"Actor: Maria"

• Dead Or Alive Trilogy Box Set | DVD | (28/05/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Dead Or Alive (2000): Welcome to Shinjuku - city of darkness and corruption and the setting for this stunning movie by Japanese director Takashi Miike. Here rapid-fire shoot-outs and twisted acts of perverse violence provide the backdrop for a vicious war between the Japanese Yakuza and the Chinese Triads and make for one of the most dizzying and spectacular openings ever committed to film. Ryuichi is a gangster who is driven by a desire for power and the memory of his deprived childhood. His younger brother Toji has just returned from studying in the U.S. Between them they are about to learn some harsh lessons about life on the wrong side of the law. Meanwhile Detective Jojima finds himself drawn deeper into the world of the Yakuza as he continues to make dirty deals he hopes will help raise the money to pay for his daughter's life-saving operation. Uncompromising and fearlessly original Takashi's 'Dead Or Alive' takes a mind-bending journey into the dark and twisted world of ruthless gangsters dealers strippers and hookers... Dead Or Alive 2: Birds (2000): With Dead or Alive the extraordinarily gifted and prolific Miike Takashi created one of the most extreme and visually stunning films of his career. With Dead or Alive 2 he pushes the boundaries further than ever before. When Otamoko (Sho Aikawa) is hired to assassinate a ruthless gangster he is surprised to find a mysterious gunman make the hit before he gets the chance to pull the trigger. Deciding to take the money for the job he failed to complete Otamoko flees the city with Japanese Yakuza and the Chinese Triads hot on his trail. Hiding out on the island where he grew up he runs into the man who killed his target; an old friend named Sawada (Riki Takeuchi). Together they plan to use their shooting skills to rid the earth of evil and set out to hit the gang bosses and drug dealers who make the world a worse place. Dead Or Alive: Final (2002): Set in a post apocalyptic Yokohama where the population is kept under rigid control by a half crazed mayor Riki Takeuchi is a hard boiled cop and Show Aikawa a mellowed out drifter that hooks up with a gang of rebels. When the gang kidnap Takeuchi's son the wheels are set in motion that leads to an inevitable showdown.

• The Way We Were/Out Of Africa | DVD | (28/07/2008) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  The Way We Were (Dir. Sydney Pollack) (1973): Screen legends Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford make movie magic as the captivating star-crossed lovers Katie Morosky and Hubbell Gardiner. Theirs is a classic love story sparked by the attraction of opposites played out against the backdrop of American life during times of foreign war domestic prosperity and McCarthy-era paranoia in Hollywood. Winner of two Academy Awards (Best Song 'The Way We Were' and Best Score) The Way We Were is the timeless romance that cannot be forgotten. Out Of Africa (Dir. Sydney Pollack) (1985): Meryl Streep stars as Karen Blixen the restless wife of European aristocrat and plantation owner Baron Bror Blixen (Brandauer). When Bror departs to hunt big game and chase women the running of their East African coffee plantation falls to Karen. She throws herself into this task with the same determination and spirit she brings to her passionate but sporadic affair with free-spirited British hunter Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford). While enduring her husband's infidelities and the eventual destruction of their beloved land she entertains Denys and befriends the workers. Hatton shares Karen's profound love for the African landscape but is unwilling to sacrifice his independence for their relationship...

• The Dead | DVD | (24/09/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

• The Ages Of Lulu | DVD | (16/12/2002) from £6.22   |  Saving you £13.77 (221.38%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The Ages of Lulu is a gruelling sexual odyssey from Spanish director Bigas Luna, made immediately prior to his popular trilogy Jamón, jamón (1992), Golden Balls (1993) and The Tit and the Moon (1994). Starting as the somewhat queasy story of the young Lulu's affair with the manipulative Pablo (Oscar Ladoire), the movie takes a much darker turn once they are wed. It is conventional cinematic wisdom that there's no such thing as sex after marriage, but here Lulu's husband incomprehensibly leads her into blindfolded incest, then is heartbroken when she reacts with disgust. Soon Lulu (superbly played by Francesca Neri from ingénue to hardened 30-something), is paying gay men for group sex, eventually becoming an unwilling attraction in a commercial sado-machochistic orgy. The closest most UK audiences will have come to this before is in Ken Russell's The Devils (1971) and Crimes of Passion (1984), and it is surely one of the most gut-churningly nightmarish scenes ever passed for home viewing. While Ages of Lulu may function as a reactionary warning against the wilder shores of sex, Luna's intention remains unsatisfyingly enigmatic, since the script is under-written and psychologically unconvincing. The end result is pretentious, repellent pornography which degrades human beings of any sexual persuasion. On the DVD: The Ages of Lulu is transferred at an anamorphically enhanced 1.78:1 and image quality is very good, though in some scenes very slightly soft. The film can be watched with or without English subtitles, and the sound is unremarkable stereo. The main extras are a seven-page essay on Bigas Luna and five pages detailing the now restored 110 seconds of cuts made to the 1998 video release. The main title still contains 65 seconds of alternate footage to the cinema original for legal reasons. Also included are filmographies of Lunas and Oscar Ladoire, two trailers plus trailers for six other films. --Gary S Dalkin

