When 13 year old Maria Merryweather's father dies, leaving her orphaned and homeless, she is forced to leave her luxurious London life to go and live with Sir Benjamin, an eccentric uncle.
The Book Group, the creation of writer-director Annie Griffin, is a superb, Glasgow-based comedy-drama. Annie Dudek stars as Claire, the prissy and neurotic American expatriate who initiates the titular group with a view to meeting high-minded types like herself. Instead, she gets Dirka, Fist and Janice, three Scottish footballers' wives, the wheelchair-bound Kenny, a leisure-centre worker with ambitions to be a writer despite his apparent inarticulacy, the stubbly-faced football-mad Rab and the insufferable Barney, a post-grad student and heroin addict at whom Claire makes one of the most embarrassingly disastrous passes in TV history in the opening episode. The Book Group is a magnificent device for bringing an unlikely cast of characters together, supposedly out of a love of literature but in fact because each of them in their own way has pretensions or ambitions to make something different out of their lives. Waves of sexual longing between the group members are among the many things that interfere with the discussions of the texts, with Kenny in particular an object of fascination for both Dirka and Fist. With each episode cleverly themed around the chosen book of the week, The Book Group is hilarious yet wise, understated and often painfully melancholic, based on detailed character study rather than contrived situations or eye-catching melodrama. It is indispensable viewing. On the DVD: The Book Group's main extra is a poorly edited but absorbing sequence of interviews with all of the cast members except James Lance, who plays Barney. Rory McGann (Kenny), who comes from a non-acting background, is particularly interesting. --David Stubbs
Dear Frankie: Nine-year-old Frankie and his single mum Lizzie have been on the move ever since Frankie can remember most recently arriving in a seaside Scottish town. Wanting to protect her deaf son from the truth that they've run away from his father Lizzie has invented a story that he is away at sea on the HMS Accra. Every few weeks Lizzie writes Frankie a make-believe letter from his father telling of his adventures in exotic lands. As Frankie tracks the ship's progress
This is a box set featuring three of Robert De Niro's most renowned films from the MGM stable. Raging Bull: Based on the life and career of boxer Jake LaMotta Raging Bull focuses on Jake's rage and violence that makes him virtually unstoppable in the ring. The same anger also drives Jake to beat his wife and his brother Joey and sends Jake down a self-destructive spiral of paranoia and rage. Ronin: A woman assembles a team of professional killers from all over the world to get a hold on a certain case with some mysterious content. The case is in the hands of some ex-KGB spies and there are many people and organizations that will do anything to get their hands on it. True Confessions: De Niro (a Catholic Priest) and Duvall (a homicide Detective) play brothers drawn together after many years apart in the aftermath of the brutal murder of a young prostitute.
Jason Biggs stars in this black comedy set in 1979, about a soldier mistakenly posted to an Arctic military base.
Ronin is the Japanese word used for Samurai without a master. In this case, the Ronin are outcast specialists of every kind, whose services are available to everyone - for money.
An expert in hazardous materials is called in to investigate an explosion in a chemical laboratory. What he discovers is his worst nightmare; a substance so deadly to humans that once exposed the future of mankind is threatened...
Rudy Spruance is lost. He has been left in the middle-of-nowhere among the snowy wastelands of the Arctic. No one comes except a swarm of blood-thirsty mosquitoes. As we awakens in an army hospital that doesn't officially exist Rudy understands what it is to be on the sharp end of a 'small clerical error.' ""You'll want to scratch "" a nurse tells him when he come round. Rudy enlists in order to escape a little prison time for burglary. His fellow soldiers are a right bunch of rag-tag misfits: there's Lavone a wannabe beat-poet; the sadistic Sergeant Genteen; and Petri the base dealer who thinks that sci-fi movies are the pinnacle of art; finally there's the base commander Colonel Woolwrap who thinks that Rudy was much like him when he was a young man. However Rudy doesn't see himself under the tutelage of Woolwrap or anyone else's for that matter! But then Rudy meets Sergeant Irene Teale - beautiful intelligent and most importantly sane. Unfortunately she's also Woolwrap's girlfriend...
Guy X
A cracking compendium of films featuring George Clooney. One Fine Day (Dir. Michael Hoffman, 1996: In this charming, romantic comedy, three-time Academy Award nominees Michelle Pfeiffer and George Clooney find that opposites attract whether they like it or not... Melanie Parker (Pfeiffer) is juggling single parenthood with a career as an architect. Jack Taylor (Clooney) is a commitment-shy newspaper columnist who only has his daughter every other weekend. When their kids miss a scho...
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