"Actor: Michael Chan"

• Twelve Monkeys | DVD | (04/10/1999) from £8.14   |  Saving you £2.85 (35.01%)   |  RRP £10.99

  Inspired by Chris Marker's acclaimed short film La Jetée, 12 Monkeys combines intricate, intelligent storytelling with the uniquely imaginative vision of director Terry Gilliam. The story opens in the wintry wasteland of the year 2035, where a virulent plague has forced humans to live in a squalid, oppressively regimented underground. Bruce Willis plays a societal outcast who is given the opportunity to erase his criminal record by "volunteering" to time-travel into the past to obtain a pure sample of the deadly virus that will help future scientists to develop a cure. But in bouncing from 1918 to the early and mid-1990s, he undergoes an ordeal that forces him to question his own perceptions of reality. Caught between the dangers of the past and the devastation of the future, he encounters a psychiatrist (Madeleine Stowe) who is initially convinced he's insane, and a wacky mental patient (Brad Pitt in a twitchy Oscar-nominated role) with links to a radical group that may have unleashed the deadly virus. Equal parts mystery, tragedy, psychological thriller, and apocalyptic drama, 12 Monkeys ranks as one of the best science fiction films of the 1990s, boosted by Gilliam's visual ingenuity and one of the finest performances of Willis's career. --Jeff Shannon

• Spiceworld The Movie | DVD | (17/04/2019) from £39.99   |  Saving you £-30.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  The girl's first live concert at the Royal Albert Hall is in just five day's time. With trusty bus driver Dennis (Meatloaf) at the wheel they hurtle from guest appearances to parties photoshoots and even dance camp! But when evil tabloid editor Kevin McMaxford steps up his campaign against them their best friend goes into labour and their manager collapses in hysterics the girls must draw on all their Girl Power to make it to the show on time...

• U.S. Marshals | DVD | (04/01/1999) from £7.19   |  Saving you £6.80 (94.58%)   |  RRP £13.99

  An ultimately futile attempt to make lightning strike twice, this so-called spin-off from 1993's blockbuster The Fugitive avoids the label of "sequel" by forging ahead without the first film's star, Harrison Ford. The idea is to showcase the return of Tommy Lee Jones in his Oscar-winning role as tenacious U.S. Marshal Sam Gerard, this time testing his mettle against a covert government operative (Wesley Snipes) accused of murdering two secret service attachés. Unfortunately, Jones and the entire cast have been trapped in a rambling plot, and the underdog status that made Ford such a compelling hero is sacrificed to an evenly matched and eventually tiresome game of cat and mouse, with a villain whose identity is far too predictable. With no dramatic build-up and several superfluous characters to distract its focus, the film's momentum plays out like a rote exercise compared to the high stakes of the earlier film. --Jeff Shannon

• Barbie of Swan Lake | DVD | (06/09/2010) from £7.95   |  Saving you £2.04 (25.66%)   |  RRP £9.99

  A baker's daughter Odette follows a unicorn into the woods where she is transformed into a swan. The spell cast by an evil wizard who wants the forest for himself is lessened by the Fairy Queen who allows Odette to become human at night. Odette discovers that she is the one chosen to save the Enchanted Forest...

• The Dreamers | DVD | (11/10/2004) from £5.99   |  Saving you £14.00 (233.72%)   |  RRP £19.99

  From Academy Award-winning Director Bernardo Bertolucci comes a tale set in 1968 Paris about a American exhange student Matthew and his tumultuous relationship with French twins, Theo and Isabelle.

• Kingsman - 2-Movie Collection | DVD | (29/01/2018) from £5.07   |  Saving you £4.92 (97.04%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Kingsman: The Secret Service: Based upon the acclaimed comic book and directed by Matthew Vaughn (Kick Ass, X-Men First Class), KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE tells the story of a super-secret spy organization that recruits an unrefined but promising street kid into the agency's ultra-competitive training program just as a global threat emerges from a twisted tech genius. Kingsman: The Golden Circle: Kingsman: The Secret Service introduced the world to Kingsman - an independent, international intelligence agency operating at the highest level of discretion, whose ultimate goal is to keep the world safe. In Kingsman: The Golden Circle, our heroes face a new challenge. When their headquarters are destroyed and the world is held hostage, their journey leads them to the discovery of an allied spy organization in the US called Statesman, dating back to the day they were both founded. In a new adventure that tests their agents' strength and wits to the limit, these two elite secret organizations band together to defeat a ruthless common enemy, in order to save the world, something that's becoming a bit of a habit for Eggsy

• The Lord of the Rings (Animated Version) | DVD | (26/11/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £13.99

  Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated adaptation of The Lord of the Rings is a bold, colourful, ambitious failure. Severely truncated, this two-hour version tackles only about half the story, climaxing with the battle of Helm's Deep and leaving poor Frodo and Sam still stuck on the borders of Mordor with Gollum. Allegedly, the director ran out of money and was unable to complete the project. As far as the film does go, however, it is a generally successful attempt at rendering Tolkien's landscapes of the imagination. Bakshi's animation uses a blend of conventional drawing and rotoscoped (traced) animated movements from live-action footage. The latter is at least in part a money-saving device, but it does succeed in lending some depth and a sense of otherworldly menace to the Black Riders and hordes of Orcs: Frodo's encounter at the ford of Rivendell, for example, is one of the movie's best scenes thanks to this mixture of animation techniques. Backdrops are detailed and well-conceived, and all the main characters are strongly drawn. Among a good cast, John Hurt (Aragorn) and C3PO himself, Anthony Daniels (Legolas), provide sterling voice characterisation, while Peter Woodthorpe gives what is surely the definitive Gollum (he revived his portrayal a couple of years later for BBC Radio's exhaustive 13-hour dramatisation). The film's other outstanding virtue is avant-garde composer Leonard Rosenman's magnificent score in which chaotic musical fragments gradually coalesce to produce the triumphant march theme that closes the picture. None of which makes up for the incompleteness of the movie, nor the severe abridging of the story actually filmed. Add to that some oddities--such as intermittently referring to Saruman as "Aruman"--and the final verdict must be that this is a brave yet ultimately unsatisfying work, noteworthy as the first attempt at transferring Tolkien to the big screen but one whose virtues are overshadowed by incompleteness. --Mark Walker

• Falling Down | DVD | (17/04/2019) from £6.45   |  Saving you £7.54 (116.90%)   |  RRP £13.99

  This film, about a downsized engineer (Michael Douglas) who goes ballistic, triggered a media avalanche of stories about middle-class white rage when it was released in 1993. In fact, it's nothing more than a manipulative, violent melodrama about one geek's meltdown. Douglas, complete with pocket protector, nerd glasses, crewcut and short-sleeved white shirt, gets stuck in traffic one day near downtown LA and proceeds to just walk away from his car--and then lose it emotionally. Everyone he encounters rubs him the wrong way--and a fine lot of stereotypes they are, from threatening ghetto punks to rude convenience store owners to a creepy white supremacist--and he reacts violently in every case. As he walks across LA (now there's a concept), cutting a bloody swath, he's being tracked by a cop on the verge of retirement (Robert Duvall). He also spends time on the phone with his frightened ex-wife (Barbara Hershey). Though Douglas and Duvall give stellar performances, they can't disguise the fact that, as usual, this is another film from director Joel Schumacher that is about surface and sensation, rather than actual substance. --Marshall Fine, Amazon.com --This text refers to the VHS edition of this video

• Spy Game | DVD | (13/05/2002) from £5.50   |  Saving you £6.49 (118.00%)   |  RRP £11.99

  Robert Redford and Brad Pitt star in this thriller set in 1991, the dying days of the Cold War. Redford is the veteran agent who discovers, on the day of his retirement, that his young protege has been taken prisoner by the Chinese.

• Kingsman - 2-Movie Collection | Blu Ray | (29/01/2018) from £5.24   |  Saving you £7.75 (147.90%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Kingsman: The Secret Service: Based upon the acclaimed comic book and directed by Matthew Vaughn (Kick Ass, X-Men First Class), KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE tells the story of a super-secret spy organization that recruits an unrefined but promising street kid into the agency's ultra-competitive training program just as a global threat emerges from a twisted tech genius. Kingsman: The Golden Circle: Kingsman: The Secret Service introduced the world to Kingsman - an independent, international intelligence agency operating at the highest level of discretion, whose ultimate goal is to keep the world safe. In Kingsman: The Golden Circle, our heroes face a new challenge. When their headquarters are destroyed and the world is held hostage, their journey leads them to the discovery of an allied spy organization in the US called Statesman, dating back to the day they were both founded. In a new adventure that tests their agents' strength and wits to the limit, these two elite secret organizations band together to defeat a ruthless common enemy, in order to save the world, something that's becoming a bit of a habit for Eggsy

• Battle Of The River Plate | DVD | (17/04/2019) from £4.85   |  Saving you £8.14 (167.84%)   |  RRP £12.99

  It is the early years of World War II and the Royal Navy must fight a desperate battle to stop Germany's best battleship, the Admiral Graf Spee, from sailing to the South Atlantic.

