"Actor: Tamara Tunie"

• 24: Series 1 | DVD | (14/10/2002) from £14.93   |  Saving you £35.06 (234.83%)   |  RRP £49.99

  Such a simple idea--yet so fiendishly complex in the execution. 24, as surely everyone knows by now, is a thriller that takes place over 24 hours, midnight to midnight, in 24 one-hour episodes (well, 45-minute episodes if you extract the ad breaks). Everything to take place in real time--on-screen and off-screen time the same--which means no flash-backs, no flash-forwards, no nice handy time-dissolves. Every strand of the plot has to be dovetailed and interlocked to make sure that things happen just when they should, in the right amount of time. Not that easy. Creator Robert Cochran and his team of writers and directors have done a pretty impressive job in putting the jigsaw together and keeping the tension ratcheted up high, as Federal Agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) hares around LA trying to stall an assassination attempt on a black Presidential candidate and rescue his wife and daughter from the clutches of the Balkan baddies. Twists, turns, revelations and cliffhangers are tossed at us with satisfying regularity. It’s not perfect: we get some hokey plot devices (instant amnesia, anybody?) and the final twist, once you start thinking back, makes no sense whatsoever. There are altogether too many huggy family moments ("I love you, Dad." "I love you, son"); and as for überbaddie Dennis Hopper’s "Serbian" accent… Even so, this is undeniably mould-breaking TV. Sutherland, rescuing his career from the doldrums in one heroic leap, fully deserves his Golden Globe. Sets and locations are artfully deployed--we gain a real sense of LA’s splayed-out geography--and Sean Callery’s score is a powerful, brooding presence. Like Murder One and The Sopranos, 24 is one of those series future TV thrillers will have to measure themselves against. On the DVDs: 24 is released in a six-disc box set. On discs 1- 5 there are no extras, but disc 6 includes the "alternative" ending and a preview of Series 2, presented by an urbane Kiefer Sutherland, that tells us precisely nothing. The transfer, in 16x9 widescreen and 2.0 Dolby Digital sound, does the high production values of the original every justice.--Philip Kemp

• Devil's Advocate | DVD | (17/04/2019) from £6.45   |  Saving you £7.54 (116.90%)   |  RRP £13.99

  Too old for Hamlet and too young for Lear--what's an ambitious actor to do? Play the Devil, of course. Jack Nicholson did it in The Witches of Eastwick; Robert De Niro did it in Angel Heart (as Louis Cyphre--get it?). In The Devil's Advocate Al Pacino takes his turn as the great Satan, and clearly relishes his chance to raise hell. He's a New York lawyer, of course, by the name of John Milton, who recruits a hotshot young Florida attorney (Keanu Reeves) to his firm and seduces him with tempting offers of power, sex and money. Think of the story as a twist on John Grisham's The Firm, with the corporate evil made even more explicit. Reeves is wooden, and therefore doesn't seem to have much of a soul to lose, but he's really just our excuse to meet the devil. Pacino's the main attraction, gleefully showing off his--and the Antichrist's--chops at perpetrating menace and mayhem. --Jim Emerson

• Wall Street | DVD | (20/08/2001) from £5.60   |  Saving you £7.39 (131.96%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Shia LaBeouf stars as a budding Wall Street broker taken under the wing of the financial district's prodigal son, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas).

• Snake Eyes | DVD | (05/02/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Brian De Palma's 1998 thriller is largely an exercise in airing out his orchestral, oversized visual style (think of his Blowout, Body Double or Raising Cain) for the heck of it. The far-fetched story featuresNicolasCage as a crooked police detective attending a championship boxing match at which the Secretary of Defence is assassinated. The unfortunate Secretary's right-hand man (Gary Sinise) happens to be Cage's old friend, a fact that complicates the cop's efforts to reconstruct the crime from conflicting accounts--a directorial strategy bearing similarities to Kurosawa's Rashomon. The outrageousness of the scenario essentially gives DePalma permission to construct a baroque cathedral of spectacular camera stunts, which (he well knows) are inevitably more interesting than the hoary conspiracy plot. (The opening scene alone, which runs on for a number of minutes and consists of one, unbroken shot that moves in from the street, following Cage up and down stairs and in and out of rooms until finally ending ringside at the match, is breathtaking.) The shifting points of view--based on the contradictory statements of witnesses--also give De Palma licence to get creative with camera angles and scene rearrangements. The script bogs down in the third act but De Palma is just revving up for a big, operatic finish that is absolutely gratuitous but undeniably impressive. Yes, it's style over substance in Snake Eyes but what style you're talking about.--Tom Keogh

• Law and Order - Special Victims Unit - Season 13 | DVD | (27/02/2017) from £20.69   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Law and Order: Special Victims Unit confronts some of its most controversial and topical crimes yet in its powerful thirteenth year. New changes are afoot for the SVU: two new detectives [Danny Pino and Kelli Giddish] join the team, while the returning squad members must deal with the fallout of last seasons shootout and the departure of one of their own. As they face these challenges, a new slew of sex crimes hit the headlines, making it vital that the team learn how to separate their personal emotions from the intense cases they must see through to their stunning ends.

• Law and Order - Special Victims Unit - Season 14 | DVD | (27/02/2017) from £23.75   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Special Victims Unit begins its gripping fourteenth year with a scandal that erupts at the heart of the squad, and the resulting investigation unearths past secrets that threaten the entire department. After the case surrounding Captain Cragen (Dann Florek) is closed, the workload gets more explosive as a brash new assistant DA (Raúl Esparza) comes onto the scene. Challenging mysteries involve a sniper that targets cops, escort services in murderous competition, high-tech kidnappings, and a wily predator who games the justice system. Primetime Emmy Award Winner Mariska Hargitay, Danny Pino, Kelli Giddish, Richard Belzer, and Ice-T also star in producer Dick Wolf s award-winning drama. Featuring guest stars Marcia Gay Harden, Patricia Arquette, Scott Bakula, Tom Sizemore, and Nia Vardalos, watch all 24 suspenseful episodes of this riveting series back-to-back and uninterrupted.

• Sign Of The Killer | DVD | (12/04/2004) from £66.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £66.99

  Variously described by critics as "Riveting", "Stunning", "Exciting..Stylish and Slick", & "An Ingenious Thriller" this is a little gem of a thriller, directed by actress turned director Kasi Lemmons, & starring the always superb, Samuel L. Jackson (Snakes On A Plane, Pulp Fiction ) as Romulus Ledbetter, a once devoted family man, now living rough on the streets os Manhattan. His home is a cave in the park and when he finds a frozen corpse outside the entrance one day he becomes determined to find out how the man died and prove he was murdered . To do this he has to re-enter the world he is no longer a part of, and most importantly confront his own inner demons. Very overlooked on it's original release it's a clever involving film, with Jackson totally believable as always.