"Actor: Jacques"

• Tati BD Collection | Blu Ray | (05/10/2020) from £51.98   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  A legendary filmmaker. 6 FEATURE FILMS. 7 SHORT FILMS. 1 TREMENDOUS ADVENTURE When we ask filmmakers across the world to name a French film director who has changed how they look at film and at t world, all or nearly all of them say with a smile, Jacques Tati. From short films to feature films, music hall to road-movie, Jacques Tati draws us into hisquirky and poetic universe. Step into the ring to face Roger in Soigne Ton Gauche (Keep Your Left Up), be invited into the festive Big Top in Parade, pedal faster and faster to deliver the post in L'Ecole des Facteurs (The School for Postmen) and Jour de Fête (The Big Day), embark ona journey across Europe in a revolutionary Renault in Trafic (Traffic), enjoy a well-deserved revitalising holiday with Monsieur Hulot, let Mon Oncle (My Uncle) guide you around the old neighbourhood of Saint-Maur and the ultramodern Arpel villa, and experience a virtual visitof Paris in the incredible PlayTime. Bon voyage! THE FILMS JOUR DE FÊTE LES VACANCES DE MONSIEUR HULOT MON ONCLE PLAYTIME TRAFIC PARADE THE SHORT FILMS ON DEMANDE UNE BRUTE - 1934 GAI DIMANCHE - 1935 SOIGNE TON GAUCHE - 1936 L'ÉCOLE DES FACTEURS - 1946 COURS DU SOIR - 1967 DÉGUSTATION MAISON - 1976 FORZA BASTIA - 1978

• Carry On Again Doctor | DVD | (17/02/2003) from £8.70   |  Saving you £4.29 (49.31%)   |  RRP £12.99

  The title of 1969's Carry On Again Doctor says it all; almost the same cast playing similar characters to their previous year's outing in Carry On Doctor. This one rejoices in the alternative title "Bowels are Ringing". But the enduring popularity of these films owes almost everything to their basic formula and if it occasionally seems a bit cobbled together, all the old favourites are still here. This time, the setting moves from the National Health Service to the private sector and even stretches as far as the "Beatific Islands" when Jim Dale is exiled to a missionary clinic for his overzealous attention to the female patients--who include Barbara Windsor of course. There, orderly Sid James rules the roost of the clinic with his harem of local women. Trivia addicts can spot Mrs Michael Caine in a brief role as a token dusky maiden. The second half of the Talbot Rothwell script picks up nicely as the characters converge on the private hospital back in England where Dale rakes in the money with a bogus weight loss treatment. Hattie Jacques is in fine form as Matron, Kenneth Williams fascinates with his usual mass of mannerisms and Joan Sims is stately as the Lady Bountiful figure financing most of the shenanigans. It's a tribute to their professionalism that we can still lose ourselves in some of the creakiest old jokes around. --Piers Ford

• Seven Brides For Seven Brothers | DVD | (17/04/2019) from £7.52   |  Saving you £6.47 (86.04%)   |  RRP £13.99

  Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, starring MGM soprano Jane Powell and handsome baritone Howard Keel, has retained a remarkably loyal following among fans of the musical film ever since its release in 1954. Although it was filmed in state-of-the-art CinemaScope, Stanley Donen was obliged to direct much of the film on Metro's sound stages, where the artificial sets and painted backdrops don't inevitably live up to the scenes shot on location in Oregon. Viewers coming fresh to the picture may find this visual discrepancy jarring and some too may find Miss Powell's singing a shade plummy. The screenplay, by husband and wife team Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich with Dorothy Kingsley, tells the story of seven brothers living in the Oregon hills and their adventures to find themselves wives. The casting of each brother with his rugged, masculine looks and ability to dance with grace and athleticism, presided over by an authoritative Howard Keel, gives the film a dynamic impetus second to none in an MGM musical. The lengthy barn-raising episode under choreographer Michael Kidd's intrepid direction, where the music and the incredibly agile and energetic male and female dance ensemble unite as one, produces a square dance without parallel. The music and lyrics by Gene De Paul and Johnny Mercer--including the mating chorus, "Spring, Spring, Spring", the rollicking "Bless You're Beautiful Hide", the rousing "Sobbin' Women" and the visually enchanting "June Bride"--are both tuneful and mindful of the plot's exposition. Adolph Deutsch and Saul Chaplin won the Academy Award in 1954 for their arrangements and conducting. On the DVD: The digital remastering has created a clearer picture of what had been a faintly muddy Ansco colour system on the original print while the polish and attack with which the MGM Studio Orchestra play the music on this full-bodied stereophonic soundtrack remains a thing of wonder. Howard Keel, standing tall and erect in his 80s, hosts the "making of" documentary. Director Donen, choreographer Kidd, Jane Powell and several of the dancers recall how the film was considered a "sleeper" during production and wasn't expected to do as well as Brigadoon, in production at the same time. The documentary also highlights the care taken over the casting of the brothers, two of whom including Keel were not dancers and their often brave and brilliant feats of acrobatic dancing executed on precarious planks and other props. When Howard Keel takes his farewell walk down the main street lot at MGM, breaking into a few brief dance steps, it's impossible not to feel a moment of regret that the curtain had to come down on MGM's most treasured possession. --Adrian Edwards

