"Actor: Michael B"

• In Search Of The Castaways | DVD | (13/04/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  The exciting tale of two children who with the help of an eccentric professor set out in search of their shipwrecked father...

• American Ninja 1-4 Collector's Edition | Blu Ray | (27/04/2015) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £34.99

  All four films in a special collector’s edition release. AMERICAN NINJA Pvt. Joe Armstrong (Michael Dudikoff) chooses to enlist in the US army rather than go to prison and finds himself fighting off ninjas on a base in the Philippines. When he saves Patricia (Judie Aronson) the base colonel's daughter from kidnapping but loses everyone else in the platoon Joe's popularity with his colleagues drops precipitously and he becomes the target of revenge of the lead ninja (Tadashi Yamashita). AMERICAN NINJA 2 – THE CONFRONTATION On a remote Caribbean island Army Ranger Joe Armstrong investigates the disappearance of several marines which leads him to The Lion a super-criminal who has kidnapped a local scientist and mass-produced an army of mutant Ninja warriors. AMERICAN NINJA 3 – BLOOD HUNT A powerful terrorist known as The Cobra (Marjoe Gortner) has infected Sean Davidson the American ninja with a deadly virus as human guinea pigs in his biological warfare experiments. Sean and his partners Curtis Jackson (Steve James) and Dexter (Evan J. Klisser) have no choice but to fight The Cobra and his army of genetically-engineered ninja clones led by the female ninja Chan Lee (Michele B. Chan). AMERICAN NINJA 4 – THE ANNIHILATION CIA agent Sean Davidson and his sidekick Carl are sent into the stronghold of sadistic British ex-soldier Mulgrew to rescue some Delta Force commandoes who have been captured and tortured. When Sean Carl and pretty doctor Sarah run into some problems Peace Corps vet Joe Armstrong is lured out of retirement to stop Mulgrew's plan to explode a nuclear device in New York City. Bonus Features: Brand new feature documentary on the making of American ninja featuring many cast members Brand New 2 audio Commentaries with star Michael Dudikoff and director Sam Fistenberg

• Prometheus - Special Edition (Blu-ray 3D + Blu-ray + Digital Copy) | Blu Ray | (08/10/2012) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £29.99

  You want an alien world created anew, with wonders and horrors lurking in its furrows? You go to Ridley Scott, of course, spectacle maker and pictorialist par excellence. So Prometheus is bound to be eye filling, with fully wrought planetary vistas and occasionally jaw-dropping visual coups. And did we use the word alien back there? Yes, folks, Prometheus is a prequel, in a sideways sort of fashion, to Scott's 1979 Alien original--or at least it's a long-distant stage setter for that story. This one begins with a space mission that could reveal the extraterrestrial roots of Earth, although what's buried out on the planet turns out to be much more complicated than expected. In the midst of suspenseful episodes (and a few contrived plot turns), Prometheus reaches for Big Answers to Big Questions, in a grand old sci-fi tradition. This lends the movie a hint of metaphysical energy, even if Scott's reach extends well, well beyond his grasp. The hokier moments are carried off with brio by Michael Fassbender (the robot on board), Charlize Theron, and Idris Elba, and then you've got Noomi Rapace entering the badass hall of fame for a long, oh-no-they-didn't sequence involving radical surgery, which might just induce the vapours in a few viewers. Even if Prometheus has its holes, the sheer size of the thing is exciting to be around. Because this movie is gigantic. --Robert Horton.

• Sharpe Classic Collection | DVD | (01/09/2008) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £44.99

  Acclaimed actor Sean Bean stars in these feature length movies set during the Napoleonic wars of 19th century Spain. After saving the life of a general Sharpe is promoted to lieutenant and given his own group of riflemen to lead. The series follows him and his troops as they make their way between battles making and losing friends along the way. Fast-moving hard-hitting action adventures based on Bernard Cornwell's best-selling novels bring to the screen all the danger and romance of one of the bloodiest periods of warfare.

• Tracey Ullman's Show | DVD | (22/02/2016) from £3.59   |  Saving you £16.40 (456.83%)   |  RRP £19.99

  After thirty years of fame and acclaim in the US, British comedy treasure Tracey Ullman is back in the UK with her hilarious all-new character-driven sketch comedy series: Tracey Ullman's Show. Discover the secret life of shoplifter and hooligan Dame Judi Dench; Dame Maggie Smith's home-filmed auditions for blockbuster feature films; an inside look at the life of Germany's Angela Merkel; the home life of Camilla Parker-Bowles; topless feminist MP Sally Preston; Hayley the obsessive zookeeper; Dominic, the app-conceiver and many, many more.

