"Actor: D R I"

• The Untouchables | DVD | (04/06/2001) from £5.25   |  Saving you £10.74 (204.57%)   |  RRP £15.99

  As noted critic Pauline Kael wrote, the 1987 box-office hit The Untouchables is "like an attempt to visualise the public's collective dream of Chicago gangsters". In other words, this lavish reworking of the vintage TV series is a rousing pot-boiler from a bygone era, so beautifully designed and photographed--and so craftily directed by Brian De Palma--that the historical reality of Prohibition-era Chicago could only pale in comparison. From a script by David Mamet, the film pits four underdog heroes (the maverick lawmen known as the Untouchables) against a singular villain in Al Capone, played by Robert De Niro as a dapper Caesar holding court (and a baseball bat) against any and all challengers. Kevin Costner is the naive federal agent Eliot Ness, whose lack of experience is tempered by the streetwise alliance of a seasoned Chicago cop (Sean Connery, in an Oscar-winning performance), a rookie marksman (Andy Garcia) and an accountant (Charles Martin Smith) who holds the key to Capone's potential downfall. The movie approaches greatness on the strength of its set pieces, such as the siege near the Canadian border, the venal ambush at Connery's apartment and the train-station shootout partially modelled after the "Odessa steps" sequences of the Russian classic Battleship Potemkin. It's thrilling stuff, fuelled by Ennio Morricone's dynamic score, but it's also manipulative and obvious. If you're inclined to be critical, the film gives you reason to complain. If you'd rather sit back and enjoy a first-rate production with an all-star cast, The Untouchables may very well strike you as a classic. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

• One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest | DVD | (30/10/2002) from £12.43   |  Saving you £1.56 (12.55%)   |  RRP £13.99

  A big Oscar winner in 1975, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest still holds up remarkably well. Ken Kesey's novel, an allegory of repression and rebellion set in a mental hospital in the early 1960s, is cannily adapted by Czech director Milos Forman into a comedy drama with a cool, unassuming, near-documentary look. Jack Nicholson has his most jacknicholsonian role as Randle P McMurphy, a livewire troublemaker who unwisely cons his way out of prison and into a mental institution without realising he has switched from serving a sentence with a release date to being committed until adjudged sane by the same people he is winding up on a daily basis. Louise Fletcher, in a career-defining turn, is Nurse Ratched, the soft-spoken sadist who represents the worst type of matronly authoritarianism and clashes with Randle all down the line. Taking another look at the picture after all these years, it's a surprise that all the unknown actors who seemed like real mental patients have graduated to becoming prolific character actor stars: Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, Vincent Schiavelli, Brad Dourif, the late Will Sampson, Sidney Lassick, Michael Berryman. Unlike many Best Picture Oscar winners, this deals with profound subject matter without seeming self-important: Forman's approach and all-round great acting make it play as a small character story as well as a Big Statement about the human condition. Full marks also for Jack Nitzsche's musical saw-based score. On the DVD: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest comes to DVD in a two-disc special edition with a great-looking anamorphic 1.85:1 print and 5.1 Dolby Digital soundtrack, plus tracks in French and Italian and optional subtitles in half a dozen languages. Disc 2 has the trailer, about 13 minutes of deleted scenes (mostly from the first third of the film, and all pretty good) and a making-of retrospective documentary with interesting material from producers Michael Douglas (who inherited the rights from Kirk) and Saul Zaentz, Forman, screenwriter Bo Goldman and many cast-members (though not Nicholson). There's also a commentary track by Forman, Douglas and others which repeats a few things from the documentary but also goes into more scene-specific detail about the development and shooting. --Kim Newman

• Lords Of Dogtown | DVD | (16/01/2006) from £11.25   |  Saving you £8.74 (77.69%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The film follows the surf and skateboarding trends that originated in California during the '70s.

