"Director: John R"

• Ariadne Auf Naxos - Strauss | DVD | (15/10/2007) from £15.59   |  Saving you £4.39 (34.84%)   |  RRP £16.99

  R. Strauss: Ariadne auf Naxos

• James Bond Collection Box Set | DVD | (14/11/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £129.99

  All 20 Special Edition James Bond DVDs are finally available packaged as one complete collection in a stunning 007 embossed steel box: the ultimate gift for any James Bond fan! Box set includes: 1. Dr. No (1962) - Sean Connery 2. From Russia With Love (1963) - Sean Connery 3. Goldfinger (1964) - Sean Connery 4. Thunderball (1965) - Sean Connery 5. You Only Live Twice (1967) - Sean Connery 6. On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) - George Lazenby 7. Diamonds Are Forever (1971) - Sean Connery 8. Live And Let Die (1973) - Roger Moore 9. The Man With The Golden Gun (1974) - Roger Moore 10. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) - Roger Moore 11. Moonraker (1979) - Roger Moore 12. For Your Eyes Only (1981) - Roger Moore 13. Octopussy (1983) - Roger Moore 14. A View To A Kill (1985) - Roger Moore 15. The Living Daylights (1987) - Timothy Dalton 16. Licence To Kill (1989) - Timothy Dalton 17. Goldeneye (1995) - Pierce Brosnan 18. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) - Pierce Brosnan 19. The World Is Not Enough (1999) - Pierce Brosnan 20. Die Another Day (2002) - Pierce Brosnan

• The Nutcracker | DVD | (23/02/1998) from £14.98   |  Saving you £3.01 (20.09%)   |  RRP £17.99

  If Christmas is an elusive, childhood state of mind, Peter Wright's 1985 Royal Ballet production of The Nutcracker, recorded at Covent Garden, is just the thing to recapture it. The delicately symmetrical choreography of Wright and Lev Ivanov ensures that the stage is constantly filled with the mesmerising enchantment demanded by Tchaikovsky's perennial favourite. The ballet's success will always lie, in part, in its familiarity and its intrinsic status as Christmas entertainment, but the best productions, like Wright's, give equal weight to the dark forces of Hoffmann's original tale, which must be overcome before good and innocence can prevail. Here, the sadness of Drosselmeyer is a potent thread in the ballet, resolved in a moving, well-judged moment as the curtain falls. There is real magic in the dancing, from Julie Rose's charming, constantly involved Clara to the irresistible images of the divertissements. But rightly, the laurels go to Lesley Collier as the Sugar Plum Fairy and Anthony Dowell as the Prince for a pas de deux that seems to hover above the stage without making contact. And, like Wright's production, the splendid sets of Julia Trevelyan Oman--combining traditional Victorian Christmas images, a delicate filigree flower garden and pre-Raphaelite angels--steer the right side of sentimentality. On the DVD: The Nutcracker has no extras on this DVD, although the booklet provides adequate production notes. The 4:3 format also provides adequate picture quality for a mid-1980s television production, although no amount of colour adjustment improves a slightly washed-out look. The sound, Linear PCM Stereo, makes the orchestra sound robust and solid at the occasional expense of subtlety. --Piers Ford

• Roustabout | DVD | (18/03/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  The Elvis formula was well in place by the time of 1964's Roustabout, a concoction of undistinguished songs (anyone remember "Poison Ivy League"?), pretty girls, tight pants, a colourful setting and a little bit of karate to prove that Elvis really had been studying his martial arts. With that understood, Roustabout is a better-than-average work-out for the King--not as peppy as Viva Las Vegas, but a good deal livelier than the sleepwalking It Happened at the World's Fair. Elvis plays a bad-boy singer roaming the highways on his Japanese motorcycle; laid up after an accident, he joins a carnival owned by the feisty Barbara Stanwyck. ("This is not a circus, it's a carnival. There's a big difference.") The cast goes from high to low: both giant-sized future James Bond villain Richard Kiel and tiny Billy Barty are carny regulars, and Raquel Welch has a small role in the opening scene. Teri Garr is one of the carnival dancers behind Elvis. The legendary costume designer Edith Head puts Elvis in a series of snappy windbreakers, but thank goodness he's also in black leather a lot. As if that weren't enough to recommend it, the movie has a sequence involving Elvis riding a cycle inside the "Wall of Death", a huge wooden cylinder with high walls. This bit actually inspired an entire Irish film in 1986, Eat the Peach, in which friends build a similar contraption after they watch Roustabout on tape. --Robert Horton

• The Omen (2006) | DVD | (23/10/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Damien is back in this remake of the chilling 1976 horror classic.

