"Actor: Joseph Leon"

• Oliver | DVD | (11/12/2000) from £19.15   |  Saving you £0.84 (4.39%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Film buffs and critics can argue until their faces turn blue about whether this lavish Dickensian musical deserved the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1968, but the movie speaks for itself on grandly entertaining terms. Adapted from Dickens's classic novel, it's one of the most dramatically involving and artistically impressive musicals of the 1960s, directed by Carol Reed with a delightful enthusiasm that would surely have impressed Dickens himself. Mark Lester plays the waifish orphan Oliver Twist, who is befriended by the pick-pocketing Artful Dodger (Jack Wild) and recruited into the gang of boy thieves led by Fagin (played to perfection by Ron Moody). The villainous Bill Sikes (Oliver Reed) casts his long shadow over Oliver and his friends, but the young orphan is still able to find loving care in the most desperate of circumstances. Full of memorable melodies and splendid lyrics, Oliver! is a timeless film, prompting even hard-to-please critic Pauline Kael to call it "a superb demonstration of intelligent craftsmanship," and to further observe that "it's as if the movie set out to be a tribute to Dickens and his melodramatic art as well as to tell the story of Oliver Twist". --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

• Alice in Wonderland | Blu Ray | (31/10/2011) from £12.55   |  Saving you £-4.56 (N/A%)   |  RRP £7.99

  Tumble down the rabbit hole with Alice for a fantastical adventure from Walt Disney Pictures and Tim Burton. Inviting and magical, Alice In Wonderland is an imaginative new twist on one of the most beloved stories of all time. Alice (Mia Wasikowska), now 19 years old returns to the whimsical world she first entered as a child and embarks on a journey to discover her true destiny. This Wonderland is a world beyond your imagination and unlike anything you've seen before. The extraordinary characters you've loved come to life richer and more colourful than ever. There's a Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen) and more. A triumphant cinematic experience - Alice in Wonderland is an incredible feast for your eyes, ears and heart that will captivate audiences for all sizes.

• Unsane | DVD | (23/07/2018) from £4.49   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  A young woman is involuntarily committed to a mental institution where she is confronted by her greatest fear--but is it real or is it a product of her delusion?

• Alice In Wonderland | DVD | (28/01/2002) from £9.99   |  Saving you £10.00 (100.10%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Imaginatively rendered but slightly chilly, this 1951 Disney adaptation of the Lewis Carroll classic is also appropriately surreal. Alice (voiced by Kathryn Beaumont) has all the anticipated experiences: shrinking and growing, meeting the White Rabbit, having tea with the Mad Hatter, and so on. The characterisation is very strong, illustrating how hard the Disney team worked to bring screen personality to Carroll's eccentric creations. For a Disney film, however, it seems more the self-satisfied sum of its inventiveness than a truly engaging experience. --Tom Keogh

• Tora! Tora! Tora! | Blu Ray | (07/06/2010) from £24.99   |  Saving you £-5.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Here is just one of the many mishaps chronicled in Tora! Tora! Tora!: "Sir, there's a large formation of planes coming in from the north, 140 miles, 3 degrees east." "Yeah? Don't worry about it." The epic film shows the bombing of Pearl Harbour from both sides in the historic first American-Japanese coproduction: American director Richard Fleischer oversaw the complicated production (the Japanese sequences were directed by Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku, after Akira Kurosawa withdrew from the film), wrestling a sprawling story with dozens of characters into a manageable, fairly easy-to-follow film. The first half maps out the collapse of diplomacy between the nations and the military blunders that left naval and air forces sitting ducks for the impending attack, while the second half is an amazing re-creation of the devastating battle. While Tora! Tora! Tora! lacks the strong central characters that anchor the best war films, the real star of the film is the climactic 30-minute battle, a massive feat of cinematic engineering that expertly conveys the surprise, the chaos and the immense destruction of the only attack by a foreign power on American soil since the Revolutionary war. The special effects won a well-deserved Oscar, but the film was shut out of every other category by, ironically, the other epic war picture of the year, Patton. --Sean Axmaker, Amazon.com

• Shaft | DVD | (05/03/2001) from £6.99   |  Saving you £7.00 (100.14%)   |  RRP £13.99

  This original and hippest version of Shaft cruised onto cinema screens in 1971. John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) is an African-American private eye who has a rocky relationship with cops, an even rockier one with Harlem gangsters, and a healthy sex life. The script finds Shaft tracking down the kidnapped daughter of a black mobster, but the pleasure of the film is the sum of its attitude, Roundtree's uncompromising performance, and the thrilling, Oscar-winning score by Isaac Hayes. Director Gordon Parks (The Learning Tree) seems fond of certain detective genre cliché (e.g., the hero walking into his low-rent office and finding a hood waiting to talk with him), but he and Roundtree make those moments their own. Shaft produced a couple of sequels, a follow-up television series, and a remake starring Samuel L Jackson, but none had the impact this movie did. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com

• Sophie's Choice | DVD | (19/09/2005) from £6.50   |  Saving you £0.49 (7.54%)   |  RRP £6.99

