"Actor: Marc Duret"

• Nikita | DVD | (31/03/2003) from £6.49   |  Saving you £6.50 (100.15%)   |  RRP £12.99

  French director Luc Besson broke the commercial taboo against female-driven action movies with Nikita, his seminal, seductively slick film about a violent street punk (Anne Parillaud) trained to become a smooth, stylish assassin. Though it amounts, in the end, to little more than disposable pop, the film has a cohesiveness in style and tone--akin to the early James Bond films--that gives it a sense of integrity. Parillaud is compelling both as a wild child and chic-but-lethal pro (trained in good manners by none other than Jeanne Moreau). Tchéky Karyo is also good as the cop mentor who develops feelings for her. --Tom Keogh

• The Big Blue | DVD | (30/06/2003) from £7.28   |  Saving you £5.70 (132.87%)   |  RRP £9.99

  A hit in Europe but a flop in the US--where it was trimmed, rescored, and given a new ending--Luc Besson's The Big Blue has endured as a minor cult classic for its gorgeous photography (both on land and underwater) and dreamy ambiance. Jean-Marc Barr is a sweet and sensitive but passive presence as Jacques, a diver with a unique connection to the sea. He has the astounding ability to slow his heartbeat and his circulation on deep dives, "a phenomenon that's only been observed in whales and dolphins until now," remarks one scientist. Kooky New York insurance adjuster Joanna (Rosanna Arquette at her most delightfully flustered and endearingly sexy best) melts after falling into his innocent baby blues, and she follows him to Italy, where he's continuing a lifelong competition with boyhood rival Enzo (Jean Reno in a performance both comic and touching). Besson's first English-language production looks more European than Hollywood, and it suffers from a tin ear for the language. At times it feels more like an IMAX undersea documentary than a drama about free divers, but the lush and lovely images create a fairy tale dimension to Jacques's story, a veritable Little Merman. More dolphin than man, he's so torn between earthly love and aquatic paradise that even his dreams call him to the sea (in a sequence more eloquent than any speech). Besson has expanded the film by 50 minutes for his director's cut, which adds little story but slows the contemplative pace until it practically floats in time, and has restored Eric Serra's synthesizer-heavy score, a slice of 1980s pop that at times borders on disco kitsch. Most importantly, he has restored his original ending, which echoes the fairy tale he tells Joanna earlier in the film and leaves the story floating in the inky blackness of ambiguity. --Sean Axmaker, Amazon.com

• Nikita | DVD | (14/09/2009) from £6.99   |  Saving you £9.00 (128.76%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Nikita

• Man Who Lived At The Ritz | DVD | (31/05/2004) from £20.00   |  Saving you £-9.01 (N/A%)   |  RRP £10.99

  Paris under the Nazis. Our hero is an American art student living at The Ritz Hotel. Suddenly he is trapped by the German occupation and finds The Ritz over-run by Nazis. Torn between his desire to keep his room at this elegant hotel but at the price of helping a morphine crazed Goering requisition France's priceless art treasures and his desire to help his friends fight against the brutality of the Nazi regime Phillip Webber is caught ever deeper into a web of intrigue romance gl