• The Sopranos: Complete Series 1 | DVD | (24/11/2003) from £13.89   |  Saving you £48.10 (346.29%)   |  RRP £61.99

  Writer-producer-director David Chase's extraordinary television seriesThe Sopranos is nominally an urban gangster drama, but its true impact strikes closer to home. This ambitious TV series chronicles a dysfunctional, suburban American family in bold relief. And for protagonist Tony Soprano, there's the added complexity posed by heading twin families, his collegiate mob clan and his own nouveau-riche brood. The brilliant first series is built around what Tony learns when, whipsawed between those two worlds, he finds himself plunged into depression and seeks psychotherapy--a gesture at odds with his midlevel capo's machismo, yet instantly recognisable as a modern emotional test. With analysis built into the very spine of the show's elaborate episodic structure, creator Chase and his formidable corps of directors, writers and actors weave an unpredictable series of parallel and intersecting plot arcs that twist from tragedy to farce to social realism. While creating for a smaller screen, they enjoy a far larger canvas than a single movie would afford and the results, like the very best episodic television, attain a richness and scope far closer to a novel than movies normally get. Unlike Francis Coppola's operatic dramatisation of Mario Puzo's Godfather epic, The Sopranos sustains a poignant, even mundane intimacy in its focus on Tony, brought to vivid life by James Gandolfini's mercurial performance. Alternately seductive, exasperated, fearful and murderous, Gandolfini is utterly convincing even when executing brutal shifts between domestic comedy and dramatic violence. Both he and the superb team of Italian-American actors recruited as his loyal (and, sometimes, not-so-loyal) henchman and their various "associates" make this mob as credible as the evocative Bronx and New Jersey locations where the episodes were filmed. The first year's other life force is Livia Soprano, Tony's monstrous, meddlesome mother. As Livia, the late Nancy Marchand eclipses her long career of patrician performances to create an indelibly earthy, calculating matriarch who shakes up both families; Livia also serves as foil and rival to Tony's loyal, usually level-headed wife, Carmela (Edie Falco). Lorraine Bracco makes Tony's therapist, Dr Melfi, a convincing confidante, by turns "professional", perceptive and sexy; the duo's therapeutic relationship is also depicted with uncommon accuracy. Such grace notes only enrich what's not merely an aesthetic high point for commercial television, but an absorbing film masterwork that deepens with subsequent screenings. --Sam Sutherland

• Alfie (1966) | DVD | (01/11/2021) from £6.91   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Alfie is not really a bad sort. It's just that he has this overwhelming desire for the opposite sex. You might say that birds' are irresistible to him, sort of second nature. With Michael Caine in the title role, Alfie is a ribald and wild comedy, filled with sex and sin. For those who want to be entertained, Alfie is charming, delightful and quick moving. For those who want more, there is, beneath the surface, a lingering tragedy, simply and poignantly told about the taker and the taken. Extras:Theatrical Trailer

• Sitting Ducks - Vol. 1 | DVD | (05/05/2003) from £10.03   |  Saving you £7.96 (79.36%)   |  RRP £17.99

  State of the art 3D digital animation allied to exciting but simple storytelling makes for great children's entertainment! Meet Bill and Aldo two crazy friends from opposite ends of the food chain in their first collection of hilarious 'Sitting Ducks' adventures! Episode titles: Running Ducks Peeking Duck Great White Hype Midnight Snack Hic Hic Hooray All In A Days Work Ducks On Ice.

• Alfie | DVD | (26/08/2002) from £5.15   |  Saving you £10.84 (210.49%)   |  RRP £15.99

  What's it all about, Alfie?" asked the hit Burt Bacharach/Hal David title song, to which the less philosophical answer might be: an amoral young man comically seducing a succession of beautiful women in swinging-sixties London. Michael Caine was the titular anti-hero, here consolidating his new star status from Zulu (1964) and The Ipcress File (1965), his conquests including Shelley Winters, Jane Asher and Shirley Ann Field. Alfie was a huge success, bringing a new frankness about changing sexual attitudes to the screen, in which respect it was almost the male companion to Julie Christie's then shocking, Oscar-winning performance in Darling (1965). It was also a sort-of contemporary Tom Jones, which had swept the Oscars for 1963, however, Alfie was not only better made, but in Michael Caine's guilelessly amoral asides to camera, offered a groundbreaking illustration of a newly self-conscious cinema. It is a technique Caine would reprise as the middle-aged philanderer in Blame It On Rio (1983). With Blow Up also released in 1966, and Ken Russell's Women In Love following in 1969, British film-making was truly in the midst of a sexual revolution. Michael Caine would reunite with director Lewis Gilbert and meet his female match in Educating Rita (1983). --Gary S. Dalkin

• Dragon Lord (Limited Edition) | Blu Ray | (10/08/2020) from £13.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Dragon (Jackie Chan) and Bull (Mars) are childhood friends who spend most of their free time chasing after local girls in general and spying on one in particular who catches their eyes. A gang in the nearby dwelling is smuggling precious Chinese artifacts to westerners. Hoi (Chan Wai-man) is a reluctant party to the scheme and when he voiced his objection, the Big Boss sent his henchmen after him to keep him quiet. When the mischievous duo came across Hoi, who was hiding in their village, they take on the gang to protect the artifacts.

