Two detectives one from New York the other from Long Island join forces to track down a bizarre serial killer. Convinced of a beautiful suspect's innocence the New York detective starts an affair with her despite hard evidence linking her to the murders.
A beautiful vampire warrior falls in love with a werewolf amidst a war between their two races.
They were perfect strangers, assembled to pull off the perfect crime. Then their simple robbery explodes into a bloody ambush, and the ruthless killers realise one of them is a police informer. But which one? Critically acclaimed for its raw power and br
The Bluebeard legend has been adapted many times through the years. This classic film noir variation on the tale incorporates influences from Daphne du Maurier s Rebecca into the mix, with gripping results. Soon after architect Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave, Dead of Night) marries Celia (Joan Bennett, Suspiria), she gradually begins to suspect that he has a past life that he s been keeping from her. But she doesn t know the half of it, and when he leaves on a business trip, she starts to uncover the sinister secret of his purpose-designed house and its apparent surplus of rooms, the seventh of which is kept firmly locked. What lies beyond its door? From the strongly expressionist use of symbolic flowers and shadows in the opening sequence, legendary director Fritz Lang (Metropolis, M) stamps his artistic signature on every frame, helped by suitably high-contrast cinematography by Stanley Cortez (The Night of the Hunter) and a score by composer Miklós Rósza (The Killers) that insinuates itself into every emotional nook and cranny. SPECIAL EDITION CONTENTS: High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation transferred from original film elements Uncompressed mono 1.0 PCM audio soundtrack Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing Commentary by film noir expert Alan K. Rode Barry Keith Grant on Secret Beyond the Door, the author and scholar introduces the film The House of Lang, a visual essay on Fritz Lang s style by filmmaker David Cairns with a focus on his noir work Bluebeard (1947), a radio play aimed at children drawing on the same source as Secret Beyond the Door International poster gallery Trailer for Lang s 1943 noir, Hangmen Also Die! Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Scott Saslow
James Cameron's 1989 aquatic epic The Abyss was, quite literally, a watershed in the annals of filmmaking: not only was it the first (and only) movie to be shot almost entirely underwater, in the largest tank ever used for a movie set, and to use live dialogue from specially designed headsets, it also pushed forward the boundaries of computer animation in one gigantic leap. The famous water tentacle sequence is now regarded as the defining moment when CGI came of age; ironically perhaps, its very success has ensured that the punishing realism of the setting, which is the best thing about the movie, is likely never to be attempted again. But the impressive technical aspects aside, is the movie any good? Granted it contains any number of striking moments, from forcing a rat to breathe liquid (it really works, apparently) to resurrecting a drowned Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. But the story is a slim one for the running time, especially in the extended Special Edition version which plays almost half an hour longer than the theatrical cut and contains a completely excised subplot featuring much too much heavy-handed moralising: "How all the world can stop fighting and learn to get along with each other", by James Cameron esq. All you need is love, apparently. Here is one rare example of the theatrical cut being preferable to the director's. Now, if only he had cut the love story from Titanic too On the DVD: The Abyss Special Edition two-disc set has plenty of neat extra features, but is let down a little by the non-anamorphic 2.35:1 letterboxed picture. Sound, on the other hand, is vivid THX mastered Dolby 5.1. Happily, the first disc contains both the original theatrical cut and the extended special-edition version. There's a reasonably informative though inevitably rather dry text-only commentary. The principal extra on Disc 2 is a 60-minute documentary, "Under Pressure", with retrospective interviews in which cast and crew detail the extraordinary challenges involved in making the film, and more than one near-death experience. In addition there's the complete screenplay, various different pieces on the effects sequences, storyboards, artwork, DVD-ROM features--in short, plenty to keep even jaded DVD enthusiasts amused for hours. The menu interfaces for both discs are a treat and the set comes with a good 12-page booklet. --Mark Walker
Barbara has been rejected by her cousin Michael and enters into a loveless marriage with Dan whose family the Benshams have owned the Hall since her father Squire Mallen went bankrupt. The widowed Mr. Bensham proposes to Anna Brigmore fulfilling her ruthless ambition to be mistress of High Banks. But their happiness is soon shattered when they discover that Barbara and Michael have become lovers again...
