Made in 1978, the original 'The Lord Of The Rings' was directed by cutting edge animator Ralph Bakshi using an innovative technique that allowed the animator to paint over live action footage, bringing the book to life with stunning success. Featuring an exceptional voice cast including William Squire as Gandalf the Grey, Christopher Guard as the Hobbit Frodo and guardian of the master ring, John Hurt as the heroic Strider, One Foot in the Grave's Annette Crosby as Galadriel and Star Wars' A...
In the space of ten years Buster Keaton made his way to becoming one of the Silent Eras' most remarkarble comedians only to fall from grace when his now-acknowledged classic The General bombed at the box office and he found himself reduced to writing gags for the Marx Brothers and forcibly partnered up with lesser performers by the studios to whom he was contracted. This Emmy award-winning documentary presents Buster's remarkable story and includes rare and unpublished material th
Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis wrote the script, but Bill Murray gets all the best lines and moments in this 1984 comedy directed by Ivan Reitman (Meatballs). The three comics, plus Ernie Hudson, play the New York City-based team that provides supernatural pest control, and Sigourney Weaver is the love interest possessed by an ancient demon. Reitman and company are full of original ideas about hobgoblins--who knew they could "slime" people with green plasma goo?--but hovering above the plot is Murray's patented ironic view of all the action. Still a lot of fun, and an obvious model for sci-fi comedies such as Men in Black. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com
Ice Age (Dirs.Chris Wedge & Carlos Saldanha 2002): A star-studded cast provides the voices for the prehistoric creatures in this computer-animated feature set 20 000 years ago as the Ice Age approaches. Seemingly anti-social Manny a woolly mammoth (voiced by Ray Romano) acts as if he just wants to be left alone. When he meets Sid (voiced by John Leguizamo) a sloth the two become unlikely traveling companions. The plot thickens when the duo finds a human infant and decides to try to return the child to its herd. Manny slowly but surely reveals his heart of gold while Sid continues to provide comic relief. Diego (voiced by Denis Leary) a saber-tooth tiger with ulterior motives soon joins them in their search for the humans. Ultimately this group of misfits becomes its own herd learning about friendship and loyalty as they brave snow ice freezing temperatures predators hail and even boiling lava pits. All the while a saber-tooth squirrel Scrat provides comic relief as he valiantly struggles with an acorn. A well-written humorous script and endearing characters mesh well with the state-of-the-art technology and effects. Other stars lending their voices to the feature include Goran Visnjic Jack Black and Jane Krakowski. Ice Age 2: The Meltdown (Dir. Carlos Saldanha 2006: Manny the woolly mammoth Sid the sloth Diego the saber-toothed tiger and the hapless prehistoric squirrel/rat known as Scrat: those sub-zero heroes are back! Manny may be ready to start a family but nobody has seen another mammoth for a long time; in fact Manny thinks he may be the last one. That is until he miraculously finds Ellie (voiced by Queen Latifah) the only female mammoth left in the world. Their only problem: they can't stand each other. Oh and Ellie somehow thinks she's a possum! Ellie comes with some excess baggage in the form of her two possum brothers Crash and Eddie (voiced by Seann William Scott and Josh Peck) a couple of daredevil pranksters and cocky loud-mouthed troublemakers. Manny Sid and Diego quickly learn that the warming climate has one major drawback: a huge glacial dam holding off oceans of water is about to break threatening the entire valley. The only chance of survival lies at the other end of the valley. So our three heroes along with Ellie Crash and Eddie form the most unlikely family as they embark on a mission across an ever-changing increasingly dangerous landscape...
