This film made in 1982 charts the final year in Dame Janet Baker's operatic career. It begins with preperations for the title role of Gluck's Alceste staged at the Royl Opera House Covent Garden.
In a storm of desire deception and murder... four people are about to be swept away. There's no turning back tonight. Academy Award-winner Faye Dunaway Daniel J. Travanti John Laughlin (Crimes Of Passion) Kim Cattrall (Mannequin) and Ned Beatty (The Fourth Protocol) star in a twisted suspense thriller of murder lust and greed. For Jeff Schubb inheriting his father's sloop and charter business in the Florida Keys was a dream come true. When his wife's employer Morely Barton suggests the two couples cruise to the Bahamas Jeff sees his financial worries drift away. Once at sea Morely provides a new destination an island off Cuba where he stashed his fortune before Castro's regime. He offers Jeff half to help retrieve his treasure. But all is not smooth sailing as the past encroaches on the present and too many deceits connect the foursome in a deadly game of intrigue.
John Wayne, aka The Duke will always be remembered as one of ROOSTER COGBURN ¢ JET PILOT ¢ THE CONQUEROR Hollywood's greatest actors; cast as a lead in over 142 films during his decade spanning career. Here are seven of the best films which display Wayne's meteoric talent in the genres for which he is most fondly remembered war and westerns. Included in this set are his Oscar® nominated performance in Sands of Iwo Jima, his first lead Western role in John Ford's Stagecoach, Rooster Cogburn (the prequel to True Grit) and four other memorable classics - The Conqueror; Jet Pilot; Rio Grande and Flying Tigers.
In 1928 Sunrise won Oscars for Janet Gaynor as Best Actress and cinematography as a "Unique and Artistic Picture". In 1967 it was declared "the single greatest masterwork in the history of cinema" by key French new wave magazine Cahiers du Cinema. Released with a synchronised score and effects soundtrack but no dialogue, it is a cinematic landmark from the transition period between silent cinema and the talkies. Beginning as a prototype film noir in which a farmer (George O' Brien) plans the murder of his wife (Gaynor) with his vacationing lover from the city (Margaret Livingstone), the film develops from tense thriller into a story of reawakened love and redemption. Anticipating Orson Welles's artistic freedom on Citizen Kane (1941), German expressionist director FW Murnau was given carte blanche following the huge American success of The Last Laugh (1924). The result was this poetic fable making inventive use of every technical device then available, including in-camera multiple exposures and superimpositions, long elegant tracking shots, forced perspectives, complex miniatures and synchronised sound, as well as the largest single-street-scene set ever built. The result is a film that influenced everything from Hitchcock suspense to Titanic (1997) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Murnau summons powerful performances from his principal players--Gaynor would later headline A Star Is Born (1937) and O'Brien would take important roles in several classic John Ford westerns--while the transcendent finale evokes and reworks the ending of the director's earlier classic, Nosferatu (1922). Though now inevitably dated Sunrise remains essential for anyone seriously interested in the development of cinematic art. On the DVD:Sunrise is presented on an immaculately produced two-disc special edition. Though restored to full length and presented in the original 1.2:1 ratio with the complete music and effects soundtrack, the film has been taken from a print made in 1936, the original camera negative having been destroyed in a fire. As a result this is the best possible modern presentation of Sunrise, though the print, while perfectly acceptable, is very grainy, lined and flickery by contemporary standards. The mono sound has been superbly restored and is remarkably effective for its vintage; an alternative stereo musical track recorded for recent reissue sounds excellent. The film also boasts a commentary by John Bailey: apart from talking a little too much about how beautiful the lighting is, Bailey offers seriously in-depth knowledge about the film and about Murnau that really puts everything into historical context and explains the constant technical ingenuity. The second disc presents the useful A Song of Two Humans, a 12-minute visual essay by film historian R Dixon Smith, and almost 10 minutes of outtakes with optional commentary by John Bailey, as well as a trailer, stills gallery and notes explaining the nature of the restoration. There is also an excellent 40-minute documentary Murnau's 4 Devils: Traces of a Lost Film, telling the story of the director's lost follow up to Sunrise. Microsoft Word and PDF files available via DVD-ROM present various incarnations of the screenplays for both Sunrise and 4 Devils. --Gary S. Dalkin