• Carousel | DVD | (08/03/2004) from £6.20   |  Saving you £9.79 (157.90%)   |  RRP £15.99

  The 1956 screen adaptation of Carousel, like its immediate predecessor Oklahoma!, boasted then state-of-the-art widescreen cinematography, stereophonic sound, a starring romantic duo with on-screen chemistry, and the Rodgers & Hammerstein imprimatur. Adding to its promise was a source (the venerable Ferenc Molnar play Liliom) that had already been filmed three times. Contributing to the lustre are the coastal Maine locations where 20th Century Fox filmed principal photography. Yet unlike the original Broadway production, and despite evident craft, Carousel proved a box-office disappointment. Why? Hindsight argues that movie-goers of the 1950s may have been unprepared for its tragic narrative, the sometimes unsympathetic protagonist, and a spiritual subtext addressing life after death. Whatever the obstacle, Carousel may well be a revelation to first-time viewers. The score is among the composers' most affecting, from the glorious instrumental "Carousel Waltz" to a succession of exquisite love songs ("If I Loved You"), a heart-rending secular hymn ("You'll Never Walk Alone"), and the expectant father's poignant reverie, "Soliloquy". Top-line stars Shirley Jones (as factory worker Julie Jordan) and Gordon MacRae (as Billy Bigelow, the carnival barker who woos and weds her) achieve greater dramatic urgency here than in the more successful Oklahoma!. MacRae in particular attains a personal best as the conflicted Billy, whose anxiety and wounded pride after losing his job are crucial to the plot. It's Billy's impatience to support his new family that drives him to an ill-fated decision, which transforms the fable into a ghost story. --Sam Sutherland, Amazon.com

• Hell | DVD | (21/08/2006) from £7.09   |  Saving you £12.90 (181.95%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Three sisters, estranged after a shared childhood trauma, are gradually reunited by a young stranger with a surprising revelation.

• Frantic | DVD | (25/10/1999) from £5.38   |  Saving you £8.61 (61.50%)   |  RRP £13.99

  A doctor and his wife go to Paris for a medical conference. While showering, his wife disappears.

• Diabolique | Blu Ray | (05/06/2017) from £17.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Legend has it that Henri-Georges Clouzot beat out Alfred Hitchcock to secure the rights to this novel, which proved to be a veritable blueprint for an icy masterpiece of murder, mystery and suspense. Véra Clouzot plays the sickly wife of a callous headmaster of a provincial boarding school going to seed, and the commanding Simone Signoret is the headmaster's mistreated mistress. Together they plot and carry out his murder, a brutal drowning that director Clouzot documents in chilly detail, but the corpse disappears and a nosy detective starts sniffing around the grounds as threatening notes taunt the women. Clouzot's thriller is as precise and accomplished a work as anything in Hitchcock's canon, a film of gruelling suspense and startling shocks in an overcast, grey world of decay, but his icy manipulations lack the human dimension and emotional resonance of the master of suspense. Many critics have accused the film of being misanthropic, and Clouzot's attitude toward his characters is bitter at best, contemptuous at worst. The viewer is left on the outside looking in, but the razor precision and terrifying twists deliver a sleek, bleak spectacle worthy of attention. --Sean Axmaker, Amazon.com

• Intimate Strangers | DVD | (14/02/2005) from £14.98   |  Saving you £5.01 (33.44%)   |  RRP £19.99

  She confused him for a therapist and told him her deepest secrets. Now two people who never should have met are discovering there's nothing more seductive than the truth. When a French woman tells her marital troubles to a man she mistakes for a psychiatrist they soon form an unusual relationship... Nominated for the Golden Bear Award at the 2004 Berlin Film Festival.