• The Yusuf Trilogy | DVD | (03/10/2011) from £35.22   |  Saving you £-8.97 (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Titles Comprise:Yumurta: Poet Yusuf returns to his childhood hometown, which he hadn't visited for years, upon his mother's death. A young girl, Ayla awaits him in a crumbling house. Yusuf has been unaware of the existence of this distant relation who had been living with his mother for five years. Ayla has something to ask of Yusuf. Yusuf is obliged to perform the sacrifice his mother Zehra had been prevented by death from fulfilling.Sut: Recent high school graduate Yusuf is uncertain about his future in the provincial countryside. Writing poetry is his greatest passion and some of his poems are starting to be published in obscure literary journals. But for the time being, he continues working in his single mother's village milk business, also with an uncertain future. Up until now, Yusuf's widowed mother Zehra has focused all her attention on her only child. Still a young and beautiful woman, Zehra is having a discreet relationship with the town station master. His mother's affair, and his being named unfit for military service due to a childhood illness, make Yusuf even more anxious about making the sudden jump toward manhood.Bal: Set in an isolated region in Northeast Turkey, Bal arrives at Yusuf's childhood when six year old Yusuf has just started primary school and is learning how to read and write. His father Yakup works as a honey-gatherer, a risky trade which involves climbing up ropes into the tops of trees where the hives are. To Yusuf, who accompanies his father to work, the forest becomes a place of mystery and adventure, and he watches his father in admiration as he works sometimes higher than the eye can see. Yusuf and his father have a very strong bond and although he is tongue-tied to the point of stuttering paralysis in social situations, he can read and speak quite clearly when he's addressing his father.Ridiculed by his classmates for his stammer, Yusuf's anxieties escalate when his father must travel to a faraway forest to hang his hives in a treacherous mountainous area. Days pass and Yusuf and his mother become anxious when Yakup doesn't return. Distraught, Yusuf slips into silence but finally summons all his courage and alone, runs deep into the forest to search for his father. A journey into the unknown.

• Murder In The First | DVD | (19/07/2004) from £9.96   |  Saving you £0.03 (0.30%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Christian Slater and Kevin Bacon star in this inspiring true story about two men who formed an unlikely friendship and fought against all odds to break an inhumane and unjust system. Alcatraz - the most feared prison in the world where no man has ever escaped with his life. Henri Young is caught attempting this impossible task and is condemned to the ""hole"" - a six by nine foot dungeon with no light or heat for ""rehabilition"". For three long years he is left naked to rot in solitary

• Pandora's Box | DVD | (24/06/2002) from £17.68   |  Saving you £2.31 (13.07%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Made at the very end of the silent era, Pandora's Box is one of the last flowerings of German cinema's greatest decade. It also marked the highpoint of two careers: Austrian director GW Pabst and American actress Louise Brooks. A merge of two linked plays by the decadent German playwright Frank Wedekind, it's the story of Lulu, the archetypal femme fatale (the same plays served as source for Alban Berg's masterly 1935 opera). At once sensual and innocent, a force of uninhibited sexuality, Lulu brings ruin on all her lovers both male and female, and ultimately upon herself. Hollywood never knew what to do with Brooks who, with her fierce intelligence and her open delight in sex, refused to play the coy flappers then in fashion. In Pabst, whose genius, she wrote, "lay in getting to the heart of a person", she found the director she needed, and he brought out her a screen persona with a depth of eroticism that's still breathtaking to see. The film features some of the finest German acting talent of the period--Fritz Kortner, Franz Lederer--but it's Brooks' luminous performance that rivets the eye and makes her a great screen icon. Though the action is nominally set in the late-19th century--Lulu ends up in a shadowy London where she encounters Jack the Ripper--Pandora's Box breathes the gamey air of the Weimar Republic, vividly captured by Günther Krampf's pungent photography. This release runs well over two hours and includes, for the first time in decades, over 30 minutes of cut footage, restoring the film to something very close to Pabst's original masterpiece. On the DVD: Pandora's Box on DVD is a clean, crisp transfer in the classic 4:3 ratio, and the mono soundtrack brings out all the detail of Peer Rubens' Kurt Weill-inflected score, stylishly performed by the Kontraste Ensemble. Dialogue intertitles can be read in either English or German. We also get an outstanding 60-minute documentary, Looking for Lulu, about Brooks' life and career: warmly narrated by Shirley MacLaine, it features excerpts from an interview with Brooks from 1976. --Philip Kemp

• Les Choses Secrets | DVD | (26/09/2005) from £7.19   |  Saving you £12.80 (178.03%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Two young women discover the power of sex to get what they want in the male-dominated business world. Nathalie a performance artist-stripper instructs her new friend the beautiful but inexperienced Sandrine on the art of seduction. Without delay they put their skills to the test at a Parisian bank where both rise to the top. But they meet their match in the ruthless son the bank's president - a vain unbridled power-hungry monster. Chosen by France's seminal critial publicati

• The Agnès Varda Collection | Blu Ray | (11/12/2017) from £43.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Eight films from the groundbreaking female director Agnès Varda; Cleo from 5 to 7 Jacquot de Nantes L une Chante, L autre Pas Le Bonheur The Gleaners and I The Beaches of Agnès Vagabond La Pointe Courte

• Chained | Blu Ray | (04/02/2013) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  From the mind of writer/director Jennifer Lynch comes one of the most controversial and uncompromising thrillers of our time. When he was 9 years old, Tim and his mother were abducted by taxi-driving serial killer Bob (an intensely disturbing performance by Vincent D'Onofrio). Tim's mother was murdered. Tim was kept as a chained slave, forced to bury the bodies of young women Bob drags home and keep scrapbooks of the crimes. Now a teenager, Tim (Eamon Farren) and Bob share a depraved father...

