"Actor: Sidney"

• Carry On Abroad | DVD | (27/08/2001) from £14.98   |  Saving you £-4.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  One of the last decent Carry On movies, Carry On Abroad is a 1972 venture into the world of package holidays. After this, the series descended into unfunny coarseness as opposed to camply laboured double entendre, culminating in the dreadful Carry On Emanuelle. Here, publican Sid James and dutiful mother's son turned sex maniac Charles Hawtrey are among a brace of Brits heading for the "paradise island" of Elsbels. Kenneth Williams is the out-of-his-depth tour operator, reverting to the sort of effete types he played in the 1950s, Peter Butterworth a pre-Manuel-style manager of a half-built hotel. A series of disasters ensue, with the entire gang landing up in jail following a fracas in a brothel at one point, but everyone finds romantic and sexual fulfilment in a quaint disco finale. This includes a gay character who is "dissuaded" from his homosexuality in a typical example of the thoroughly reactionary subtext that constitutes the really naughty bit of most Carry On films. Nonetheless, this throwback to an imaginary time when the lewdest innuendo of a dirty old man was greeted by young females with a flirty "Ooh, saucy!" is enjoyable on condition that you enter into its seaside-postcard spirit. June Whitfield is fine as a sexually uptight wife, Kenneth Connor a model of red-faced frustration as her wimpish husband. On the DVD: Sadly, no extra features except scene selection. The picture is a 4:3 ratio full-screen presentation. --David Stubbs

• King of Kings | DVD | (10/04/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  The King Of Kings is the Greatest Story Ever Told as only Cecil B. DeMille could tell it. In 1927 working with the biggest budget in the history of Hollywood DeMille spun the life and Passion of Christ into one of the highest-grossing films of all time. Featuring text drawn directly from the Bible a cast of thousands and a cinematic bag of tricks that could belong to none other than Hollywood's greatest showman The King Of Kings is at once spectacular and deeply reverent-part Gospel part Technicolor epic.

• Carry On Matron | DVD | (27/08/2001) from £11.50   |  Saving you £1.48 (17.39%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Hattie Jacques finally got to the play the title role in 1972 when Carry On Matron immortalised the character she had developed during several previous outings, most notably in Carry On Doctor. And she seized it with gusto. This is no one-dimensional performance, but a very human portrait of a woman doing her best to retain her authority in the face of mounting chaos--a raid planned by Sid James to steal the hospital's supply of contraceptive pills. Certainly, she's obsessed with regular bowel movements--this wouldn't be a Carry On film otherwise--but she remains a majestic figure of dignity with a touch of human warmth. Occasionally, too, a real hint of irony peeks through the slapstick and the innuendo. Surely scriptwriter Talbot Rothwell had his tongue lodged firmly in his cheek when he gave Barbara Windsor--then married to Ronnie Knight--a the line, "I don't fancy being a gangster's moll!" Terry Scott makes a guest appearance and Sid James is at his most conniving and lecherous. Theatre impresario Bill Kenwright has a cameo role and there's an early appearance from Wendy Richard as a prototype Pauline Fowler. But it's the female stalwarts who shine. Joan Sims and Hattie Jacques truly were comic actresses of the highest order. On the DVD: Presented like most of the other Carry On DVD releases in 4:3 picture format and mono soundtrack, this release has all the comfy quality of a lazy Saturday afternoon in front of the television. But where are the extras? It's one thing to launch a highly popular series of films as classic entertainment, but they deserve more than the budget treatment. As always, a cast list, some sort of documentary extra and biographies of at least the key players would really do them justice. --Piers Ford

• Carry On Don't Lose Your Head | DVD | (17/02/2003) from £6.64   |  Saving you £6.35 (95.63%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Carry On Don't Lose Your Head parodies the adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel, with crinkly cackling Sid James as master of disguise the Black Fingernail and Jim Dale as his assistant Lord Darcy. He must rescue preposterously effete aristocrat Charles Hawtrey from the clutches of Kenneth Williams' fiendish Citizen Camembert and his sidekick Citizen Bidet (Peter Butterworth). The Black Fingernail is assisted in his efforts to thwart the birth of the burgeoning republic by the almost supernatural stupidity of his opponents, who fail to recognise the frankly undisguisable Sid James even when dressed as a flirty young woman. What with an executioner who is tricked into beheading himself in order to prove the efficacy of his own guillotine, it's all a little too easy. As usual, no groan-worthy pun is left unturned, or unheralded by the soundtrack strains of a long whistle or wah-wah trumpet. This is pretty silly stuff even by Carry On standards, with most of the cast barely required to come out of first gear and an overlong climactic swordfight sequence hardly raising the dramatic stakes. Most of the humour here resides neither in the script nor the characterisation but in the endlessly watchable Williams' whooping, nasal delivery (occasionally lapsing into broad Cockney) and the jowl movements of the always-underrated Butterworth. --David Stubbs