• Jour De Fete | DVD | (10/11/2014) from £10.12   |  Saving you £7.87 (77.77%)   |  RRP £17.99

  Details TBC

• Lola Montes (1955) (Criterion Collection) UK Only | Blu Ray | (11/05/2020) from £23.98   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Lola Montès is a visually ravishing, narratively daring dramatization of the life of the notorious courtesan and showgirl, played by Martine Carol. With his customary cinematographic flourish and, for the first time, vibrant colour, Max Ophuls charts Montès's scandalous past through the bombastic ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) of the American circus where she ends up performing. Ophuls's final film, Lola Montès is at once a magnificent romantic melodrama, a meditation on the lurid fascination with celebrity, and a meticulous, one-of-a-kind movie spectacle. Special Features: New, restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed stereo soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition Audio commentary featuring Max Ophuls scholar Susan White Max Ophuls ou le plaisir de tourner, a 1965 episode of the French television program Cinéastes de notre temps, featuring interviews with many of Ophuls's collaborators Max by Marcel, a new documentary by Marcel Ophuls about his father and the making of Lola Montès Silent footage of actress Martine Carol demonstrating the various glamorous hairstyles in Lola Montès Theatrical rerelease trailer from Rialto Pictures New and improved English subtitle translation PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Gary Giddins

• Gigi | DVD | (02/06/2003) from £10.78   |  Saving you £3.21 (29.78%)   |  RRP £13.99

  Gigi, Vincente Minnelli's 1958 adaptation of Colette's story about a girl (Leslie Caron) groomed as a courtesan but desired as a wife by a Parisian playboy (Louis Jordan), won a lot of Oscars, but it also has the unusual distinction of being an MGM musical shot on location in the City of Lights. What a musical it is (by Lerner and Loewe): Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold crooning "Ah, Yes, I Remember It Well", plus the songs "Thank Heaven for Little Girls", "Gigi", "I'm a Bore", and "She's Not Thinking of Me". Director Minnelli makes a sumptuous, dreamy, almost laid-back affair of it all and the indispensable cast is forever etched into memory. Hollywood's long-running infatuation with continental grace and manners, the memory of a much earlier time imported to American movies through such immigrant directors as Ernst Lubitsch, may have finally come to a gentle end with this film. --Tom Keogh

• Carry On At Your Convenience | DVD | (07/07/2003) from £9.49   |  Saving you £3.50 (36.88%)   |  RRP £12.99

  In 1971 when Carry On at Your Convenience hit our screens, the series had long since become part of the fabric of British popular entertainment. Never mind the situation, the characters were essentially the same, film after film. The jokes were all as old as the hills, but nobody cared, they were still funny. But it's just too easy to treat them as a job lot of postcard humour and music hall innuendo. This tale of revolt at a sanitary ware factory--Boggs and Son, what else?--certainly chimed in with the state of the nation in the early 1970s when strikes were called at the drop of a hat. Here, tea urns, demarcation and the company's decision to branch out into bidets all wreak havoc. Kenneth Williams as the company's besieged managing director, Sidney James and Joan Sims give their all as usual, but it's the lesser roles that really add some lustre. Hattie Jacques as Sid's budgerigar-obsessed, sluggish put-upon wife and Renee Houston as a superbly domineering battleaxe with a penchant for strip poker remind us that in the hands of fine actors, even the laziest of caricatures become real human beings. --Piers Ford

• Carry On Christmas | DVD | (14/11/2022) from £14.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  All four made-for-TV Christmas specials from the 'Carry On' crew. 'Carry On Christmas' (1969) is a reworking of Charles Dickens' classic 'A Christmas Carol' while 'Carry On Again Christmas' (1970) is a new take on 'Treasure Island'. In 'Carry On Stuffing' (1972), the cast recreate a bawdy version of the classic panto 'Aladdin', and in 'Carry On Christmas' (1973), a saucy department store Santa wonders how Christmas has been celebrated through the ages. The cast includes Sid James, Barbara Windsor, Frankie Howerd, Terry Scott, Charles Hawtrey, Bernard Bresslaw and Kenneth Connor.