• Hideous Kinky | DVD | (29/04/2002) from £12.97   |  Saving you £-3.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Hideous Kinky journeys back to the early 1970s to Marrakesh, that hippy mecca for everyone from Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix to Gillies MacKinnon, the director of this movie. Here you'll find one nice but confused middle-class young woman escaping the daily grind of a drab London with her two young daughters in tow. Whereas Esther Freud's book was told from the younger girl's perspective, the film-script places Julia centre-stage as she searches for what she describes wistfully as "the annihilation of the ego". Though fresh from her Titanic experience, Kate Winslet is no drippy hippy, bringing a refreshing feistiness to her role and looking fetching swathed in diaphanous layers. As her two daughters, Bella Riza (Bea, the wide-eyed younger one) and Carrie Mullan (Lucy, the sensible one) are brilliant discoveries--unselfconscious, charmingly quirky and enjoying a camaraderie that belies their difference in characters. Completing the family unit is Julia's lover, the endearingly unreliable Bilal (a fiery performance from Saïd Taghmaoui). When the money runs out, their adventures begin and the resilience and practicality of the girls is contrasted throughout with the dreaminess of their mother, her sense of duty vying with her quest for self-discovery. Visually, it's a veritable feast as we're pitched from the colour and cacophony of the market-place to the dusty harshness of the mountains. And that elusive title--which is never explained in the film--is in fact a phrase coined by the girls as a term of approbation. On the DVD: Hideous Kinky is presented in widescreen 16:9 with a Dolby Digital soundtrack. Additional features are disappointing minimal. As well as the usual theatrical trailer, there are brief interviews with the main players (though no marks for imagination as they're all asked the same questions) and approximately eight minutes of behind-the-scenes footage. There are no subtitles. --Harriet Smith

• Danielle Steel's Fine Things | DVD | (17/04/2006) from £4.99   |  Saving you £1.00 (20.04%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Devoted to his work but emotionally unfulfilled Bernie achieves his romantic dream when he meets and eventually marries beautiful divorcee Liz. Their new life together with her young daughter Jane is blissfully happy until Liz is fatally stricken with cancer soon after the birth of their son. Heartbroken Bernie and eight-year old Jane struggle to come to terms with their tragic loss. Suddenly out of the blue arrives Jane's natural father an ex-convict. He demands money in excha

• Death Train | DVD | (13/09/2002) from £7.98   |  Saving you £-5.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £1.99

  A German Scientist aids an ex-Soviet general in constructing a nuclear weapon which is in the possession of an American mercenary heading across Europe in a hijacked goods train. Malcolm Philpott a member of UNACO (United Nations Anti Crime Organisation) must use a team of hand picked agents from various parts of the globe to stop this death train at all costs.

• The Kid | Blu Ray | (03/06/2019) from £7.95   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Following a violent altercation, a young boy, Rio (Jake Schur), is forced to go on the run across the American Southwest in a desperate attempt to save his sister (Leila George) from his villainous uncle (Chris Pratt). Along the way, he encounters Sheriff Pat Garrett (Ethan Hawke), on the hunt for the infamous outlaw Billy the Kid (Dane DeHaan). Rio finds himself increasingly entwined in the lives of these two legendary figures as the cat and mouse game of Billy the Kid's final year of life plays out. Ultimately Rio is forced to choose which type of man he is going to become, the outlaw or the man of valor, and will use this self-realization in a final act to save his family. Special Features: The Making of The Kid

• Boudu Saved From Drowning | DVD | (27/01/2003) from £11.98   |  Saving you £8.01 (40.10%)   |  RRP £19.99

  In an oeuvre permeated with ambivalence toward bourgeois life director Jean Renoir speculates on the result of the abandonment of those values in Boudu Saved From Drowning. Producer Michel Simon stars as Boudu a vagabond who attempts suicide by throwing himself into the Seine grieving over the loss of his dog. But Eduaord Lestingois (Charles Granval) a humane bookseller rescues him and takes him into his home hoping to reform the shaggy bum. Shortly thereafter anarchy

• Wagner - Die Meistersinger (Stein, Horst) | DVD | (15/05/2006) from £19.95   |  Saving you £-4.96 (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Stage and directed by Richard Wagner's grandson Wolfgang at the Bayreuther Festspiele in 1984 this production of Wagner's only comedy dispenses with the common cliches to reveal the humanity of each character. Here Beckmesser is no longer a foolish caricature but a cultivated intellectual; Stolzing emerges as a thoughtful individual rather than aggressive aristocrat; and Hans Sachs sheds his solemn patriarchal veneer to become a likeable middle-aged man.