Evil feeds on evil... Jake Cummings is your average high school teenager but his life is irrevocably changed when a fellow student introduces him to a video game called ""The Pathway"". After submitting his information into the computer software Jake finds that he is having visions of a half-goat / half-human creature. After much doubt about the game Jake uses the pathway to get revenge on his boss. One by one his friends and family suffer the same fate death by self-mutila
An irresistible melange of showbiz and politics, The Rat Pack is a sprawling HBO TV movie about the late-50s axis between Frank Sinatra's cool-talking cronies and the White House-bound Kennedy clan. Ray Liotta, William L Petersen and Joe Mantegna manage to give real performances as opposed to impersonations as Frankie, JFK and Dean Martin, and there's a stand-out turn from Don Cheadle as Sammy Davis Jr, who fantasises a blazing, gunslinging rendition of "I've Got You Under My Skin" as delivered to the cross-burning Nazi pickets outside his hotel campaigning against his marriage to a white Swedish starlet. Naturally the story goes over a lot of familiar ground (Marilyn Monroe, and so on,) but the Hollywood-Vegas angle, with the obvious criminal tie-ins, lends it a freshness. Angus McFadyen remains typecast as real-life actors, following up his Orson Welles (Cradle Will Rock) and Richard Burton (Liz, the Elizabeth Taylor biopic) by doing a squirming, but funny take on Peter Lawford, caught between the White House and Sinatra's vast, demanding ego. Its general style is somewhere between a Scorsese gangland epic and made-for-TV muckraking biopic and a lot of material from Shawn Levy's fine book Rat Pack Confidential is worked into the weave. On the DVD: The Rat Pack is a no-frills disc presented in a good-looking 16:9 anamorphic transfer, though as it's a TV movie this means trimming the top and the bottom of the image. --Kim Newman
Verdi's last opera and the final peak of his career Falstaff is the culmination of Italian comic opera. The story is taken from Shakespeare's play The Merry Wives Of Windsor although the central character is much closer to the Falstaff of Henry IV. The roguish Sir John embroils himself in numerous plots and dupes of love and marriage until eventually the Merry Wives get their revenge on him and all plans are thwarted. Verdi's sparkling and witty opera is the perfect synthesis of mu
CS Lewis's timeless novel comes to life in this big budget adaptation.
They put him in a coma now he's going to put them out of their misery. Anthony Stowe (Van Damme) is a narcotics lieutenant - he's addicted to heroin has a bad attitude and everyone hates him including his soon-to-be-ex wife. His ex-partner Gabriel Callaghan (Stephen Rea) is working to become the new leader of the gangsters in local organized crime. Callaghan sends his men after Anthony they shoot him in the head and he falls into a coma. Months later he awakens with the idea of finishing off his former partner and becoming a better person and better husband.
A heart surgeon gets to experience firsthand exactly the kind of treatment that his patients receive. Through it all Jack learns that compassion and caring are a physician's most important skills and he ultimately becomes an extraordinary doctor....
The Sixth Sense: After the assault and suicide of one of his ex-patients award-winning child psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) is left determined to help a young boy named Cole who suffers from the same diagnosis as the ex-patient - they both see dead people. Malcolm cannot rest until he makes amends for his feelings of failure created by the mental breakdown of the first patient. Cole is a young boy who is paralyzed by fear from his visions of dead people. His mother is at her wits end trying to cope with Cole's eccentricities. With the help of Dr. Crowe Cole goes on a journey of self as he learns to overcome his fears all the while discovering the purpose of his gift. Unbreakable: When David Dunn (Willis) emerges from a horrific train crash as the sole survivor - and without a single scratch on him - he meets a mysterious stranger (Jackson) who will change David's life forever. Interrupting his life at odd moments it's Elijah Price's presence and probing that force David to confront his destiny on a journey of self-discovery and purpose that will absolutely stun you with its power. Signs: Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) and his family are told extra-terrestrials are responsible for the sign in their field. They watch with growing dread at the news of crop circles being found all over the world. Signs is the emotional story of one family on one farm as they encounter the terrifying last moments of life as the world is being invaded. Get ready for a close encounter of the scared kind... The Village: Run. The truce is ending... M. Night Shyamalan's 'The Village' finds the renowned writer-director crafting a suspenseful story of a small community whose inhabitants are plagued by fear of the unknown forest that surrounds them. For years they have kept a truce with mysterious creatures in the woods by vowing never to breach a clearly defined border. However when a young man (Joaquin Phoenix) becomes determined to explore the nearby towns his actions are met with menacing consequences.