• Desperate Romantics | DVD | (17/04/2019) from £7.90   |  Saving you £-0.98 (N/A%)   |  RRP £6.92

  Set in and among the alleys galleries and flesh-houses of 19th-century industrial London Desperate Romantics follows the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood a vagabond group of English painters poets and critics. A relationship drama from the perspective of this iconoclastic group of dysfunctional male romantics the series follows their lives and relationships as they shamelessly scheme and strive to find fame fortune and success as well as love and sex along the way.

• Carry On Doctor | DVD | (17/02/2003) from £4.99   |  Saving you £8.00 (160.32%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Bedpan humour rules in Carry On Doctor, the vintage 1968 offering from gang, assisted by guest star Frankie Howerd as bogus faith healer Francis Bigger. Hospitals, of course, always provided the Carry On producers with plenty of material. Today, these comedies induce a twinge of serious nostalgia for the great days of the National Health Service when Matron (Hattie Jacques, naturally) ran the hospital as if it was a house of correction, medical professionals were idolised as if they were all Doctor Kildare and Accident and Emergency Departments were deserted oases of calm. But even if you aren't interested in a history lesson, Talbot Rothwell's script contains some immortal dialogue, particularly when Matron loosens her stays. "You may not realise it but I was once a weak man", says Kenneth Williams' terrified Doctor Tinkle to Hattie Jacques. "Once a week's enough for any man", she purrs back. Other highlights include Joan Sims, excellent as Frankie Howerd's deaf, bespectacled sidekick, Charles Hawtrey suffering from a phantom pregnancy, 1960s singer Anita Harris in a rare film role, and Barbara Windsor at her most irrepressible as nurse Sandra May. --Piers Ford

• Carry On Matron | DVD | (07/07/2003) from £8.22   |  Saving you £4.77 (58.03%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Hattie Jacques finally got to the play the title role in 1972 when Carry On Matron immortalised the character she had developed during several previous outings, most notably in Carry On Doctor. And she seized it with gusto. This is no one-dimensional performance, but a very human portrait of a woman doing her best to retain her authority in the face of mounting chaos--a raid planned by Sid James to steal the hospital's supply of contraceptive pills. Certainly, she's obsessed with regular bowel movements--this wouldn't be a Carry On film otherwise--but she remains a majestic figure of dignity with a touch of human warmth. Occasionally, too, a real hint of irony peeks through the slapstick and the innuendo. Surely scriptwriter Talbot Rothwell had his tongue lodged firmly in his cheek when he gave Barbara Windsor--then married to Ronnie Knight--the line, "I don't fancy being a gangster's moll!" Terry Scott makes a guest appearance and Sid James is at his most conniving and lecherous. Theatre impresario Bill Kenwright has a cameo role and there's an early appearance from Wendy Richard as a prototype Pauline Fowler. But it's the female stalwarts who shine. Joan Sims and Hattie Jacques were truly comic actresses of the highest order. --Piers Ford

• Diva | DVD | (15/01/2007) from £8.99   |  Saving you £9.00 (100.11%)   |  RRP £17.99

  Jean-Jacques Beineix's wonderfully stylish thriller was largely responsible for the renaissance of foreign language film in the UK in the early 80s. The story of Jules (Andrei) an opera-obsessed courier whose bootleg recording of a rare concert by American diva Cynthia Hawkins (Wiggins-Fernandez) is believed to be a tape connecting the chief of police with a Parisian vice ring precipitates a frantic search for its whereabouts by two murderous thugs (Pinon and Gerard Darmon).

• The Train | DVD | (17/04/2019) from £15.28   |  Saving you £-2.29 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Inspired by a true incident during World War II in 'The Train' Burt Lancaster plays a French Resistance fighter doggedly attempting to stop a train used by the Nazis (led by Paul Scofield as Colonel Von Waldheim) to steal precious French art treasures in the summer of 1944. Featuring spectacular action sequences expertly directed by John Frankenheimer 'The Train' is a truly thrilling war film. The Oscar-nominated screenplay by Franklin Coen and Frank Davis superbly recreates the te

• Les Vacances De M. Hulot | DVD | (10/11/2014) from £9.99   |  Saving you £8.00 (80.08%)   |  RRP £17.99

  Details TBC

• Playtime | Blu Ray | (24/11/2014) from £11.99   |  Saving you £11.00 (91.74%)   |  RRP £22.99

  Synopsis and product details to follow