"Actor: Arne Dixon"

• Time Bandits | DVD | (30/09/2002) from £9.07   |  Saving you £13.91 (228.78%)   |  RRP £19.99

  With Time Bandits, only his second movie as director, Terry Gilliam's barbed humour and hyperactive visual imagination got themselves gloriously into full gear. Sketched out in a matter of weeks over Michael Palin's kitchen table while Gilliam struggled to get his dream project Brazil off the ground, this is a children's film made by a director who "hates kid films" and all the "mawkish sentimental crap" that goes with them. The 11-year-old hero, Kevin, finds himself lugged out of his suburban bedroom and off through a series of wormholes in time and space by a gang of rapacious, bickering midgets in search of loot, en route encountering (and casually despoiling) a gallery of eminent historical figures that include Agamemnon, Napoleon and Robin Hood, along with assorted ogres, giants and monsters. As co-screenwriters, Gilliam and Palin cheerfully filch ideas from everyone from Homer and Jonathan Swift to Lewis Carroll and Walt Disney, while the sets--as always with Gilliam--ingeniously work towering miracles on puny budgets. "The whole point of fairy tales", according to Gilliam, "is to frighten the kids" and Time Bandits taps into some archetypal nightmare imagery. But the whole farrago is much too good-humoured to be seriously scary. Not least of the movie's pleasures are a series of ripe cameos from the likes of Ian Holm as an irascible Bonaparte, Sean Connery good-humouredly spoofing his own image as Agamemnon, John Cleese's version of Robin Hood as inanely condescending minor royalty ("So you're a robber too! Jolly good!"), David Warner hamming it up gleefully as the Evil Genius, and the great Ralph Richardson playing the Supreme Being as a tetchy public-school headmaster. On the DVD: Time Bandits on disc comes with a generous wealth of extras. Along with the expected trailer--sent up Python-style by a disaffected voice-over--we get excerpts from Gilliam's storyboard and notated script, filmographies for Gilliam, Palin, Connery and David Rappaport (the leader of the vertically challenged gang), stills, production shots, a scrapbook with cast photos and drawings, notes on the film and plenty more background data, plus a cheerfully relaxed 27-minute interview with Gilliam and Palin. There's also an informative and appealingly unpretentious full-length commentary shared between Gilliam, Palin, Cleese, Warner and Craig Warnock, who played Kevin. The transfer, clean and crisp, is in the original full-width ratio, and there's a choice of Dolby Stereo or Dolby 5.1 sound. --Philip Kemp

• Holiday (1938) | Blu Ray | (13/01/2020) from £17.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Two years before stars KATHARINE HEPBURN (The African Queen) and CARY GRANT (North by Northwest) and director GEORGE CUKOR (My Fair Lady) would collaborate on The Philadelphia Story, they brought their timeless talents to this delectable slice of 1930s romantic-comedy perfection, the second film adaptation of a hit 1928 play by PHILIP BARRY. Grant is at his charismatic best as the acrobatically inclined free spirit who, following a whirlwind engagement, literally tumbles into the lives of his fiancée's aristocratic familysetting up a clash of values with her staid father while firing the rebellious imagination of her brash, black-sheep sister (Hepburn). With a sparkling surface and an undercurrent of melancholy, Holiday is an enchanting ode to nonconformists and pie-in-the-sky dreamers everywhere, as well as a thoughtful reflection on what it truly means to live well. Special Edition Features New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray Holiday (1930), a previous adaptation of Philip Barry's play, directed by Edward H. Griffith New conversation between filmmaker and distributor Michael Schlesinger and film critic Michael Sragow Audio excerpts from an American Film Institute oral history with director George Cukor, recorded in 1970 and '71 Costume gallery PLUS: An essay by critic Dana Stevens

• Holiday | DVD | (06/03/2006) from £9.05   |  Saving you £0.94 (10.39%)   |  RRP £9.99

  An iconoclastic young man (Cary Grant) who's engaged to a snooty heiress (Doris Nolan) discovers he's really in love with his fiance's down-to-earth sister (Katharine Hepburn) in director George Cukor's stylish comedy...

• Holiday | DVD | (10/03/2003) from £9.50   |  Saving you £0.49 (5.16%)   |  RRP £9.99

  An iconoclastic young man (Cary Grant) who's engaged to a snooty heiress (Doris Nolan) discovers he's really in love with his fianc''e's down-to-earth sister (Katharine Hepburn) in director George Cukor's stylish comedy...

• Club Dread / Dude, Where's My Car? / Lake Placid | DVD | (19/09/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Lake Placid (Dir. Steve Miner 1999): Bill Pullman Bridget Fonda and Oliver Platt share an appetite for sheer adventure when a tranquil New England lakefront erupts into an action-packed den of destruction in this ""Monster of a hit!"" (Wireless Magazine). An investigative team of malcontents (armed with state-of-the-art equipment high-powered weaponry and a biting sense of sarcasm) must work together to defeat Black Lake's most ferocious resident: a 30-foot prehistoric crocod

• Time Bandits | UMD | (06/03/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

• Learn To Yo-Yo | DVD | (12/04/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Presenter Arne Dixon the American yo-yo expert provides a teaching programme designed to assist learners to become proficient in yo-yoing skills. Tricks included are: Eiffel Tower The Star Whirlybird Walk The Dog Around The World Rock The Baby Roller Coaster Split The Atom and much more.