"Actor: Philip Chan"

• Hard Boiled | DVD | (28/01/2013) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Masterful Hong Kong action director John Woo (The Killer Face/Off) turns in this exciting and pyrotechnic tale of warring gangsters and shifting loyalties. Chow Yun-Fat (The Replacement Killers) plays a take-no-prisoners cop on the trail of the Triad the Hong Kong Mafia when his partner is killed during a gun battle. His guilt propels him into an all-out war against the gang including an up-and-coming soldier in the mob (Tony Leung) who turns out to be an undercover cop. The two men must come to terms with their allegiance to the force and their loyalty to each other as they try to take down the gangsters. A stunning feast of hyperbolic action sequences (including a climactic sequence in an entire hospital taken hostage) Hard Boiled is a rare treat for fans of the action genre with sequences as thrilling and intense as any ever committed to film.

• Bloodsport / Enter The Dragon | DVD | (08/09/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £22.99

  A well-oiled Jean-Claude Van Damme makes his starring debut in what may be one of the few kickboxing films to be based on a true story. The Muscles from Brussels plays Frank Dux, the first Westerner ever to win the extreme "whupfest" known as the Kumatai (a long-running, no-holds-barred fighting tournament in Hong Kong). While a bit deficient in the script department (to say the least), this undeniably exciting flick succeeds by letting Van Damme play to his strengths: namely, minimal acting and a lot of impossibly acrobatic splits while kicking people in the head. Bloodsport is a guilty-pleasure testosterone blast of the highest order, with a memorable villain (the massive Bolo Yeung from Enter the Dragon) and a multitude of well-choreographed fight scenes. An embarrassed-looking Forest Whitaker cameos as a hapless (and non-kickboxing) cop. --Andrew Wright

• Cider With Rosie | DVD | (03/03/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Based on a memoir of English writer Laurie Lee and featuring narration by Lee himself, this made-for-television adaptation begins in wartime 1918 with Lee's family moving to the Gloucestershire countryside. Juliet Stevenson (Truly, Madly, Deeply) shines as the matriarch of this large blended family, a compassionate and distracted woman who pines for the brood's missing father. The movie takes Lee from a young boy sleeping in his mother's bed through his girl-obsessed adolescence, fondly dealing with an assortment of relatives, schoolmates and villagers along the way. Lee doesn't actually have cider with girlfriend Rosie until a few minutes before the 82-minute movie ends, but in the meantime Charles Beeson, directing from an adaptation by John Mortimer, has offered up a gentle homage to long-passed era. --Kimberly Heinrichs, Amazon.com

• Incredible Shaolin Thunderkick | DVD | (22/09/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  A revenge-fuelled Hong Kong martial arts flick! This Korean Kung Fu flick has become a culkt favourite across the globe ever since its release back in the 80's. Now for the first time fans can get this world exclusive on DVD. Benny Tsui stars as a young martial artist out to make a name for himself against the White Tiger gang.

• Martial Monks Of Shaolin Temple | DVD | (08/07/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  When Kurt Wong becomes leader of one of China's two most renowned Kung Fu schools the power it gives him turns him into an egotistical murderer. Dragon Lang a layman disciple of Shaolin takes on the tough task of bringing about his downfall...

• 976 Evil II | DVD | (05/09/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Robin (Debbie James) finds herself visited by an astral spirit. She soon becomes the only witness through her visions to the murders that the spirit commits in his astral form. Robin's only hope is a handsome stranger named Spike Johnson (Patrick O'Bryan). Through his past experiences with the horrorscope Spike's acquired his own psychic strength. Together they discover that the only way to save themselves from the vicious revenge of the astral spirit is to fight him on his own turf...

• Two Wonderous Tigers | DVD | (20/02/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Tiger is down on his luck when he meets a wealthy Kung Fu expert; the two soon become friends until they fall for the same girl...

• Saxon - The DVD Collection - Live Innocence / The Video Anthology | DVD | (20/10/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

• The Bounty | UMD | (01/01/1980) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

• Hard Boiled | DVD | (19/03/2001) from £7.91   |  Saving you £12.08 (152.72%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Released in 1992, Hard Boiled is John Woo's farewell to the kind of blood-spattered cinema of vengeance and redemption with which he had made his name as a director in Hong Kong during the late 1980s. The following year he was in Hollywood filming Hard Target with Jean-Claude Van Damme, and an era had effectively ended. This might explain the elegiac feel Woo brings to his study of two men haunted by the violent consequences of their actions. Chow Yun Fat generates tremendous sullen energy in his portrayal of Tequila, a plain-clothes cop who not only loses his partner in a shoot-out with a gang of underground gunrunners but also discovers that he's unwittingly killed a fellow officer working undercover. Playing opposite him is Tony Leung as the enigmatic Tony, a young police officer who has secretly managed to penetrate the world of illegal arms-dealing in the guise of a cold-blooded gangland assassin. With rival gangs fighting over the weapons trade and Tequila gunning for Tony, unaware of his true identity, Hard Boiled has an unsurprisingly high body count, particularly when the various factions converge on a private hospital, reducing it by the movie's end to a smoking war zone, its corridors strewn with corpses. John Woo's ability to exploit the comic-book profundities of the genre, endowing his set-piece action sequences with a uniquely emotional edge, comes through in the controlled use of slow motion, cut-away details and brooding freeze-frame studies of the central characters. The image of Chow Yun Fat cradling an abandoned baby against his chest while he blasts his way out of the hospital's maternity unit has an enduring sharpness to it. However, a sense of ending runs throughout the movie, as if Woo were acknowledging that, having done everything he could with the format, the time had come for him to move on. And perhaps it had. --Ken Hollings