"Actor: Peter MacNicol"

• Ally McBeal - The Complete DVD Collection | DVD | (19/11/2007) from £49.94   |  Saving you £-24.95 (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Every episode from all 5 seasons of Ally McBeal in one must-have collector's box set! Meet Ally McBeal she over-analyses her relationships (and sometimes lack of) to the point of becoming emotionally neurotic. Sounds annoying? It can be. Sounds so-American? It can be. Sounds addictive? It will be... They are young successful lawyers some of them could even be called beautiful a lot of them could be called eccentric and they all work and play together. From the first season we are introduced to the Unisex (the bathroom they all share). Ally is living with Renee still trying to deal with Billy's marriage to someone who is not her and is forced to come to terms with working with his new wife Georgia. Richard and Whipper are still together Elaine establishes herself as the resident know-it-all tart and John Cage is well warming up to being John Cage.... It is from this season we all have to hold to our hearts as the first time we were introduced to Ally McBeal the quirky original and (yet again) brilliance of a David E. Kelly creation!

• Housesitter | DVD | (14/04/2003) from £9.43   |  Saving you £0.56 (5.94%)   |  RRP £9.99

  A slick, smart vehicle for Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn, Housesitter offers an acceptably daffy premise and enough inventive business to sustain it through to the, not unexpected, happy ending. Architect Martin builds a dream home for his childhood sweetheart (Dana Delaney) only to be rejected when he proposes marriage. After a one-night stand, Hawn--a daffy waitress with a gift for making up improbable but convincing lies--moves into Martin's house and tells his parents (Donald Moffatt, Julie Harris) and the whole community that she is his surprise new wife. When he sees how this impresses Delaney, Martin goes along with the charade, encouraging wilder and wilder fictions and doing his best to join in so that he can rush through to a divorce and move on to the woman he has always wanted. Hawn has to recruit a couple of winos to pose as her parents and impress Martin's boss into giving him a promotion, but we glimpse her real misery at his eventual intention to toss her out of the make-believe world she has created because her own real background is so grim. Its sit-com hi-jinx are manic enough not to be strangled by an inevitable dip in to sentiment towards the end, and Hawn, who always has to work hard, is better matched against the apparently effortless Martin than in their subsequent pairing in Out-of-Towners. Martin, often wasted in comparatively straight roles, has a few wild and crazy scenes as Hawn prompts him into joining her improvised fantasies. Director Frank Oz, a frequent Martin collaborator (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Little Shop of Horrors, Bowfinger), is the model of a proper, competent, professional craftsman when he sets out to put a comedy together--but the film misses streaks of lunacy or cruelty that might have made it funnier and more affecting. On the DVD: The disc offers a pristine widescreen non-anamorphic transfer, letterboxed to 1.85:1. There are no extra features to speak of, just text-based production notes, cast and director bios, plus a trailer and an assortment of language and subtitle options. --Kim Newman

• Ghostbusters Triple: (1984), II & Afterlife (3 Disc DVD) | DVD | (31/01/2022) from £4.35   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  From director Jason Reitman and producer Ivan Reitman comes the next chapter in the original Ghostbusters universe. In Ghostbusters: Afterlife, when a single mom and her two kids arrive in a small town, they begin to discover their connection to the original ghostbusters and the secret legacy their grandfather left behind. The film is written by Gil Kenan & Jason Reitman.

• Stuart Little / Stuart Little 2 / Stuart Little 3 | DVD | (27/02/2006) from £5.94   |  Saving you £1.05 (17.68%)   |  RRP £6.99

  Stuart Little: Join the fun when the Little family adopts an adorably spunky boy named Stuart (voiced by Michael J. Fox) who looks a lot like a mouse. Mr. and Mrs. Little (Hugh Laurie and Geena Davis) fall in love with Stuart right away but their older son George (Jonathan Lipnicki) isn't so sure what to make of his new brother and the family's white cat Snowbell (voiced by Nathan Lane) devises a dastardly plan to get Stuart out of the house...permanently. Stuart Littl

• Chicago Hope Season 4 | DVD | (18/03/2013) from £33.73   |  Saving you £6.26 (18.56%)   |  RRP £39.99

  Critically-acclaimed medical drama Chicago Hope returns for a fourth season, featuring gripping storylines and more outstanding acting. The hospital staff are faced with more drama as they deal with tough patients and moral dilemmas that challenge them both personally and professionally. In this season, Aaron has to cope with his own medical problems; Kate, Lisa and Diane go on a weekend away which goes horribly wrong; Billy and Diane begin their life together and the entire team has to struggle through a wintery night when the power goes out. With an amazing cast and award-winning performances, Season Four comes to DVD in this 6 disc set for the very first time.