• I Love You Phillip Morris | Blu Ray | (02/08/2010) from £10.12   |  Saving you £15.86 (222.44%)   |  RRP £22.99

  "I Love You Phillip Morris" is the improbable but true story of a charismatic conman's journey from small-town businessman to flamboyant white-collar criminal who escapes from the Texas prison system on four separate occasions - all in the name of love.

• Max Payne | Blu Ray | (13/04/2009) from £7.44   |  Saving you £18.55 (249.33%)   |  RRP £25.99

  Max Payne (Mark Wahlberg) is an undercover cop fighting for justice and seeking revenge on the twisted thugs in the gritty streets of New York.

• Transformers - Season 1 | DVD | (11/10/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Remastered episodes of season 1! 1. More Than Meets The Eye (Part 1) 2. More Than Meets The Eye (Part 2) 3. More Than Meets The Eye (Part 3) 4. Transport To Oblivion 5. Roll For It 6. Divide And Conquer 7. Fire In The Sky 8. S.O.S. Dinobots 9. Fire On The Mountain 10. War Of The Dinobots 11. The Ultimate Doom: Brainwash (Part 1 of 3) 12. The Ultimate Doom: Search (Part 2 of 3) 13. The Ultimate Doom: Revival (Part 3 of 3) 14. Countdown To Extinction 15. A Plague Of Ins

• Hell In The Pacific | DVD | (08/04/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Hell in the Pacific is one of the most original and thoughtful war films of the 1960s. Fresh from Point Blank (1967) Lee Marvin reunited with director John Boorman for this elemental story of a US pilot and a Japanese naval officer washed ashore on an otherwise uninhabited Pacific island. Lee Marvin speaks English; Toshiro Mifune (The Seven Samurai) speaks Japanese; and the audience shares their frustrations as they attempt to communicate, as Boorman does not use subtitles. Once the men become aware of each other's presence they move from wary avoidance through conflict to an uneasy truce as they realise they will have to cooperate to survive. The naturalistic acting is key to the film's success, greatly aided by the fact that both stars served their respective countries in the Pacific theatre during the Second World War. Conrad Hall's cinematography is superb, using natural light to evoke the beauty of the island, and the wide Panavision frame to show the men's isolation and their reactions to each another. Boorman developed further his fascination with man against nature in Deliverance (1974) and The Emerald Forest (1985), and there wouldn't be another poetic war film until Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1999). On the DVD: The stereo sound is fine, atmospherically reproducing both the natural sounds of the island and Lalo Schfrin's imaginative score. The picture quality likewise is very good, with the image well focused with strong colours and plenty of detail. Unfortunately the 2.35:1 image has been panned and scanned to 1.33:1 TV ratio, destroying the scale and beauty of the compositions and sometimes meaning the viewer sees only one side of the interactions between the two men. Extras are perfunctory, with production notes, biographies of the stars and a "slide show". Considering even BBC2 occasionally shows the film in near full Pavavision and with Boorman's preferred, TS Elliot inspired ending, this DVD is a lost opportunity to bring a modern classic into the digital age. --Gary S Dalkin

• Annie/Annie 2/Oliver | DVD | (27/09/2010) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Annie: A plucky red-haired girl dreams of a life away outside her orphanage and its gin-soaked tyrant Miss Hannigan (played to perfection by Carol Burnett). One day Annie meets the famous billionaire Daddy Warbucks and the pair share spectacular times in 1930's New York City. But Miss Hannigan and her zany villainous colleagues are determined to spoil the fun for America's favourite orphan... Annie 2: The little red-head orphan is back in this film based on the classic Harold Gray comic strip. This time she and her faithful canine Sandy visit England after Daddy Warbucks is called over to be knighted by the Queen. Oliver!: Young Oliver Twist (Mark Lester) is an orphan who escapes the cheerless life of the workhouse and takes to the streets of 19th-Century London. He's immediately taken in by a band of street urchins headed by the lovable villain Fagin (Ron Moody) his fiendish henchman Bill Sikes (Oliver Reed) and his loyal apprentice The Artful Dodger (Jack Wild). Through his education in the fine points of pick-pocketing Oliver makes away with an unexpected treasure... a home and a family of his own.

