"Actor: Peter Kaa"

• Amistad | DVD | (29/01/2001) from £6.77   |  Saving you £13.22 (195.27%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Steven Spielberg's most simplistic, sanitised history lesson, Amistad, explores the symbolic 1840s trials of 53 West Africans following their bloody rebellion aboard a slave ship. For most of Schindler's List (and, later, Saving Private Ryan) Spielberg restrains himself from the sweeping narrative and technical flourishes that make him one of our most entertaining and manipulative directors. Here, he doesn't even bother trying, succumbing to his driving need to entertain with beautiful images and contrived emotion. He cheapens his grandiose motives and simplifies slavery, treating it as cut- and-dry genre piece. Characters are easy Hollywood stereotypes--"villains" like the Spanish sailors or zealous abolitionists are drawn one-dimensionally and sneered upon. And Spielberg can't suppress his gifted eye, undercutting normally ugly sequences, such as the terrifying slave passage, which is shot as a gorgeous, well-lit composition. At its core, Amistad is a traditional courtroom drama, centred by a tired, clichéd narrative: a struggling, idealistic young lawyer (Matthew McConaughey) fighting the crooked political system and saving helpless victims. Worse yet, Spielberg actually takes the underlying premise of his childhood fantasy, E.T. and repackages it for slavery. Cinque (Djimon Hounsou), the leader of the West African rebellion, is presented much like the adorable alien: lost, lacking a common language, and trying to find his way home. McConaughey is a grown-up Elliot who tries communicating complicated ideas such as geography by drawing pictures in the sand or language by having Cinque mimic his facial expressions. Such stuff was effective for a sci-fi fantasy about the communication barriers between a boy and a lost alien; here, it seems like a naive view of real, complex history. --Dave McCoy, Amazon.com

• Italian For Beginners | DVD | (31/03/2003) from £10.29   |  Saving you £9.70 (94.27%)   |  RRP £19.99

  veral lonely hearts in a semi-provincial suburb of a town in Denmark use a beginner's course in Italian as the platform to meet the romance of their lives.

• Terrorama! | DVD | (08/09/2008) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Previously banned in the UK!

• Journey To The Centre Of The Earth | DVD | (06/12/2004) from £4.98   |  Saving you £-1.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £2.99

  Wealthy Alice Hastings hires Geologist Theodore Lytton and his nephew Jonas to find her missing husband Caspar lost during an expedition to New Zealand. The rescuers track Casper into the mysterious caves of a volcanic crater and risk life and limb to get to the centre of the Earth. It's here they encounter a tribe of prehistoric humans led by the now fanatical and greedy Casper Hastings. His fanatical ambition is to take a magical cure-all plant to the civilized world and become extremely rich and powerful. Jonas falls in love with Ralna one of the women of the tribe and she joins him in his expedition as they attempt to return to the surface when a series of increasingly dangerous and devastating earthquakes begin to destroy the underground world.

• The Diamond Of Jeru | DVD | (12/04/2005) from £5.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  A diamond hunter agrees to take an American couple deep into the jungles of Borneo in search of a raw diamond.