The stakes are high. The trap is set. There's no one left to trust. Mike Santini (Rob Lowe) is a by-the-book New York detective whose rise to the top has stalled in the aftermath of a bribery scandal. But when he brings in Eddie Myers (Sam Neill) banker for the Mob and key prosecution witness on America's biggest ever money-laundering trial it looks like Santini's career may be back on track. Holed up with Myers in a safe house while the FBI finalise their case Santini is stunne
Regan is classic TV drama that will have you saying, "they don't make 'em like that any more". This is the feature-length pilot to what became the long-running TV series The Sweeney, starring John Thaw and Dennis Waterman as the hard-as-nails Flying Squad double act. The story opens in a south London pub decorated in shades of brown so manifold that it forms a patina on the screen more normally associated with a painterly artist. It's the early 1970s, and Thaw's Inspector Regan is a lone ranger fighting on several fronts including the imminent modernisation of the police force, which he describes as a vision of "hundreds of little grey men working on top of each other, pots of tea and committees". The dialogue is clever, rich and funny. When Regan tries to persuade Carter to work with him on the case he growls: "Mary darling, I'm not trying to start an affair with you." The heroes have thinning hair and bad habits: Regan drinks whiskey in the middle of the day and constantly smokes, he's lost his wife, let down his daughter, and then loses his girlfriend (Maureen Lipman). The filming is wonderfully crafted--shots taken from odd angles, action that surprises and gritty London locations. "You're a copper. You belong like me out in the cold," Regan says to Carter in the last scene as they go off to get a drink out of licensed hours. Not the end, but the start of a beautiful relationship. --Joan Byrne
A tough realistic war film that centers around a small platoon at a remote firebase in Vietnam. The platoon are sent relentlessly on search and destroy missions. On one particular mission the Platoon move into a village catching and killing a band of Viet-Cong they then destroy the arms cache. As the Platoon moves out of the village they discover they are surrounded by a battalion. They make for a rendezvous point where they will be lifted out by helicopter they manage to fight their way to the helicopter pick-up point most of the platoon are now dead and the handful of men left become trapped at the bottom of the ravine.
For a first feature from a 24-year-old director, George Washington is an amazingly assured piece of work. The titles misleading: this is no biopic of Americas first President, but a poetic, richly atmospheric rhapsody set in a rundown industrial town in the American South. Given this backdrop, and a predominantly black cast, you might expect an angry study of social deprivation and racial tension, but Green has no such agenda. Instead, he derives a shimmering, heat-hazed beauty from his images of rusting machinery, junkyards and derelict buildings, and if the overall tone is tinged with sadness, its mainly from a sense of universal human loss. The action, such as it is, moves at its own slow Southern pace, following a group of youngsters, black and white, over a few high-summer days. Things do happen--a couple decide to elope, one boys saved from drowning, another gets killed--but theyre presented in an oblique, understated fashion that owes nothing to conventional Hollywood notions of narrative. With one exception, the cast are all non-professionals, mainly youngsters who director-writer David Gordon Green found in and around the town where the film was made, Winston-Salem in North Carolina. Shooting in a semi-improvised fashion, Green draws from his young cast remarkably spontaneous performances and dialogue (often their own) full of unselfconscious poetry. Drawing on a wide range of influences--among other things he cites Sesame Street, documentaries and such 70s classics as Deliverance, Walkabout and especially Terrence Malicks Days of Heaven--Green has fashioned a film thats fresh, tender and utterly individual. And it looks just gorgeous: belying the tiny budget, Tim Orrs widescreen photography lavishes mellow softness on images of dereliction and small-town decay. Never has dead-end poverty been made to look so attractive. On the DVD: George Washington comes on a disc generously loaded with extras. Besides the obvious theatrical trailer we get two of Greens early short films, Physical Pinball and Pleasant Grove (both clearly dry runs for the main feature), an 18-minute featurette about the films reception at the Berlin Film Fest and a deleted scene of a community meeting. This scene, the short Pleasant Grove and the movie itself also offer a directors commentary--or rather a directors dialogue, as Green shares the honours with one of his lead actors, Paul Schneider. Their laconic, unpretentious comments enhance the whole experience enormously. The film has been transferred in its full scope ratio (2.35:1) and looks great. --Philip Kemp
G-Force Princess Tiny Keyop Mark Jason and watching over them from Centre Neptune their computerised co-ordinator 7-Zark-7! Watching warning against surprise attacks by alien galaxies beyond space! Fearless young orphans protecting earth''s entire galaxy. Always five acting as one... Dedicated Inseparable Invincible!