• Benny Hill - The Best Of Benny Hill | DVD | (24/09/2001) from £14.96   |  Saving you £-1.98 (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Benny Hill was always best at quasi-silent slapstick, so it's no surprise that some of the best stuff on The Best of Benny Hill seems to owe more to the work of Mack Sennett and Fatty Arbuckle than to mainstream TV comedy. It may also be no coincidence that, unusually, this release began life in the cinema. There's some classic material on offer here: the extended opening item, "Hospital Care" for example, almost transcends buffoonery to become social comment, but best of all is the sketch which features Hill as a chat-show host (people really used to wear matching shirts and ties) attempting to deal with a West End star and starlet, the former monosyllabic, the latter catastrophically plastered. Among the 15 other items featured, the knowing send-up of the pretentiousness of avant-garde French cinema is also very funny, while the short linking items include a wicked parody of Alan Whicker and a sideswipe at barely literate actresses ("What's that in the road? A head?"). Fans will be pleased to know that Hill's regular supporting cast, including Patricia Hayes, Nicholas Parsons and Rita Webb, are all present. On the DVD: The Best of Benny Hill on DVD comes with full-frame picture as expected but no extras, which is a shame as at the very least some biographical material would have been welcome. --Roger Thomas

• Mrs Thursday - The Complete Series 1 | DVD | (01/04/2013) from £20.69   |  Saving you £19.30 (93.28%)   |  RRP £39.99

  Kathleen Harrison, one of Britain's best-loved character actresses, stars in this ratings-topping comedy-drama devised by Dixon of Dock Green creator Ted Willis. Featuring scripts by the celebrated dramatist Jack Rosenthal, this set contains the complete first series. Cheerful charlady Alice Thursday worked tirelessly for tycoon George Dunrich until the day he died. Now, she learns that she's inherited control of her late employer's multi-million pound corporation - along with his Mayfair m...

• Flight Of The Phoenix | Blu Ray | (12/03/2007) from £12.55   |  Saving you £7.44 (59.28%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Dennis Quaid headlines this tale of the survivors of a plane crash in the Gobi desert whose only hope of survival is to build a new plane from the wreckage of the old.

• Shaft In Africa | DVD | (05/03/2001) from £21.29   |  Saving you £-7.30 (-52.20%)   |  RRP £13.99

  Shaft in Africa, the second sequel to the original hit, foreshadows itself early on when Shaft, asked to go undercover in Africa to halt a modern-day slave trade, claims that he's not James Bond but strictly Sam Spade. Bond, however, is the operative model here, with John Shaft masquerading as an Ethiopian to infiltrate the slave business and bring it down. Yet everyone he encounters seems to know who he is and wants to kill him--but the string of dead bodies he leaves in his wake across two continents proves that no one is able to stop everyone's favourite hip private eye. Written by Stirling Silliphant, the film is long on action set pieces that are filmed with more energy than the previous movie, Shaft's Big Score. Given contemporary practices involving smugglers of illegal Chinese and Mexican immigrants, the plot isn't all that far-fetched. Roundtree, as usual, is the picture of unflappable cool--but don't get him mad. --Marshall Fine, Amazon.com

• ReGenesis - Series 2 | DVD | (04/05/2009) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £34.99

  Have we gone too far? The future is here. Bioterrorism. Designer babies. Frankenfoods. Suddenly Humanity possesses the ability to play god. But is it progress-or madness? Will cutting-edge science be our salvation? Or our demise? ReGenesis returns for a second series! Episodes Comprise: 1. China 2. Escape Mutant 3. The Cocktail 4. Dim And Dimmer 5. Massive Change 6. Our Men In Havana 7. Listen To Him 8. Haze 9. Gene In A Bottle 10. The Wild And The Innocent 11. Fishy 12. Lethargica 13. The End