• The Sons of Katie Elder (Blu-ray) | Blu Ray | (15/09/2020) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• And Now For Something Completely Different | DVD | (28/07/2003) from £4.65   |  Saving you £8.34 (179.35%)   |  RRP £12.99

  And Now for Something Completely Different, Monty Python's first feature, is a reworking of their best skits from the first two seasons of the TV series. Originally made for the US market (where the show had yet to be aired), it was shot on film outside the usual studio sets ("Nudge Nudge", for example, is set in a tavern filled with passers-by). The writing and performances are fine and the film is packed with some of their best bits: "How to Avoid Being Seen", " Hell's Grannies", "Blackmail", "The Lumberjack Song" and "The Upper Class Twit of the Year", among others. Many of the sketches have been shortened, however, and the loss of the overly bright video sheen (the film has a muddy, dull look to it) and the invigorating presence of a live audience leaves the film sluggish at times. They're still feeling out the possibilities of the feature length, which they conquered with their next movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974). --Sean Axmaker

• Brazil | DVD | (19/05/2003) from £9.15   |  Saving you £6.84 (74.75%)   |  RRP £15.99

  If Franz Kafka had been an animator and film director--oh, and a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus--Brazil is the sort of outrageously dystopian satire one could easily imagine him making. In fact it was made by Terry Gilliam, who is all of the above except, of course, Franz Kafka. Be that as it may, Gilliam captures the paranoid-subversive spirit of Kafka's The Trial (along with his own Python animation) in this bureaucratic nightmare-comedy about a meek government clerk named Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) whose life is destroyed by a simple bug. It's not a software bug but a real bug (no doubt related to Kafka's famous Metamorphosis insect) that gets squashed in a printer and causes a typographical error unjustly identifying an innocent citizen, one Mr Buttle, as suspected terrorist Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro). When Sam becomes enmeshed in unravelling this bureaucratic tangle, he himself winds up labelled as a miscreant. The movie presents such an unrelentingly imaginative and savage vision of 20th-century bureaucracy that it almost became a victim of small-minded studio management itself--until Gilliam surreptitiously screened his cut for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, who named it the best movie of 1985 and virtually embarrassed Universal into releasing it. --Jim Emerson On the DVD: Brazil comes to DVD in a welcome anamorphic print of the full director's cut--here running some 136 minutes. Disappointingly the only extra feature is the 30-minute making-of documentary "What Is Brazil?", which consists of on-set and behind-the-scenes interviews. There's nothing about the film's controversial release history (covered so comprehensively on the North American Criterion Collection release), nor is Gilliam's illuminating, irreverent directorial commentary anywhere to be found. The only other extra here is the ubiquitous theatrical trailer. A welcome release of a real classic, then, but something of a missed opportunity. --Mark Walker

• Armageddon | DVD | (20/08/2001) from £4.99   |  Saving you £13.00 (260.52%)   |  RRP £17.99

  This 1998 testosterone-saturated blow-'em-up from producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay (The Rock, Bad Boys) continued Hollywood's millennium-fuelled fascination with the destruction of our planet. There's no arguing that the successful duo understand what mainstream audiences want in their blockbuster movies--loads of loud, eye-popping special effects, rapid-fire pacing, and patriotic flag waving. Bay's protagonists--the eight crude, lewd, oversexed (but, of course, lovable) oil drillers summoned to save the world from a Texas-sized meteor hurling toward the earth--are not flawless heroes, but common men with whom all can relate. In this huge Western-in-space soap opera, they're American cowboys turned astronauts. Sci-fi buffs will appreciate Bay's fetishising of technology, even though it's apparent he doesn't understand it as anything more than flashing lights and shiny gadgets. Smartly, the duo also try to lure the art-house crowd, raiding the local indie acting stable to populate the film with guys like Steve Buscemi, Billy Bob Thornton, Owen Wilson, and Michael Duncan, all adding needed touches of humour and charisma. When Bay applies his sledgehammer aesthetics to the action portions of the film, it's mindless fun; it's only when Armageddon tackles humanity that it becomes truly offensive. Not since Mississippi Burning have racial and cultural stereotypes been substituted for characters so blatantly--African Americans, Japanese, Chinese, Scottish, Samoans, Muslims, French ... if it's not white and American, Bay simplifies it. Or, make that white male America; the film features only three notable female characters--four if you count the meteor, who's constantly referred to as a "bitch that needs drillin'". Sadly, she's a hell of a lot more developed and unpredictable than all the other women characters combined. Sure, Bay's film creates some tension and contains some visceral moments, but if he can't create any redeemable characters outside of those in space, what's the point of saving the planet? --Dave McCoy