The Painted Desert: Filmed at the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona The Painted Desert follows the lives of two feuding cowboys J. Farrell MacDonald and William Farnum who clash over who will raise an orphaned boy they find at a deserted waterhole. Farnum takes the boy whom he names Bill but several years later the feud continues this time over water their adjacent ranches share. Tension escalates until the grown Bill played by William Boyd must choose between h
In 1960, Norman Wisdom was left all at sea in The Bulldog Breed. He had already made a farce of the army in The Square Peg (1958), so what better than to join the navy? Back in the real world, the Russians had kick-started the space race putting Sputnik into orbit, so Norman rapidly finds himself selected to be the first Brit in space. Playing to type, the result is excellent physical comedy and copious tomfoolery at the expense of the upper ranks. With support from John Le Mesurier and Edward Chapman (the legendary "Mr Grimsdale") and uncredited appearances from Oliver Reed and Michael Caine, this is a notable British comedy, with an unusually direct reference to the risqué Carry On movies. For his second starring role Norman Wisdom played the oldest orphan of Greenwood Children's Home in 1954's One Good Turn. Not only does he have to find the money to buy one of the orphans a model car, but after a visit to Brighton he discovers Greenwood is due to be closed down by the home's own unscrupulous chairman, a property developer with plans to build a factory on the site. Also starring Thora Hird, One Good Turn was surely a film with a personal resonance for Wisdom who was himself brought-up in an orphanage after his mother died and his father was unable to raise him. As would become a tradition, he contributes a song, "Please Opportunity", and the movie, though produced by Rank, now sits easily in that classic Ealing era where the ordinary man took on the big guys and won. The innocent knockabout humour remains appealing. --Gary S Dalkin
Raining Stones is classic Ken Loach--an overtly bleak piece of drama shot through with defiant humour, a story of life beyond the edge of society. Bob (Bruce Jones in a role that foreshadows his more ludicrous Coronation Street character) is unemployed and struggling to make ends meet, especially with the added pressure of his young daughter's first communion and the expense involved. And that's it really--one man's struggle to maintain his dignity and provide for his family. Despite the film's frequent moments of comedy (more often than not provided by Loach regular Ricky Tomlinson), Raining Stones is ultimately more than a little disheartening. The film is in many ways similar to Loach's previous film, Riff Raff (1991), but here the examples of a community pulling together are countered with backstabbing and exploitation. In the end, there are no winners or losers in Loach's world, only those who survive and those who don't. --Phil Udell
A prequel of sorts to Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid chronicling the two outlaws' lives in the years before the events portrayed in the Newman/Redford movie.
Welcome to Death Row tells the unauthorised history of the most notorious rap label ever. And what a story it is, with enough blood and betrayal to satiate the Borgias and machinations that would make Machiavelli proud. The rise and fall of Death Row and its power-hungry CEO, Marion "Suge" Knight, makes The Godfather look like a bedtime story. The film centres on the testimony of Michael Harris--also known as "Harry O", as in octopus, because he had his business fingers in so many pies--who provided Suge Knight with the seed money to set up Death Row, and assigned his lawyer David Kenner to oversee the label's business affairs. The film traces the entire controversial history of the label, which at its height was turning over $500 million a year, and the impact it had on not only the music industry but American culture. "It was like working in a prison", says Doug Young, the label's record promoter, of Suge Knight's predilection for hiring gangsters and ex-felons. The film also details the relationship between Death Row and its biggest star, Tupac Shakur, and the effect that Shakur's sudden death in a Las Vegas drive-by shooting had on the label's fortunes (a story told in greater depth in Savidge's film Thug Immortal).Although none of the major players in this drama are represented on tape--Dr Dre and Interscope Records heads Jimmy Iovine and Ted Fields are as conspicuous by their absence as lawyer David Kenner and Suge Knight, the villains of the piece--the producers have unearthed an alarming number of believable behind-the-scenes sources including record promoters, managers, private investigators and former associates and employees of the label. Director Savidge wisely uses talking heads to tell his story, weaving into it a wealth of archive material and previously unseen home-video footage. The epic narrative is split into discrete chapters but, with so much information and opinion flying about, at times the chronology of events becomes confused. Yet this does little to spoil a documentary that goes a long way to revealing the intimate connection between the music industry and organised crime, and the desire for power and glory that drives them both.On the DVD: As if there wasn't enough information to digest in the documentary (which is presented in a clean 1:85.1 anamorphic format), the extra features on the DVD provide even more supplementary evidence. There are outtakes from the interviews used in the main feature, as well as additional interview footage of Snoop Dogg and Harry O. There is uncensored security camera footage of a fight in the lobby of the MGM Grand involving the Death Row entourage that preceded the death of Tupac Shakur by minutes, a music video for "Deep Cover" (the song that launched Snoop Dogg) and a fascinating audio commentary by director Savidge and producers Jeff Scheftel and Stephen A Housden, in which they relate the difficulties encountered in obtaining the trust of those they interviewed and the factors they took into consideration when constructing the film. Savidge recalls that the model they had in mind was the fractured, multi-perspective narrative of Kurosawa's Rashomon. --Chris Campion
Scotland Yard’s Chief Inspector Rose (played by William Mervyn) was first introduced in The Odd Man and It’s Dark Outside Granada’s cult crime series of the early ’60s and this sequel sees the acerbic detective taking on a further selection of intriguing cases alongside Donald Webster as his enigmatic manservant John Halifax; this series also features guest turns from Barbara Shelley Tenniel Evans and Robert Urquhart.
TBC
All the best episodes of the popular TV series featuring Michael Knight (Hasselhoff) and his computerised car KITT... Episode titles: Trust Doesn't Rust Knight of the Phoenix Parts One and Two Soul Survivor Knightmares A Good Knight's Work.
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