• Salon Kitty | DVD | (01/09/2008) from £11.99   |  Saving you £10.00 (100.10%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Depraved. Decadent. Damned. A fully restored and uncensored Director's Cut of this infamous Tinto Brass erotic classic presented in its original widescreen format completely uncut and featuring 21 minutes of never-seen-before footage! Based on actual events the story takes place in Berlin in 1939 at the start of World War II. SS Officer Helmut Wallenburg (Helmut Berger) is instructed by his superiors to set up an elite brothel the eponymous Salon Kitty specially designed to serve high-ranking Nazi officials and foreign diplomats. In order to cater to the clients' darkest perversions and desires sufficiently Wallenburg is also charged with finding and rigorously training twenty beautiful and intelligent women who are not only dedicated to the ideals of National Socialism but are also prepared to perform the most extreme acts of debauchery imaginable. What these prostitutes and their customers don't know is that the brothel is bugged and is being used to collect intelligence and to monitor the clients' loyalty to the Nazi Party and its cause. Wallenburg exploits his position feeding his insatiable need to dominate and using the information he receives to blackmail his way to the top. Meanwhile one of the prostitutes Marguerite (Teresa Ann Savoy) discovers the truth about the brothel when a soldier she loves is executed for revealing to her his plans to defect from the Party. With the help of the brothel's madam Kitty (Ingrid Thulin) Marguerite plots to turn the tables on Wallenburg and exact her revenge...

• Cairo Road | DVD | (25/06/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  The story of a Egyptian Narcotics Bureau unit and their never-ending struggle against the drug traffickers who'll stop at nothing to continue their nefarious ways.

• Casanova 70 | DVD | (18/02/2008) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £17.99

  An Italian sex comedy in which Marcello Mastroianni plays a Major who is impotent unless an element of danger is present in his wooing. When his lecherous psychiatrist tries to convince him to give up women it becomes obvious that the doctor has an agenda of his own.

• The Big Boss | DVD | (06/11/2000) from £8.95   |  Saving you £11.04 (123.35%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The Big Boss - uncut at last! Hong Kong Legends is proud to release the Bruce Lee classic THE BIG BOSS: DVD SPECIAL EDITION (18) - for the first time in the UK totally uncut with eight previously cut scenes now re-instated. This seminal martial arts film was instrumental in creating the legend that is BRUCE LEE. Shot in Pak Choi in Thailand Bruce Lee introduced his magnetic charisma and ground-breaking fight choreography to the world with this film. In an emotive rollercoaster

• Premier's Desires | DVD | (01/12/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Famous still photographer David Hamilton liked to step behind the film camera on occasion and explore similar themes in each medium. Three young girls adjusting to adolescence and their own sexuality after being stranded by a boat wreck in the Mediterranean Innocence purity and sexuality were Hamilton's main preoccupations and this is clearly revealed in Premiers Desirs. Highly charged erotica.

• La Seconda Moglie | DVD | (09/05/2011) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

• Out of Africa | DVD | (04/04/2016) from £7.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Winner of seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Out of Africa seems to have slipped more readily from public memory than other comparably lauded films. Yet Sidney Pollack's panoramic treatment of Karen Blixen's novel has retained its atmosphere and slow-burning emotion, and deserves reassessment. Meryl Streep is in her possibly most involving starring role as Baroness Karen Blixen, Danish free spirit whose ill-fated venture at the beginning of World War One to run a coffee plantation in Kenya is overlaid by her intimate yet distant relationship with adventurer and idealist Denys Finch Hatton, unselfconsciously portrayed by Robert Redford. Klaus Maria Brandauer puts in a rare and convincing English-language appearance as the amoral but charming womaniser Baron Bror Blixen. The film is tellingly held together by Kurt Luedke's finely honed screenplay, and John Barry's sumptuously expressive score. On the DVD: The anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen format reproduces superbly, as does the 4.1 discrete audio. 18 access points are provided, with printed and aural subtitles in English only. Pollack's feature commentary is amusing enough on a single run-through, but an on-location documentary would have been preferable. Production notes and biographies are very adequate, though the theatrical trailer reproduction is notably inferior. No matter, this is a major film, well worth the transfer to DVD.--Richard Whitehouse

