal appearances. Another film might play this as a paranoid mystery thriller, but this goes for psychology, and Crudup delivers an intense portrait of a man cracking up by the loss of his ideals as much as his life's love--climaxing in a terrific restaurant outburst to his needy, congratulatory family. Unreleased theatrically in the UK, this outstanding film has award-quality performances from Crudup and Connelly, both doing their best screen work to date. On the DVD: The picture is presented in 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen, with Dolby Digital sound. You get the usual trailer, filmographies and puff piece featurette, but also three superb extras: a commentary from Gordon that passionately and intelligently addresses the thematic material and production circumstances of the film; a package of deleted scenes that goes well beyond the usual irrelevant snippets--everything here offers additional insights into the plot and character; tracks from the composers Tomandandy which play over the menus--a rare feature that's liable to become more common. --Kim Newman

• This Life - Series 2 | DVD | (27/02/2006) from £49.88   |  Saving you £-9.89 (N/A%)   |  RRP £39.99

  Miles Anna Egg Milly Warren and Ferdy return for the second series of the groundbreaking BBC drama This Life. This time around life is even more complicated: Egg is having serious problems with money and direction; Milly enters an affair with her boss O'Donnell; Anna is still in love with Miles but having a hard time accepting it; meanwhile Miles gets engaged despite his feelings for Anna; Warren gets arrested for 'cruising' in the local park and decides to le

• Bogart And Bacall Collection | DVD | (28/09/2009) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £13.99

  Titles Comprise: The Big Sleep: One of the most satisfying and sheerly entertaining movies ever to come out of Hollywood this marvellous 1946 classic adaptation of Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled novel is the perfect vehicle for the real-life team of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall whose sultry zingy dialogue adds spice to what has to be the most intricate and most exciting thriller plot ever filmed. In the hands of screen play writers William Faulkner Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman and master director Howard Hawks who slings the lamps low and keeps violence crackling this movie zips along down Chandler's mean Los Angelino streets as Bogie's world-weary cynical private eye Philip Marlowe begins a search for a missing chauffeur that turns into a blackmail hunt with a pretty girl at each turn and a corpse on each corner. The sexual undercurrents are torrid the repartee remarkable the whole just simply terrific. To Have And Have Not: Help the Free French? Not world-weary gunrunner Harry Morgan (Humphrey Bogart). But he changes his mind when a sultry siren-in-distress named Marie asks Anybody got a match? That red-hot match is Bogart and 19-year-old first-time film actress Lauren Bacall. Full of intrigue and racy banter (including Bacall's legendary whistling instructions) this thriller excites further interest for what it has and has not. Cannily directed by Howard Hawks and smartly written by William Faulkner and Jules Furthman it doesn't have much similarity to the Ernest Hemingway novel that inspired it. And it strongly resembles Casablanca: French resistance fighters a piano-playing bluesman (Hoagy Carmichael) and a Martinique bar much like Rick's Cafe Americaine. But first and foremost it showcases Bogart and Bacall carrying on with a passion that smolders from the tips of their cigarettes clear through to their souls. Key Largo: A hurricane swells outside but it's nothing compared to the storm within the hotel at Key Largo. There sadistic mobster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) holes up and holds at gunpoint hotel owner Nora Temple (Lauren Bacall) and ex-GI Frank McCloud (Humphrey Bogart). McCloud's the one man capable of standing up against the belligerent Rocco. But the postwar world's realities may have taken all the fight out of him. John Huston co-wrote and compellingly directs this film of Maxwell Anderson's 1939 play with a searing Academy Award winning performance by Claire Trevor as Rocco's gold-hearted boozy moll. In Huston's hands it becomes a powerful sweltering classic. The Dark Passage: Bogey's on the lam and Bacall's at his side in Dark Passage Delmer Daves' stylish film-noir thriller that's the third of four films Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together. Bogart is Vincent Parry a prison escapee framed for murder who emerges from plastic surgery with a new face. Bacall is Irene Jansen Vincent's lone ally. In a supporting role Agnes Moorehead portrays Madge a venomous harpy who finds pleasure in the unhappiness of others. The chemistry of the leads is undeniable and they augment it here with exceptional tenderness. Exceptional too are the atmospheric San Francisco locations and the imaginative camera work that shows Vincent's point of view - but not his face - until the bandages are removed. Lest Irene get ideas the post-surgery Vincent tells her: Don't change yours. I like it just as it is.

• Lynn + Lucy (Blu-ray) | Blu Ray | (19/10/2020) from £10.35   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Lynn and Lucy are lifelong best friends, their relationship as intense as any romance. Neither has ventured far from where they grew up. Lynn, who married her first boyfriend and whose daughter is fast growing up, is delighted when the charismatic, volatile Lucy has her first baby, a boy. Lucy, however, does not react to motherhood as Lynn expects. Soon, they find their friendship tested in the most extreme circumstances. A study of escalating hysteria at a societal level, Lynn + Lucy stars Roxanne Scrimshaw in her first ever screen appearance, alongside Nichola Burley (Love and Hate, Wuthering Heights), and this highly anticipated feature by Cannes awardwinning filmmaker Fyzal Boulifa.

• Cat Chaser | DVD | (01/11/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Crime novelist Elmore Leonard co-wrote the script for 'Cat Chaser'(based on his book) and Abel Ferrara directed filling the screen with his usual eye-popping doses of nudity and violence. An American veteran is running a hotel in Miami where he meets a former Dominican Republic general's wife and begins an affair. Unwittingly he is tricked into helping a group of people rip the general off...

• The Attic - The Hiding Of Ann Frank | DVD | (19/02/2007) from £10.78   |  Saving you £2.21 (17.00%)   |  RRP £12.99

  The Film portrays the lives of the Frank family before hiding and during hiding in Nazi Occupied Amsterdam