• The Day Of The Jackal | Blu Ray | (04/09/2017) from £16.35   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  With its high-intensity plot about an attempt to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle, the bestselling novel by Frederick Forsyth was a prime candidate for screen adaptation. Director Fred Zinnemann brought his veteran skills to bear on what has become a timeless classic of screen suspense. Not to be confused with the later remake The Jackal starring Bruce Willis (which shamelessly embraced all the bombast that Zinnemann so wisely avoided), this 1973 thriller opts for lethal elegance and low-key tenacity in the form of the Jackal, the suave assassin played with consummate British coolness by Edward Fox. He's a killer of the highest order, a master of disguise and international elusiveness, and this riveting film follows his path to de Gaulle with an intense, straightforward documentary style. Perhaps one of the last great films from a bygone age of pure, down-to-basics suspense (and a kind of debonair European alternative to the American grittiness of The French Connection), The Day of the Jackal is a cat-and-mouse thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat until its brilliantly executed final scene (pardon the pun), by which time Fox has achieved cinematic immortality as one of the screen's most memorable killers. --Jeff Shannon

• Mayans M.C. Season 1 DVD | DVD | (02/09/2019) from £14.35   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Mayans M.C. is the next chapter in Kurt Sutter's award-winning Sons of Anarchy saga. In a post-Jax Teller world, Ezekiel EZ Reyes (JD Pardo) is fresh out of prison and a prospect in the Mayans M.C. charter on the Californian/Mexican border. Now, EZ must carve out his new identity in a town where he was once the golden boy with the American dream in his grasp.

• Boardwalk Empire - The Complete Season 1-5 | Blu Ray | (01/06/2015) from £59.99   |  Saving you £50.00 (83.35%)   |  RRP £109.99

  Boardwalk Empire is an Emmy®-winning HBO drama series from Academy Award® nominee/Emmy® Award winner Terence Winter and Academy Award®-winning director Martin Scorsese. The series chronicles the life and times of Enoch Nucky Thompson, Atlantic City's czar at a time when Prohibition proved to be a major catalyst in the rise of organized crime in America.

• The Whistle Blower | DVD | (05/05/2001) from £5.56   |  Saving you £-2.57 (N/A%)   |  RRP £2.99

  A 1987 espionage thriller, The Whistle Blower stars Michael Caine as Frank Jones, a businessman and regular patriotic war veteran whose son Bob (Nigel Havers) is a Russian linguist who works at GCHQ. Bob begins to express doubts to his father about aspects of his work; days later, police report to Frank that his son has died in a fall. A verdict of accidental death is recorded. However, in the midst of his grief, Frank is puzzled by aspects of the death and decides to conduct his own investigation. In so doing he finds himself pitted against an utterly unscrupulous Secret Service prepared to stop at nothing, including murder, to cover up their operations. Set at the time when concerns about GCHQ were at their height and the Cold War had yet to thaw, many of the film's concerns seem, years subsequently, to be thankfully dated. Moreover, it's hard to believe that the bumbling British Secret Services would actually be capable of organising a convivial soiree in a brewery, let alone orchestrate the sort of skulduggery they perpetrate here. Still, with a cast that features all the usual British suspects (Sir John Gielgud, James Fox, Gordon Jackson) there's no doubting the pedigree of The Whistle Blower, which, despite its ostensibly uncomfortable message, actually makes for very agreeable comfort viewing. Michael Caine is especially fine as Michael Caine. --David Stubbs

• Sleepy Hollow | Blu Ray | (21/09/2009) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Tim Burton's unique take on the tale of the headless horseman, with Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci.