A massively underrated action thriller which kept Schwarzenegger occupied between blockbusters, Commando may be one of the last shoot-out films ever to have real characters in it. Not, of course, that they're anything other than stereotypes, but they're painted with such detailed, positive strokes that it's impossible not to relate to them. Arnie plays a retired military special-ops officer whose daughter (played with an expert balance of cute/feisty by Alyssa Milano) is kidnapped by the baddest of bad guys, who'll only hand her back as and when he's assassinated a tiresome banana-republic president on their behalf. Needless to say, Arnie is deeply annoyed by this, rescues the moppet single-handed amid more bullets and explosions than you can shake a stuntman's pay cheque at, and... well, why spoil the fun by revealing any more? Co-star Rae Dawn Chong gets some nice one-liners as the innocent bystander who gets caught up in the mayhem. The DVD comes with no additional features at all, but who needs 'em anyway? --Roger Thomas
The rebellion begins! Lord Voldemort has returned, but the Ministry of Magic is doing everything it can to keep the wizarding world from knowing the truth including appointing Ministry official Dolores Umbridge as the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts. When Umbridge refuses to teach practical defensive magic, Ron and Hermione convince Harry to secretly train a select group of students for the wizarding war that lies ahead. A terrifying showdown between good and evil awaits in this enthralling film version of the fifth novel in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Prepare for battle!
Savannah Bernadine Robin and Gloria are all searching for the real thing: true love. Bernadine thought she had it until her husband left her for another woman. Savannah and Robin are successful in business but their love lives are bankrupt. Divorcee Gloria is getting back in the game by flirting with her new very eligible neighbour! Based on Terry McMillan's best-selling novel and featuring the #1 smash Hit ""Exhale (Shoop Shoop)"" this is the film you and your friends have bee
Beth Cappadora (Michelle Pfeiffer) is at her high school reunion when her three-year-old son disappears from his brother's care. The little boy never turns up, and the family has to deal with the devastating guilt and grief that goes along with it. Nine years later, the family has relocated to Chicago. By a sheer fluke, the kid turns up, living no more than two blocks away. The authorities swoop down and return the kid to his biological parents, but things are far from being that simple. The boy grew up around what he has called his father, while his new family are strangers to him; the older son, now a teenager, has brushes with the law and behavioural problems. His adjustment to his lost brother is complicated by normal teenage churlishness, and the dad (Treat Williams) seems to expect everything to fall into place as though the family had been intact all along. It's a tightrope routine for actors in a story like this, being careful not to chew the scenery while at the same time not being too flaccid or understated. For the most part, the members of the cast deal well with the emotional complexity of their roles. Though the story stretches credulity, weirder things do happen in the real world. The family's pain for the first half of the film is certainly credible, though the second half almost seems like a different movie. Whoopi Goldberg plays the detective assigned to the case; casting her is a bit of a stretch, but she makes it work. All in all, a decent three-hanky movie in the vein of Ordinary People. --Jerry Renshaw, Amazon.com
Having lost his intelligence job at the end of the Cold War former British secret agent Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) now travels East to find new outlets for his skills. Harry sets up a Private Investigation company in Russia and soon finds himself charged with rescuing his young assistant Nikolai's girlfriend Tatiana who has been kidnapped. The trail leads to St. Petersburg which Harry finds to be a city held in the iron grip of the violent Russian Mafia. The mafia does its best to stop Harry in his tracks but it may be easier said than done!
Some pundits called it a flawed, exploitative action film that glamorised drug dealing and the luxury of a lucrative criminal lifestyle, spawning a trend of films that attracted youth gangs and provoked violence in cinemas. Others hailed it as a breakthrough movie that depicted drug dealers as ruthless, corrupt, and evil, leading dead-end lives that no rational youth would want to emulate. However you interpret it, New Jack City is still one of the first and best films of the 1990s to crack open the underworld of cocaine and peer inside with its eyes wide open. It's also the film that established Wesley Snipes as an actor to watch, with enough charisma to bring an insidious quality of seduction to his role as coke-lord Nino Brown, and enough intelligence to portray a character deluded by his own sense of indestructible power. Director Mario Van Peebles stretched his otherwise-limited talent to bring vivid authenticity and urgency to this crime story, and subplots involving a pair of tenacious cops (Ice-T, Judd Nelson) and a recovering coke addict (Chris Rock) provide additional dramatic tension. Although some critics may hesitate to admit it, New Jack City deserves mention in any serious discussion about African American filmmakers and influential films. --Jeff Shannon
Can a kid from Kansas come to New York to conquer the business world and maneuver his way from the mailroom to the boardroom in a matter of weeks? Michael J. Fox proves it can be done in this very funny lampoon of corporate business life. Fresh out of college he's determined to climb New York's corporate ladder in record time by masquerading as an up-and-coming executive even though he's really the new mail boy. However Fox's plans begin to go awry when the boss's wife falls in love with him and he falls in love with a junior executive who also happens to be the boss's mistress...