• Ghostbusters 2 | DVD | (07/03/2005) from £2.99   |  Saving you £7.00 (234.11%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Much less fun than its predecessor, this 1989 sequel starts off on a bleak note by telling us our heroes from Ghostbusters have been on the skids for five years and Bill Murray's lead character never did hook up with Sigourney Weaver's lovely symphony-musician character. What's more, she has a kid by somebody else. Everybody's on an uphill climb, and Ghostbusters II never soars the way the first film did, despite having the same director, Ivan Reitman (Dave, Kindergarten Cop). The lame plot finds the boys attempting to prevent a disaster on New York City caused by too many bad vibes in the Big Apple. Yikes! Fortunately, screenwriters Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis have penned enough good one-liners to keep Murray busy, and if the ghostly special effects no longer surprise as they did in Ghostbusters, they're at least inventive. -- Tom Keogh, Amazon.com

• Addams Family Values | Blu Ray | (07/10/2019) from £7.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Beware!... you could die laughing! This rarity a sequel that's better than the original... Make sure you see it. Alan Frank, Daily Star It's love at first fright when Gomez (Raul Julia) and Morticia (Anjelica Huston) welcome a new addition to the Addams household ± Pubert, their soft, cuddly, mustachioed baby boy. As Fester (Christopher Lloyd) falls hard for voluptuous nanny Debbie Jilinsky (Joan Cusack), Wednesday (Christina Ricci) and Pugsley (Jimmy Workman) discover she's a black-widow murderess who plans to add Fester to her collection of dead husbands. The family's future grows even bleaker when the no-good nanny marries Fester and has the kids shipped o to summer camp. But Wednesday still has a thing or two up her sleeve With gags and ghouls galore, Addams Family Values is quite brilliant... (Julie Burchill, The Sunday Times)

• Recess - School's Out | DVD | (26/11/2001) from £20.00   |  Saving you £-8.01 (N/A%)   |  RRP £11.99

  In this big-screen version of the Saturday-morning animated series, the school year is finally over, and T J Detweiler is looking forward to a fun-filled summer. Boredom quickly sets in until T J uncovers a scheme to do away with summer vacation.

• CSI: Cyber Complete Season 1 | DVD | (27/06/2016) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £49.99

  Agents with the FBI's Cyber Crime Division investigate illegal activities on the Internet in this high-tech drama. Special Agent Avery Ryan (Patricia Arquette), a noted psychologist, heads up the unit. She's aided by a former marine (James Van Der Beek), two former black hat hackers, and a computer security expert. The team is tasked with solving cyber theft, hacking murders and other crimes that originate on the Internet.

• Bean - The Ultimate Disaster Movie | DVD | (24/12/2001) from £5.66   |  Saving you £10.33 (182.51%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Translating Rowan Atkinson's Mr Bean character from British television to the big screen takes a bit of a toll, but there are some hilarious sequences in this popular comedy. The eponymous Bean, a boy-man twit with a knack for getting into difficult binds (and then making them worse and worse and worse), is a London museum guard who is sent to Los Angeles in the company of the famous painting Whistler's Mother. He's mistaken as an art expert by the well-meaning curator (Peter MacNicol) of an LA museum, but Bean's famously eccentric behaviour soon causes the poor guy to almost lose his family and job. The insularity of Bean's TV world is sacrificed in this film, and that change diminishes some of the character's appeal. But Atkinson is a man naturally full of comedy, and he doesn't let his fans down. --Tom Keogh

• Dragonslayer | DVD | (20/07/2004) from £8.25   |  Saving you £6.74 (81.70%)   |  RRP £14.99

  In the Dark Ages a young would be sorcerer sets out to slay Vermithrax the terrifying dragon that has reigned supreme throughout the land.... Abounding in fantasy and science fiction Dragonslayer is lit by magic and from it's medieval alchemy emerges an entertainment bursting with suspense - an awesome adventure that sends the imagination soaring to new heights!