• Damien: Omen II | DVD | (20/06/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  The first time was only a warning... Since the sudden and highly suspicious death of his parents 12-year-old Damien has been in the charge of his wealthy aunt and uncle (Lee Grant and William Holden). Widely feared to be the Antichrist Damien relentlessly plots to seize control of his uncle's business empire - and the world. Meanwhile anyone attempting to unravel the secrets of Damien's sinister past or fiendish future meets with a swift and cruel demise. In this chilling sequel to 'The Omen' the forces of good and evil battle each other to a taut and terrifying end!

• Buck and the Preacher (1972) (Criterion Collection) UK Only | Blu Ray | (26/09/2022) from £21.84   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  !With his rousingly entertaining directorial debut, SIDNEY POITIER (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner) helped rewrite the history of the western, bringing Black heroes to a genre in which they had always been sorely underrepresented. Combining boisterous buddy comedy with blistering, Black Powerera political fury, Poitier and a marvellously mischievous HARRY BELAFONTE (Carmen Jones) star as a tough and taciturn wagon master and an unscrupulous, pistol-packing preacher, who join forces in order to take on the white bounty hunters threatening a westward-bound caravan of recently freed enslaved people. A superbly crafted revisionist landmark, Buck and the Preacher subverts Hollywood conventions at every turn and reclaims the western genre in the name of Black liberation. Special Features New digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack New interview with Mia Mask, author of Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western Behind-the-scenes footage featuring actor-director Sidney Poitier and actor Harry Belafonte Interviews with Poitier and Belafonte from 1972 episodes of Soul! and The Dick Cavett Show New interview with Gina Belafonte, daughter of Harry Belafonte English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing PLUS: An essay by critic Aisha Harris

• Heidi (Colourised) | DVD | (24/09/2012) from £26.63   |  Saving you £-16.64 (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Shirley Temple, in a role that seems custom-made for her, portrays the spirited young heroine of the popular children's novel, giving her rich emotional depth and infinite charm. When her Aunt tires of caring for her, orphan Heidi is taken into the Swiss mountains to live with her gruff Grandfather (Jean Hersholt), a hermit who comes to adore her. But the Aunt returns to steal Heidi away, selling her to a family whose invalid daughter (Marcia Mae Jones) needs a companion. Bullied by an evil governess (Mary Nash), Heidi still charms the entire household and never stops trying to return to her beloved Grandfather.

• Sneakers | DVD | (17/04/2019) from £14.44   |  Saving you £-4.45 (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  This enjoyable thriller, written and directed by Phil Alden Robinson (the screenwriter of Field of Dreams), follows a raggedy group of corporate security experts who get in over their heads when they accept an assignment poaching some hot hardware for the National Security Agency. Robert Redford plays the group's guru, an ageing techno-anarchist who has been hiding from the feds since the early 1970s; his companionable gang of freaks includes Dan Aykroyd, David Strathairn, Mary McDonnell, the late River Phoenix, and Sidney Poitier, as a veteran CIA operative turned "sneaker." The technological black box that everybody is after, an array of computer chips that can decode any encrypted message, isn't a very plausible invention, but it's a serviceable McGuffin, and the megalomania of the master plotter played by Ben Kingsley has more resonance than most. Modest inferences can be drawn about the very latest high-tech threats to civil liberties. --David Chute, Amazon.com