• Eloge De L'Amour | DVD | (25/03/2002) from £13.48   |  Saving you £6.51 (48.29%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Jean-Luc Godard's eagerly awaited Eloge de l'Amour was one of the highlights of the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, dividing critics between those who loved its extraordinary beauty and those who found it hard to discern an overall theme from a multitude of contending threads. Certainly the plot is elusive. A young writer (Bruno Putzulu) wants a dark-haired woman (Cecile Camp) to play a role in his evolving project, a study of the four stages of love: meeting, physical passion, separation and reconciliation. By the time the funding comes through, she has killed herself and he looks back to the time when he might, or might not have met her before. Above all, the picture explores the blurred territory between the personal and the collective memory and the difference between a life which is simply lived and one in which the individual brings the power of imagination to their existence. Ultimately, the characters remain curiously faceless and the film fragments into a kaleidoscope of merging images, colours and landscapes and collective experience triumphs.Godard's legendary status as the godfather of French New Wave cinema has long since passed into the realms of cliché. Here, the "present" is shot on the streets of Paris in black and white. Godard's city of light looks as timeless as it did back in 1966 when he made Masculin Feminin. The second part of the film is shot in digital video, absorbing the audience with its electrically intense, mesmerising colours. Eloge de l'Amour is, more than anything, a sensual experience. Godard provokes but doesn't provide any answers. But fans of his more polemical work will enjoy the satirised American producers who want to purchase the rights to the Resistance couple's story. Americans have no memory, says the author. So they buy it from others. Godard never was a fence-sitter. --Piers Ford On the DVD: the main DVD extra on this disc sounds enticing: an interview with one of the world’s most innovative and influential directors. Yet the reality is disappointing, as it’s merely a transcript. The biography is more of the same. The only other additional feature is the subtitles, though there’s no option to turn them off. --Nikki Disney

• Family Enforcer | DVD | (26/07/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £4.99

  The story of a young man who is bent on becoming the best hoodlum in the underworld society where favours are repaid in kind... or repaid in blood.

• Thunderheart | DVD | (08/03/2004) from £17.98   |  Saving you £-11.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Tough but moving, Thunderheart is an unusual story about an arrogant FBI agent (Val Kilmer) who participates in a federal investigation of a murder on an Oglala Sioux reservation. Kilmer's character is part Sioux himself, a detail that leaves him cold as he sets about pushing his way through the community to find facts on the case. In time, however, he begins to feel an ethnic tug and grows increasingly sympathetic to the locals and hostile toward his fellow G-men, much to the dismay of his agency mentor (Sam Shepard). The script is based on real events that occurred on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975 in South Dakota (involving an armed stand-off between Indian activists and the FBI, an event that prompted Thunderheart director Michael Apted to make a companion documentary, Incident at Oglala). The conclusion of Thunderheart feels like politically charged whimsy, but the real strength of the film is Kilmer's outstanding performance as a man in transformation. Apted's clear-eyed depiction of the Sioux's spiritual and cultural continuity with the past has none of the cloying romanticism of other films about Indians. Produced by Robert De Niro. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com --This text refers to the VHS edition of this video

• Piranha 3 | Blu Ray | (17/04/2019) from £11.98   |  Saving you £13.01 (108.60%)   |  RRP £24.99

  After a sudden underwater tremor sets free scores of the prehistoric man-eating fish an unlikely group of strangers must band together to stop themselves from becoming fish food for the area's new razor-toothed residents.

• Shackles | DVD | (22/08/2005) from £9.99   |  Saving you £10.00 (100.10%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Welcome to the schol of hard knocks. Ben a struggling teacher in his 30s is desperately trying to get his life back in order to win back his ex-wife. After abundant struggle and a haunting past an old friend gets him a teaching position at Riker's Island Prison. Meanwhile Gabriel a 17-year-old drug-dealer is arrested and sent to the same prison. Ben is having terrible luck with his teaching program and is given an ultimatum that he must have more students or the program w