Join Janet Ellis and her friends on their musical journey at Whipsnade Wild Animal Park one of Europe's biggest zoos and conservation Parks. At the zoo Janet and the children get to see and feed all the most exciting animals including elephants giraffes bears zebras and camels. A Trip To The Zoo is packed with all those elements that children adore - animals other children and best-loved songs. What's more viewers of the video can learn all about the animals through specially w
Fifi And The Flowertots: Fifi's Carnival
Setting a Carry On film in a marriage bureau has a certain self-serving obviousness, so it's hardly surprising that Carry On Loving milks the idea for all it's worth. The Wedded Bliss Agency is of course a pretty dubious outfit, being run by Sid (James) and Sophie Bliss (Hattie Jacques), who together are the worst possible argument both for marriage and for their own profession: they constantly snipe at each other, they aren't actually married and their sophisticated computer matching system is in fact a complete fake. The remainder of the team are mostly cast as hapless clients, with predictable but often very funny situations arising from the various mismatches engineered by the agency, such as the inevitable misunderstanding over one client's interest in modelling. Yes, the humour is about as subtle as a flatulent elephant, but you can't help entering into the spirit of the thing. If there's an outstanding performance it has to be that of Imogen Hassall, who handles her transformation from round-shouldered frump to well-bred love goddess with considerable expertise and a genuine sense of fun. On the DVD: The picture ratio is 4:3, and as is usual for this series the disc has no added features, which always seems like a terribly missed opportunity.--Roger Thomas
Adapted from H.E. Bates' novel My Uncle Silas is set at the turn of the last century and stars Albert Finney as the country-living womanizing rogue Uncle Silas. The series tells of what happens when Silas' townie nephew (Joe Prospero) comes to stay with him. Co-stars Lynda Bellingham and Sue Johnston.
The Bower Family Band petitions the Democratic National Committee to sing a Grover Cleveland rally song at the 1888 convention but decide instead to move to the Dakota territory on the urging of a suitor to their eldest daughter. There Grampa Bower causes trouble with his pro-Cleveland ideas as Dakota residents are overwhelmingly Republican and hope to get the territory admitted as two states (North and South Dakota) rather than one in order to send four Republican senators to Was
Ivanhoe Martin comes to the city to make it big singing Reggae. However he finds life in the city to be harder than he though and is taken advantage of by both the record producer and the marijuana boss he later starts dealing for. When he kills a police officer events start escalating that make him the Jamaica's most wanted man and a momentary hero to all the oppressed Jamaicans. This is based on a true story.
Featuring 40 films by such luminaries as Humphrey Jennings Paul Rotha and Ruby Grierson this collection is a major retrospective of the British documentary film movement during its period of greatest influence. The diverse and compelling films contained here - many of which are made available for the first time since their original release - bear witness to the social and industrial transformations of a rapidly changing world. This unique collection captures the spirit and strength concerns and resolve of Britain and its people before during and immediately after the Second World War.
Feisty, fearless Judy Moody (Jordana Beatty) is looking forward to the most super-duper amazing summer vacation ever! The problem is, her parents are called out of town and her friends are going away with their own families. That leaves Judy trapped at home with her pesky brother Stink (Parris Mosteller) under the watchful eye of Aunt opal (Heather Graham). Judy looks set for a Bummer summer. However, with a little playful planning and a lot of imagination Judy turns a boring summer into the best vacation ever! Bonus Features: Judy Moody's Guide to Making a Movie 10 Things You Need to Know About Judy Moody Deleted Scenes... and more!
An estimated one out of every three women will be sexually assaulted at some time in their life with ninety percent of these victims choosing not to report the assaults to the police. This powerful and disturbing film deals with 'Forcible Rape Amongst Friends' one of the most prevelant crimes facing young women today. Annabeth Gish (Mystic Pizza) portrays the shocked and violated victim Lynn McKenna who is lured into a sense of false security and raped by her bestfriend's boyfriend John Telersky (Deathstalker 2). Confused and ashamed and faced with the knowledge of almost certain defeat Lynn must decide whether or not to press criminal charges against her attacker and bring about necessary justice.
There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow between science and superstition and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area we call...The Twilight Zone! Episodes comprise: 1. Two 2. The Arrival 3. The Shelter 4. The Passerby 5. A Game of Pool 6.
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