• The In-Laws | DVD | (26/01/2004) from £6.36   |  Saving you £7.63 (119.97%)   |  RRP £13.99

  Just before his daughter is to be married, a mild-mannered foot doctor discovers his in-laws are not what they seem...

• The Sopranos: Complete Series 1 (Six Disc Set) | DVD | (29/10/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £61.99

  The Sopranos, writer-producer-director David Chase's extraordinary television series, is nominally an urban gangster drama, but its true impact strikes closer to home: This ambitious TV series chronicles a dysfunctional, suburban American family in bold relief. And for protagonist Tony Soprano, there's the added complexity posed by heading twin families, his collegial mob clan and his own nouveau riche brood. The series' brilliant first season is built around what Tony learns when, whipsawed between those two worlds, he finds himself plunged into depression and seeks psychotherapy--a gesture at odds with his midlevel capo's machismo, yet instantly recognisable as a modern emotional test. With analysis built into the very spine of the show's elaborate episodic structure, creator Chase and his formidable corps of directors, writers, and actors weave an unpredictable series of parallel and intersecting plot arcs that twist from tragedy to farce to social realism. While creating for a smaller screen, they enjoy a far larger canvas than a single movie would afford, and the results, like the very best episodic television, attain a richness and scope far closer to a novel than movies normally get. Unlike Francis Coppola's operatic dramatisation of Mario Puzo's Godfather epic, The Sopranos sustains a poignant, even mundane intimacy in its focus on Tony, brought to vivid life by James Gandolfini's mercurial performance. Alternately seductive, exasperated, fearful, and murderous, Gandolfini is utterly convincing even when executing brutal shifts between domestic comedy and dramatic violence. Both he and the superb team of Italian-American actors recruited as his loyal (and, sometimes, not-so-loyal) henchman and their various "associates" make this mob as credible as the evocative Bronx and New Jersey locations where the episodes were filmed. The first season's other life force is Livia Soprano, Tony's monstrous, meddlesome mother. As Livia, the late Nancy Marchand eclipses her long career of patrician performances to create an indelibly earthy, calculating matriarch who shakes up both families; Livia also serves as foil and rival to Tony's loyal, usually level-headed wife, Carmela (Edie Falco). Lorraine Bracco makes Tony's therapist, Dr Melfi, a convincing confidante, by turns "professional", perceptive, and sexy; the duo's therapeutic relationship is also depicted with uncommon accuracy. Such grace notes only enrich what's not merely an aesthetic high point for commercial television, but an absorbing film masterwork that deepens with subsequent screenings. --Sam Sutherland, Amazon.com

• Visions Of Light | DVD | (27/03/2006) from £18.75   |  Saving you £1.24 (6.61%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Experience the dazzling story of cinematography as seen through the lenses of the world's greatest filmmakers and captured in classic scenes from over 125 immortal movies. Discover Gordon Willis's secrets of lighting Marlon Brando in The Godfather and Greg Toland's contributions to Citizen Kane. Hear William Fraker on filming Rosemary's Baby; Vittorio Storaro on his use of colour and light in Apocalypse Now; and much much more. From black and white to Te

• Rapid Fire | DVD | (30/06/2003) from £19.99   |  Saving you £-14.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Rapid Fire was the penultimate film starring Brandon Lee before his untimely death on the set of The Crow. It's a standard martial arts thriller in which Lee plays Jake Lo, a young arts student who witnesses a gangland execution and is unwittingly drawn into a pitched standoff between the mafia, a Chinese drug syndicate and Ryan, a downbeat but resolute Chicago cop (Powers Boothe) determined to nail his prey. With a plot that careens through every genre cliché, Lee's smouldering looks and showy fighting skills carry the film. The martial arts sequences (which Lee co-choreographed) are nicely staged, but given the unusual settings--the penultimate fight takes place in a Chinese laundry--could have been even more inventive. The workmanlike direction by Dwight H Little (Marked for Death, Free Willy 2) fails to inject much into the material. In particular, traumatised by seeing his Special Agent father die in the Tiananmen Square massacre, Jake Lo's attraction to both a corrupt FBI agent and Ryan as surrogate father figures could have been given more resonance given the loss of Brandon Lee's own father at an early age. With hundreds of bloodless deaths, cringe-worthy dialogue and a dated power rock soundtrack, Rapid Fire looks and feels like a TV film. And on that level, at least, it's entertaining. On the DVD: The main feature is presented in letterboxed widescreen. Sound and picture quality are very good. Subtitles are provided for ten languages (Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norweigian, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish) and in English for the hard of hearing. Extra features are limited to chapter selection and a theatrical trailer. --Chris Campion