Professor Peter Williams is obsessed with USS LIONFISH, a WWII US Navy submarine that was mysteriously and suddenly chained, welded shut, sealed and locked to a pier in 1943. Forced to resign from the Navy as a young man due to his obsession with the case, one evening, years later, he receives a visit from a Navy official. With a top secret research team, Peter is asked to descend into the deep and board the submarine for the first time in seventy years. But, once on board and miles under the ocean, the team become trapped, and as the boat begins to reveal its darkest secrets, the prospect of returning to the surface alive begins to fade...
Agent 007 (Roger Moore) blasts into orbit in this action-packed adventure that takes him to Venice Rio de Janeiro and outer space. When Bond investigates the hijacking of an American space shuttle he and beautiful CIA agent Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles) are soon locked in a life-or-death struggle against Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale) a power-mad industrialist whose horrific scheme may destroy all human life on earth!
It now seems clear that year five of Stargate will be remembered as the one where something went awry with Daniel Jackson. Lots of behind-the-scenes rumours fuelled the idea of cast tension, but whatever the problem, his sudden departure from the show was obviously via a hastily contrived scenario. In retrospect, there must have been a problem for some while before the weird penultimate episode ("Meridian"). Michael Shanks looks frequently bored in his rare moments of individual screen time as he infiltrates a Goa'uld meeting and even when making friends with a creature everyone else wants dead. In fact, there's only one point when everyone really seems to be having fun, and that's in the spoof 100th episode "Wormhole X-treme!" Most shows go through a run-around, skin-of-their-teeth period awaiting renewal and it certainly seems to have affected storylines this year. For example, a next generation of younger SG teams is introduced. Replacements? The most unfortunate aspect of things however was that not a single episode managed to stand alone on its own merits. Every single story was dependent on a part of the greater interwoven warring species threads. Some of the one-off tales were terrific in and of themselves, but it was as if the writers fell into the trap of having to refer to as much backstory as possible, perhaps to ensure loose ends could be easily wrapped up? Ultimately none of this mattered since the show went on for quite a while. --Paul Tonks
From executive producers and Academy Award® Winners Brian Grazer and Ron Howard*, National Geographic's ï¬rst-ever scripted series, GENIUS, offers an extraordinary look into the life of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein. Academy Award® Winner Geoffrey Rush stars as the rebellious daydreamer who went on to become the greatest scientiï¬c mind of the 20th century. Beyond his ground breaking theories of relativity, you'll witness Einstein's struggles to be a good husband and father and a man of principle during a time of global unrest. With Johnny Flynn as young Albert and Emily Watson as his second wife, Elsa, GENIUS takes you on an unprecedented, 10-episode journey of discovery guided by Einstein's wit, wisdom and insatiable thirst for knowledge.
Funeral in Berlin (1967) is the sequel to 1965's The Ipcress File, again featuring Michael Caine as reluctant spy Harry Palmer. It was clearly the filmmakers' intention to make Palmer a harder-nosed James Bond, and director Guy Hamilton was brought to this project in between Goldfinger and Diamonds Are Forever for that purpose. There's espionage intrigue, easy women (Eva Renzi as Samantha Steel), and gunplay. But without the gadgetry, one-liners, or even the John Barry score of the first movie, the Bond comparison runs dry. Against the backdrop of a bombed-out industrial wasteland that was Berlin in the mid-Sixties, Palmer is sent to facilitate the defection of Col. Stock (Oscar Homolka). Numerous sub-plots weave together involving indifferent chief Ross (Guy Doleman from IPCRESS), mission aide Johnnie Volkon (Paul Hubschmid), and the untrustworthy Kreutzman (Günter Meisner, who was more memorable as Slugworth in Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory). It all comes down to revealing who's working for whom and who's really defecting in the set-piece funeral of the title. The main reason the series continued (Ken Russell's OTT Billion Dollar Brain came next) was the commanding presence of Caine. It's fun to hear him try German, and he manages a few subtle comic gems, such as when a waiter asks "Bitte mein heir?" and he replies, "No. Lager please", but the best moment of characterisation recalling the womanising Palmer of Len Deighton's novels is the put down guaranteed to win any woman: "You're useless in the kitchen. Why don't you go back to bed?" --Paul Tonks
Director John Huston was a master of storytelling and Prizzi's Honor was his black comedy masterpiece. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards including Best Picture and Anjelica Huston won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her caustic performance. Charley Partanna a do-it-yourself kind of guy has been loyal to 'The Family' since he can remember. If you need somebody rubbed out he's your eraser ready to kill at the drop of a dollar. Boss Don Corrado Prizzi's daughter Maerose has eyes for Charley but Charley has already fallen for a sultry hit-woman named Irene Walker. Their unlikely romance hits a snag however as Irene and Charley have each been hired to knock off the other.
Please wait. Loading...
This site uses cookies.
More details in our privacy policy