• Kingdom Hospital - Complete | DVD | (09/08/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £44.99

  Kingdom Hospital is horror novelist Stephen King’s adaptation of Danish director Lars Von Trier’s cult mini-series The Kingdom, geared very much for an American audience. The story unfolds across 15 hours, telling the story of a hospital in Maine that’s been built on the site of a 19th Century mill fire that killed most of its young occupants--themes that King fans will be familiar with. In the present day, Kingdom Hospital is haunted by the ghost of ten-year-old child labourer Mary and, even more bizarrely, a fearsome giant anteater-like creature called Antubis. It falls to the ace doctor Hook (Andrew McCarthy), the paraplegic artist Jack Coleman (Peter Rickman) and the hypochondriac psychic Sally Druse (Diane Ladd) to enlist the help of a surreal assortment of hospital staff and patients to help Mary and save Kingdom Hospital itself from certain doom. Fans of Stephen King will probably enjoy the blend of black comedy, spectral horror and general weirdness, which owes a big debt to previous television series like Twin Peaks and even ER. But too often, Kingdom Hospital seems to be trying too hard to make itself into a cult series, something which King is just not a subtle enough writer to carry off. But Kingdom Hospital looks good, especially the CGI Antubis, who steals every scene in which he appears. Generally, though, the series is more of an entertaining experiment than a cult-in-the-making. --Ted Kord

• Barbra Streisand - One Voice | DVD | (30/09/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  A collection of music from the highly successful Barbra Streisand.

• The Eagle Has Landed | DVD | (11/06/2007) from £6.25   |  Saving you £9.74 (155.84%)   |  RRP £15.99

  A Nazi strike force plots to assassinate Winston Churchill while he is resting in a desolate Norfolk village. Colonel Radl masterminds the plot which if successful would change the outcome of the war. He enlists the help of Colonel Steiner and Liam Devlin. Disguised as Polish airmen German paratroopers land in England. Radl's plan appear to be going smoothly until an unforeseeable incident exposed the Germans. But the kidnap continues and Steiner Luger in hand approaches the unmistakable figure of Churchill...

• Educating Rita | DVD | (21/05/2018) from £6.34   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• A River Runs Through It | DVD | (23/04/2001) from £5.99   |  Saving you £7.00 (116.86%)   |  RRP £12.99

  A River Runs Through It is a lyrical and nostalgic film from director Robert Redford (Quiz Show, Ordinary People), based on the popular autobiographical novel by Norman MacLean. The film chronicles two brothers' coming of age in early 20th-century Missoula, Montana, under the stern tutelage of their minister father (Tom Skerritt). He instils in them a love of fly fishing, which for one brother (Brad Pitt) becomes a lifelong passion even as he sets out to become a newspaperman and struggles with his addiction to gambling. The other brother, Norman (Craig Sheffer), dreams of exploring the world outside Missoula as he falls in love with a local girl (Emily Lloyd) who also dreams of broader horizons. Soon one brother must discover the true meaning of family loyalty when the other finds himself in deeper trouble than ever before. Redford, who also narrates the film, does a masterful job in re-creating the period and in drawing out affecting performances from his young cast. An Oscar winner for Philippe Rousselot's luminescent cinematography, this is a poignant and special film. --Robert Lane, Amazon.com

• Return To Oz | DVD | (22/03/2004) from £5.99   |  Saving you £9.00 (150.25%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Return to Oz is a 1985 live-action sequel that split critics and audiences alike: you don't fool with Mother Nature, spit into the wind, remake Casablanca, or trash the land of Oz. The 1939 classic musical is so beloved that it's almost impossible to imagine seeing Dorothy in shock therapy, a crumbled yellow brick road, the ruins of Emerald City, and the Tin Man turned into stone. But L Frank Baum, the author of the original Oz books, portrayed just that with his continuing stories of Dorothy. When you get by these tough facts, the film version is solid entertainment for the over-seven set. Dorothy (a 10-year-old Fairuza Balk in her debut) is back in Kansas, where Aunt Em (Piper Laurie) is at the end of her rope: her niece is not sleeping and going on about a place called Oz. Therapy may be the answer, but luckily the scary clinic goes dark before Dorothy can be, er, cured (but the lead-up will scare the munchkins out of most kids). She wakes up in the land of Oz, now in tatters, and searches for its king, the Scarecrow. A new set of friends, including a tin soldier, a talking chicken, and a pumpkin man, help her against new villains, including Princess Mombi (Jean Marsh)--complete with a set of detachable heads--and the evil Nome King (Nicol Williamson with a great assist from Will Vinton's Claymation). The sole directorial effort of Oscar-winning editor Walter Murch is stuffed with marvellous effects that foreshadow later works by Tim Burton and the Henson non-Muppet films. --Doug Thomas