  The sunny streets of Brooklyn, just after World War II. A young would-be writer named Stingo (Peter MacNicol) shares a boarding house with beautiful Polish immigrant Sophie (Meryl Streep) and her tempestuous lover, Nathan (Kevin Kline); their friendship changes his life. This adaptation of the bestselling novel by William Styron is faithful to the point of being reverential, which is not always the right way to make a film come to life. But director Alan J. Pakula (All the President's Men) provides a steady, intelligent path into the harrowing story of Sophie, whose flashback memories of the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp form the backbone of the movie. Streep's exceptional performance--flawless Polish accent and all--won her an Oscar, and effectively raised the standard for American actresses of her generation. No less impressive is Kevin Kline, in his movie debut, capturing the mercurial moods of the dangerously attractive Nathan. The two worlds of Sophie's Choice, nostalgic Brooklyn and monstrous Europe, are beautifully captured by the gifted cinematographer Néstor Almendros, whose work was Oscar-nominated but didn't win. It should have. --Robert Horton, Amazon.com

• Cleopatra | Blu Ray | (24/09/2012) from £31.98   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £29.99

  A pre-code film that sneaked onto screens just as the censorious Hays Office began cracking down on Hollywood's racier propositions, Cleopatra is a libertine paean to decadence and depravity that can still send a viewer's mind reeling and pulse thumping – all courtesy of the Golden Age's swampiest psychosexual auteur, Cecil B. DeMille (The Ten Commandments; The Greatest Show on Earth; The King of Kings). Claudette Colbert (It Happened One Night; The Palm Beach Story; Drums Along the Mohawk) presides over the most outrageous spectacle this side of The Scarlet Empress as the eponymous pharaoh queen who speeds from Julius Caesar (Warren William) to Marc Antony (Henry Wilcoxon), from Egypt to Rome, from war-room to bedroom… The whiff of incense permeates every scene, with each connected to the next in a veritable matrix of whips, blindfolds, and bindings – the crazed arrangement laying bare all the fetish inklings of the moving-picture dream.

• CLEOPATRA (Masters of Cinema) (DVD) | DVD | (24/09/2012) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £16.99

  A pre-code film that sneaked onto screens just as the censorious Hays Office began cracking down on Hollywood's racier propositions, Cleopatra is a libertine paean to decadence and depravity that can still send a viewer's mind reeling and pulse thumping - all courtesy of the Golden Age's swampiest psychosexual auteur, Cecil B. DeMille (The Ten Commandments; The Greatest Show on Earth; The King of Kings).Claudette Colbert (It Happened One Night; The Palm Beach Story; Drums Along the Mohawk) presides over the most outrageous spectacle this side of The Scarlet Empress as the eponymous pharaoh queen who speeds from Julius Caesar (Warren William) to Marc Antony (Henry Wilcoxon), from Egypt to Rome, from war-room to bedroom... The whiff of incense permeates every scene, with each connected to the next in a veritable matrix of whips, blindfolds, and bindings - the crazed arrangement laying bare all the fetish inklings of the moving-picture dream.Lavishly produced with some of the most inspired waxing-moon photography and unwholesome set-design to come out of the studio system, DeMille's film is an erotic tour-de-force that obliges us to re-examine the appeal of this most popular of Hollywood directors. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Cleopatra on DVD.

• Tora! Tora! Tora! | DVD | (18/12/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £17.99

  Tora! Tora! Tora! Is the Japanese signal to attack - and this movie meticulously recreates the attack on Pearl Harbor and the events leading up to it. Opening scenes contrast the American and Japanese positions. Japanese imperialists decide to stage the attack. Top U.S. brass ignore its possibility. Intercepted Japanese messages warn of it - but never reach F.D.R.'s desk. Radar warnings are disregarded. Even the entrapment of a Japanese submarine in Pearl Harbor before the attack goes unreported. Ultimately the Day of Infamy arrives - in the most spectacular gut-wrenching cavalcade of action.

• Dinner At Fred's | DVD | (09/02/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Richard leaves the corporate office for a weekend in the country house of his fiance who is also the daughter of his boss. On the way there he is forced to accept lodging from a local called Fred but when he enters the house the wacky family refuse to let him move on. The family believe they are under the curse of the wild turkey by which anyone who stays past midnight in the rural house is doomed never to leave.

• Soylent Green | Blu Ray | (26/09/2022) from £20.34   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Soylent Green is landmark science fiction film, a cautionary tale that holds a mirror to a tomorrow rife with ecological disaster. Working well again in the futuristic genre following Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man, action titan Charlton Heston portrays Thom, a detective prowling the dank streets of a polluted, overpopulated Big Apple gone rotten in 2022.He's trailing a murderer and the trail leads to a stunning discovery. Vividly realised, Soylent Green's world gains its power not just from its special effects but from its heart a human dimension magnified by the performance of legendary Edward G.Robinson in his moving screen farewell.Product FeaturesCommentary by Richard Fleischer and Leigh Taylor-YoungA Look at The World of Soylent GreenMGM's Tribute to Edward G.Robinson's 101st FilmDebossed finish on the title treatment of the Steelbook