• Sleepless | DVD | (11/12/2006) from £24.98   |  Saving you £-11.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Dario Argento's 2001 feature Sleepless didn't receive a cinematic release in the UK, and it's not hard to see why. The movie often feels like Argento on auto-pilot, rehashing images and ideas and camera angles from his more inspired films like Suspiria or Tenebrae. The dialogue is leaden, the plot is a plodding whodunnit (and most of the time it's hard to care who) and the acting, with the exception of the veteran Max von Sydow, is mostly atrocious and crudely dubbed. But then again, no one ever came to an Argento movie for the plot or the dialogue, and least of all for the acting. The key to his mastery has always been the atmosphere of a nightmare that he conjures up, with all its jagged imagery and complete absence of narrative logic. The less sense it makes, the scarier it gets. Sleepless never attains anywhere near a level of nightmarish intensity, but it has its moments--especially the least rational ones. Although the plot involves no elements of the supernatural, and everything is finally (if cumbersomely) explained, it's episodes like the first killing (where the murderer traps his victim on a speeding train he couldn't possibly have boarded) that strike most effectively home. The action involves a retired police inspector (von Sydow) lured back to investigate a series of killings in Turin that replicate murders he was assigned to 17 years earlier. As always with Argento, knives figure prominently, as do prowling steadicam tracking shots, old dark houses and females butchered in any number of gory and far-fetched ways. The film looks unfailingly good, courtesy of its rich dark palate of colours, Ronnie Taylor's sinuous camera, and Argento's favourite group Goblin contribute an edgy, insidious score. On the DVD: Sleepless on DVD comes with a clear, sharp transfer that's a pleasure to watch, with no loss of detail even in the many underlit scenes. Picture is matched for clarity by the terrific 5.1 Dolby Digital sound. This, unlike the truncated US and German DVD releases, is the full 117-minute original, shown in 1.85:1 widescreen. The two-disc set includes a generous helping of extras: stills gallery, the theatrical trailer (in Italian only, though), a 15-minute "making of" featurette, plus an informative one-hour documentary, Dario Argento--An Eye for Horror, narrated by Mark Kermode and previously shown on Channel Four at Christmas 2001.--Philip Kemp

• Coyote Ugly - Director's Cut | DVD | (01/08/2005) from £7.55   |  Saving you £10.44 (138.28%)   |  RRP £17.99

  Tonight they're calling the shots. It's the intoxicating romantic comedy starring an unbeatable cast of hot stars from hit-making producer Jerry Bruckheimer; now presented in a longer and racier (now rated 15!) Director's Cut! Moving to New York to pursue her dream of becoming a famous songwriter Violet Sanford (Perabo) finds herself desperate and broke. Through a twist of fate the shy innocent Violet lands a job as one of the barmaids at the hottest nightclub in town -

• Blood Of A Poet / Testament Of Orpheus | DVD | (04/04/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

• Justine | DVD | (27/01/2003) from £9.43   |  Saving you £7.56 (80.17%)   |  RRP £16.99

  Justine is one of the most lavish and bizarre erotic shockers ever made by the notorious Jess Franco bursting with wanton nudity sexual perversion and an all star cast... Romina Power (18 year old daughter of Tyrone power) stars as Justine a nubile young Virgin cast out of a French orphanage and thrust into a depraved world of Prostitution predatory lesbians a fugitive murderess (Mercedes McCambridge) bondage branding and one supremely sadistic monk (an outrageous performance

• Tosca | DVD | (10/08/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £22.99

  The opera Tosca composed by Giacomo Puccini.

• Belle De Jour 50th Anniversary | DVD | (02/10/2017) from £8.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Stunningly restored for the 50th anniversary, BELLE DE JOUR is an elegant and erotic masterpiece and undoubtedly Luis Buñuel's most accessible film. Screen icon Catherine Deneuve plays Séverine, the glacially beautiful, sexually unfulfilled wife of a surgeon, whose blood runs icy with ennui until she takes a day-job in a brothel. There she meets a charismatic but sinister young gangster (Pierre Clémenti), and ignites an obsession that will court peril. Buñuel uses diffused lighting, dark colours, and shadows throughout the film to temper the gravity and emotional impact of each uncomfortable scene. Left to our own imaginative devices, the result is a film that is highly unsettling, perverse, and inevitably tragic. SPECIAL FEATURES: The Last Script A Story of Perversion or Emancipation? Interview with Dr Sylvain Mimoun Commentary by Professor Peter W. Evans NEW Interview with Jean-Claude Carrière NEW Masterclass with Diego Bunuel and Jean-Claude Carrière NEW Trailer INCLUDES 6 ARTCARDS

• The Bridge: Season 1-4 | DVD | (02/07/2018) from £39.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  When a body is found on the bridge between Denmark and Sweden, right on the border, Danish inspector Martin Rohde and Swedish Saga Norén have to share jurisdiction and work together to find the killer.

• Way of the Dragon/the Big Boss/Fist of Fury | DVD | (02/02/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £32.99

  Fantastic Bruce Lee Box Set containg the martial arts classics: 'Way Of The Dragon', 'Fist Of Fury', and 'The Big Boss'. Please see individual titles for full descriptions!

• Deutschland '86 | DVD | (13/05/2019) from £14.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  1986: East Germany is broke, Perestroika is real, terrorism plagues Europe, the AIDS crisis intensifies and the struggle against apartheid rages on. Banished for his sins in 1983, Martin Rauch wallows in limbo until his Aunt Lenora conscripts him into her plan to drum up hard currency abroad. They set off on an adventure through Africa, Western Europe and finally home to East Germany. Can mafioso-style Capitalism save Communism just in the nick of time?