• A Raisin In The Sun | Blu Ray | (01/10/2018) from £17.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  The classic film version of Lorraine Hansberry's revelatory dramastarring Sidney Poitier and Ruby Deenewly restored. LORRAINE HANSBERRY's A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by a black woman to be on Broadway and is now an immortal part of the theatrical canon. Two years after its premiere, the production came to the screen, directed by DANIEL PETRIE. The original starsincluding SIDNEY POITIER (In the Heat of the Night) and RUBY DEE (Do the Right Thing)reprise their roles as members of an African American family living in a cramped Chicago apartment, in this deeply resonant tale of dreams deferred. Following the death of their patriarch, the Youngers await a life insurance check they hope will change their circumstances, but tensions arise over how best to use the money. Vividly rendering Hansberry's intimate observations on generational conflict and housing discrimination, Petrie's film captures the high stakes, shifting currents, and varieties of experience within black life in midcentury America. Features: New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack Interview from 1961 with playwright and screenwriter Lorraine Hansberry New interview with Imani Perry, author of Looking for Lorraine, on the reallife events on which the play is based Episode of Theater Talk from 2002 featuring producer Philip Rose and actors Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis Excerpt from The Black Theatre Movement: From A Raisin in the Sun to the Present, a 1978 documentary, with a new introduction by director Woodie King Jr. New interview with film scholar Mia Mask, editor of Poitier Revisited Trailer PLUS: An essay by scholar Sarita Cannon

• The Greatest Story Ever Told | DVD | (25/03/2024) from £12.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• King Richard | Blu Ray | (21/02/2022) from £9.95   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  From Warner Bros. Pictures comes King Richard, starring two-time Oscar nominee Will Smith ( Ali, The Pursuit of Happyness, Bad Boys for Life ), under the direction of Reinaldo Marcus Green ( Monsters and Men ). Armed with a clear vision and a brazen 78-page plan, Richard Williams is determined to write his daughters, Venus and Serena, into history. Training on Compton, California's abandoned tennis courts - rain or shine - the girls are shaped by their father's unyielding commitment and their mother's balanced perspective and keen intuition, defying the seemingly insurmountable odds and prevailing expectations laid before them. Based on the true story that will inspire the world, King Richard follows the uplifting journey of a family whose unwavering resolve and unconditional belief ultimately deliver two of the world's greatest sports legends.

• Sabotage | Blu Ray | (01/06/2015) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Celebrated for the macabre tour-de-force plots and sublime twist endings that would come to define the very genre of suspense Alfred Hitchcock is one of cinema's greatest auteurs his career spanning six decades and over sixty films. Based on Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and starring Oscar Homolka and Sylvia Sidney Sabotage is one of Hitchcock's most significant pre-war British films. Featured here in a High Definition transfer from original film elements this classic early thriller has never looked better. Karl Verloc manager of a London cinema is secretly involved with a gang of European saboteurs who are plotting a massive bomb attack in Piccadilly Circus. With the police already suspicious of Verloc they place an undercover detective on his trail – can he bring the saboteurs to justice before they perpetrate their outrage on London? Special Features: Introduction by Charles Barr On Location featurette introduced by Robert Powell Image gallery

• Ealing Comedy DVD Collection - The Ladykillers/Kind Hearts and Coronets/The Lavender Hill Mob/The Man in the White Suit | DVD | (02/09/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Four of the British film industry's best-loved comedies in one box set makes The Ealing Comedy Collection absolutely essential for anyone who has any passion at all for movies. The set contains Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Man in the White Suit (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955). Ealing's greatest comedies captured the essence of post-war Britain, both in their evocation of a land once blighted by war but now rising doggedly and optimistically again from the ashes, and in their mordant yet graceful humour. They portray a country with an antiquated class system whose crumbling conventions are being undermined by a new spirit of individual opportunism. In the delightfully wicked Kind Hearts and Coronets, a serial killer politely murders his way into the peerage; in The Lavender Hill Mob a put-upon bank clerk schemes to rob his employers; The Man in the White Suit is a harshly satirical depiction of idealism crushed by the status quo; while The Ladykillers mocks both the criminals and the authorities with its unlikely octogenarian heroine Mrs "lop-sided" Wilberforce. Many factors contribute to the success of these films--including fine music scores from composers such as Benjamin Frankel (Man in the White Suit) and Tristram Cary (The Ladykillers); positively symphonic sound effects (White Suit); marvellously evocative locations (the environs of King's Cross in Ladykillers, for example); and writing that always displays Ealing's unique perspective on British social mores ("All the exuberance of Chaucer without, happily, any of the concomitant crudities of his period")--yet arguably their greatest asset is Alec Guinness, whose multifaceted performances are the keystone upon which Ealing built its biting, often macabre, yet always elegant comedy. On the DVD: The Ealing Comedy Collection presents the four discs in a fold-out package with postcards of the original poster artwork for each. Aside from theatrical trailers on each disc there are no extra features, which is a pity given the importance of these films. The Ladykillers is in muted Technicolor and presented in 1.66:1 ratio, the three earlier films are all black and white 1.33:1. Sound is perfectly adequate mono throughout. --Mark Walker

• The Jackal | DVD | (21/07/2003) from £6.20   |  Saving you £9.79 (157.90%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Bruce Willis is The Jackal - the greatest assassin in history - out to eliminate a top U.S. government official. Declan Mulqueen an imprisoned underground operative is the only man who can stop him. Now the Deputy Director of the FBI is taking the biggest risk of all . . . he's releasing one criminal to stop another in this terrifically explosive totally intrigueing suspense thriller.