• Ghostbusters / Ghostbusters II - Set | Blu Ray | (28/09/2020) from £34.98   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  The classic supernatural comedies that defined a generation: Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters 2, together in this special collector's edition Blu-ray set. Celebrate 30 years of the Ghostbusters franchise with remastered high-def picture & sound for both movies, plus all-new and never-before-seen special features. Plus, explore the history of the films with this deluxe collector's edition, loaded with production notes, character sketches, insider info and more. Bring home these spooktacularly successful films that captured the imagination of audiences around the worldand redefined the action-comedy genre in the process. Who you gonna call? UHD release: The classic supernatural comedies that defined a generation: GHOSTBUSTERS and GHOSTBUSTERS II, together in a limited edition 4K Ultra HD Steelbook® with never-before-seen special features! In the original GHOSTBUSTERS, Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) and Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson)

• Ally McBeal, Series 5 Box Set 1 | DVD | (10/02/2003) from £10.65   |  Saving you £9.34 (87.70%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The fifth season was the last series of Ally McBeal, and probably the least satisfying. While always at least slightly entertaining, it was troubled by two conflicting imperatives: first, to steer its neurotic characters and multiplicity of sub-plots towards a coherent and credible resolution; second, to sustain another series of a programme which had, by now, exhausted all the plot possibilities that were remotely believable. The result is a bemusing onslaught of new characters (Ally's Mini-Me Jenny and a barely distinguishable phalanx of lantern-jawed male leads), celebrity cameos (Edna Everage, Christina Ricci, Barry White, Matthew Perry, Jon Bon Jovi), several storylines that would test the credulity of any of the curiously indulgent judges before whom Ally's firm practises (notably the arrival of a 10-year-old daughter that Ally didn't know she had) and one misbegotten attempt to anchor the programme to the real world (the "Nine One One" episode, an unwatchably mawkish allegory about the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States). Granted that Ally McBeal was never intended to be realistic drama, but when the programme spirals entirely off into the realms of the surreal, any possibility of the sort of identification with the characters on which the programme once relied is lost. Though not without its moments, the sudden redemption of Fish, always the best-written character, is deftly handled. Series Five will be of chief interest to adherents who stuck with it through the first four and so wanted to see how it all ends; in keeping with the central character's defining motifs of solipsism and self-pity, it does so with a whimper. On the DVD: Ally McBeal has episode selector on each disc, and a scene selector within each of those. The final disc contains two short and desultory documentaries on the series billed, somewhat hopefully, as "Special Features". A French audio soundtrack is available, as are subtitles in English, French and Dutch. –-Andrew Mueller

• Olive, the Other Reindeer | DVD | (01/10/2012) from £9.43   |  Saving you £-0.56 (N/A%)   |  RRP £8.87

  When Santa cancels his annual flight because of a hurt reindeer, a young Christmas loving dog named Olive is convinced she has what it takes to get Santa's flight off the ground and save Christmas.

• Baby Geniuses | DVD | (09/10/2003) from £5.41   |  Saving you £0.58 (10.72%)   |  RRP £5.99

  When babies babble or draw, adults jokingly say they know what the baby is trying to communicate. What if a clinic found that these babblings and doodles were actually very intelligent responses or scribbling of an ancient form of communication? Well, it seems that all it would create is this tepid comedy. Kathleen Turner runs the clinic that believes babies have "universal knowledge" before they learn to speak (and dumb down). What she plans to do with this knowledge is never really understood, but know this: the plans are evil. The secret lives of babies have been pretty adorably filmed previously with Look Who's Talking, but here the babies talk and move via visual effects like the animals in Babe. They also karate chop adults and talk about such adorable things as "diaper gravy". By the time the story (a variation of The Parent Trap) heats up (relatively speaking), there is not much left to engage us except some cute babies that just look odd as effects take over their mouths and movements. --Doug Thomas

• Dragonslayer | Blu Ray | (21/03/2023) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Bean - The Ultimate Disaster Movie | DVD | (19/03/2007) from £8.30   |  Saving you £6.69 (80.60%)   |  RRP £14.99