• Carry On: Collection 2 | Blu Ray | (28/07/2023) from £40.90   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Trapeze | DVD | (22/09/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Burt Lancaster Tony Curtis and Gina Lollobrigida star as a triangle of lovers in this powerful drama set against the magnificent background of a European circus. Filmed on location in Paris Carol Reed's Trapeze is one of the most spectacular and authentic circus movies ever made.

• Paris Blues (DVD + Blu-ray) | Blu Ray | (24/10/2016) from £14.99   |  Saving you £5.00 (33.36%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Ram Bowen (Paul Newman The Hustler) and Eddie Cook (Sidney Poitier In the Heat of the Night) are jazz musicians who live for music. Their Paris is one of underground, smoke-filled Jazz bars and the rain-drenched streets of the Left Bank at night. However their carefree idyll is disturbed when two American tourists (Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll) enter their lives, and against the backdrop of music and moonlight, they find themselves falling in love. All too soon however, romance is put to the test, as the men find themselves torn between their love for the women, and their passion for music. Featuring the legendary Louis Armstrong as Wild Man Moore, the film's score by the incomparable Jazz musician Duke Ellington was Oscar nominated in 1962. Extras Original trailer Fully illustrated booklet with new writing on the film

• Dead End | DVD | (12/07/2005) from £12.61   |  Saving you £0.38 (3.01%)   |  RRP £12.99

  On the mean streets of New York's Lower East Side Drina (Sylvia Sidney) hopes to save her brother from a life of crime. But notorious hoodlum Baby Face Martin (Bogart) has come back to his old haunts looking for trouble and threatening to drag the boy down with him. Drina turns to her childhood friend Dave (Joel McCrea) for help. But can he stop Martin without becoming just like him?

• Carnival Of Souls | DVD | (23/02/2009) from £13.90   |  Saving you £1.09 (7.84%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Gifted young organist Mary Henry is riding in a car with friends when the car is forced off the road plunging from a bridge into the river below. Mary's friends die instantly; miraculously she emerges from the water. But Mary is changed. She becomes increasingly detached from everyday life displaying an emotional coldness which those she encounters readily attribute to grief and shock. But the nightmare world that Mary now inhabits is one of transition: she is helplessly caught between the living and the dead. Mary moves to Salt Lake City but is haunted by the spectral presence that lurks in the shadows of its derelict pleasure pavilion. She finds herself drawn inexorably towards the pavilion and its demonic Carnival of Souls' Every inch a cult classic from its iconic opening titles (reminiscent of Hitchcock's Psycho) to its terrifying final sequences Carnival of Souls is cited as an inspiration by among others David Lynch Wes Craven and George A. Romero. The complexity of its themes and eerily atmospheric direction and cinematography with minimal reliance on special effects are widely acknowledged; Carnival of Souls directed by Herk Harvey and first released in 1962 transcends the horror genre to become a unique work of unsettling and enduring power.

• Fury | Blu Ray | (01/01/2024) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Joe Wilson, a wrongly jailed man thought to have died in a blaze started by a bloodthirsty lynch mob, is somehow alive. And dead to all he ever stood for and perhaps ever will. Because Joe aims to ensure his would-be executioners meet the fate Joe miraculously escaped. Spencer Tracy is Joe, Sylvia Sidney is his bride-to-be, and Fury lives up to its volatile name with its searing indictment of mob justice and lynching. In his first American film, director Fritz Lang (Metropolis, The Big Heat) combines a passion for justice and a sharp visual style into a landmark of social-conscience filmmaking. In the 49 years before this movie's release, some 6,000 people in the U.S. were victims of lynch mobs. The Fury over those tragedies - and over other injustices to come - remains.Product FeaturesOn-Disc Special FeaturesCommentary by Peter Bogdanovich, with Audio Interview Excerpts of Director Fritz LangTheatrical Trailer