  One Man. One Masterpiece. One Very Big Mistake. When the Royal National Gallery of London is asked to send their finest scholar to oversee the unveiling of Whistler's Mother in California they send their most inept and detested employee in a desperate attempt to get him out of their lives. That employee is Mr. Bean - the master of disaster! Within days of his arrival Mr. Bean destroys virtually everything he comes into contact with be it the career and marriage of his ho

• Ally McBeal - Season 1 Part 1 | DVD | (07/10/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Much lighter in tone than creator, producer and writer David E Kelley's other forays into legal drama LA Law, and The Practice, the slick thirtysomething series Ally McBeal has never been out-and-out comedy but it spikes its exploration of emotional territory with sharp funny lines. Ally (Calista Flockhart) is a kookie cutie, a ditzy, skinny, single lawyer and we are privy to scenes from her overactive imagination (courtesy of CGI), surrounded by larger-than-life peripheral characters--almost grotesques--like outspoken boss Richard Fish (Greg Germann), nervy courtroom wizz John "The Biscuit" Cage (Peter MacNicol) and nosy secretary Elaine Vassal (Jane Krakowski). In later series these characters (including popular newcomers Lucy Lui and Portia de Rossi as frosty law babes Ling and Nelle) would edge towards one-dimensional caricatures as the same ground was retrodden relentlessly, but in this first series there is something compelling about the intrusive dynamics of this group of oddballs. The point is you don't have to like them to find them entertaining. Ally herself can be extremely irritating in a love-to-hate-her kind of a way. She is a curious dichotomy, a 1990s woman with a go-getting career and a penchant for her own way and yet with the romantic ideals of someone from another generation. Basically still hung up on ex-boyfriend Billy (Gil Bellows) who works for same Boston practice, alongside wife Georgia (Courtney Thorne-Smith), Ally is on the look out for her Prince Charming. The first series and its lead both garnered Golden Globes, a lot of gossip and a healthy audience for the Fox television network in America. Channel 4 snapped it up for British audiences who were intrigued, not least by the unisex toilets and sophisticated afterwork bar soirées where chanteuse Vonda Shepherd was always to be found crooning away in the corner. All in all, Ally McBeal leaves you with the conundrum of wanting more but not being able to say why. --Emma Perry

• Sophie's Choice | Blu Ray | (04/08/2014) from £6.99   |  Saving you £9.00 (128.76%)   |  RRP £15.99

  The sunny streets of Brooklyn, just after World War II. A young would-be writer named Stingo (Peter MacNicol) shares a boarding house with beautiful Polish immigrant Sophie (Meryl Streep) and her tempestuous lover, Nathan (Kevin Kline); their friendship changes his life. This adaptation of the bestselling novel by William Styron is faithful to the point of being reverential, which is not always the right way to make a film come to life. But director Alan J. Pakula (All the President's Men) provides a steady, intelligent path into the harrowing story of Sophie, whose flashback memories of the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp form the backbone of the movie. Streep's exceptional performance--flawless Polish accent and all--won her an Oscar, and effectively raised the standard for American actresses of her generation. No less impressive is Kevin Kline, in his movie debut, capturing the mercurial moods of the dangerously attractive Nathan. The two worlds of Sophie's Choice, nostalgic Brooklyn and monstrous Europe, are beautifully captured by the gifted cinematographer Néstor Almendros, whose work was Oscar-nominated but didn't win. It should have. --Robert Horton, Amazon.com

• Chicago Hope Season 3 | DVD | (05/11/2012) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £39.99

  Created by David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, Boston Legal) Chicago Hope: television's finest medical drama stars Mandy Patinkin, Adam Arkin, Hector Elizondo, guest appearances by Julia Stiles - Isabella Rossellini. In this Season, Kate (Christine Lahti) flies to Washington with Tommy to speak to Congress about health care. Back in Chicago, her friend Marina makes a decision about adoption. McNeil's patient Harriett Owens is hospitalized again. Aaron and Phillip explore the possibility of buying the hospital and in A Day In The Life, Austin's cystic fibrosis patient is just one of four patients needing transplants who have to wait in fear and hope when a potential donor appears but is prematurely pronounced dead and entered into the donor system by the inexperienced Eggert.