• Die Hard | Blu Ray | (28/01/2013) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Bruce Willis is John McClane, a New York cop who flies to L.A. on Christmas Eve to visit his wife at a party in her company's lavish high-rise. Plans change once a group of terrorists, led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), seize the building and take everyone hostage. McClane slips away and becomes the only chance anyone has in this heart-stopping action thriller. Special Features: Commentary by Director John McTiernan and Jackson De Govia Scene Specific Commentary by Richard Edlund The Newscasts Interactive Still Gallery Trailers TV Spots Bonus Disc: Decoding Die Hard: Join the stars and filmmakers of the first four films for an unprecedented behind-the-scenes journey. Seven all-new featurettes take you so deep inside the world of Die Hard, you may have to shoot your way out. All-New Featurettes: Origins - Reinventing the Action Genre John McClane - Modern Day Hero Villains - Bad to the Bone Sidekicks - Along for the Ride Fight Sequences - Punishing Blows Action - Explosive Effects The Legacy - The Right Hero for the Right Time Die Hard Trailers - Die Hard - Die Hard 2 - Die Hard With a Vengeance - Die Hard 4.0 - A Good Day to Die Hard

• The Horse Soldiers | Blu Ray | (02/09/2013) from £14.83   |  Saving you £-4.84 (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  John Wayne teams with William Holden and eminent Western director John Ford for this frontier actioner packed with laughter romance and thrills (The Hollywood Reporter). Based on one of the most daring cavalry exploits in history The Horse Soldiers is both a moving tribute to the men who fought and died in that bloody war and a powerful action-packed drama. In command is hard bitten Colonel Marlowe (Wayne) a man who is strikingly contrasted by the company's gentle surgeon (Holden) and the beautiful but crafty Southern belle (Constance Towers) who's forced to accompany the Union raiders as they force their way deep into Southern territory to destroy a rebel stronghold at Newton Station.

• Path To War | DVD | (28/07/2003) from £15.17   |  Saving you £-9.18 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  As the successor to a martyred president Lyndon B. Johnson sought to transform America into a 'Great Society' of equal opportunity. Instead he became the symbol for the most unpopular war in U.S. history. Michael Gambon (as President Johnson) Donald Sutherland (as Clark Gifford) and Alec Baldwin (as Robert McNamara) star in a compelling drama of soaring ambition and shattered dreams set inside the LBJ White House in the volatile years leading up to and during Vietnam. This HBO production was decorated director John Frankenheimer's final film.

• Cars 2 | Blu Ray | (21/11/2011) from £19.99   |  Saving you £10.00 (33.30%)   |  RRP £29.99

  Star racecar Lightning McQueen and the incomparable tow truck Mater take their friendship to exciting new places in Cars 2 when they head overseas to compete in the first-ever World Grand Prix to determine the world's fastest car.

• Transporter, The / Broken Arrow / Point Break | DVD | (06/09/2004) from £19.98   |  Saving you £-11.99 (-150.10%)   |  RRP £7.99

  The Transporter Ex-Special Forces operator Frank Martin lives what seems to be a quiet life along the French Mediterranean hiring himself out as a mercenary transporter who moves goods - human or otherwise - from one place to another. No questions asked. Carrying out mysterious and sometimes dangerous tasks in his tricked-out BMW Martin finds his latest assignment could well be his last after his package is revealed to be a beautiful woman (Shu Qi) at the centre of a human trafficking ring... Broken Arrow Two military pilots (Travolta and Slater) engage in a no-holds-barred battle against time and each other in a race to recover two stolen nuclear warheads. When a Stealth Bomber crashes in the Utah desert during a top-secret test run the military quickly moves in to retrieve its two broken arrows. But the situation spins wildly out of control after one of the pilots reveals the crash to be part of an incredible nuclear extortion plot. A supersonic hit from renowned action director John Woo Broken Arrow is a breathless non-stop joyride. --Dennis Cunningham WCBS-TV. Point Break Keanu Reeves stars as Johnny Utah a clean-cut FBI rookie assigned to track down a gang of bank robbers operating in Southern California. Since his partner (Gary Busey) is convinced that the robbers are surfers Johnny decides to go undercover in the maverick world of surfing. He soon meets Bohdi (Patrick Swayze) a charismatic adrenaline junkie who'll do anything for a thrill..perhaps even rob banks. As the two become friends Johnny falls under the dangerous influence of Bohdi. He becomes addicted to the endless days of surfing and reckless nights of partying and even gets involved with Bohdi's ex-girlfriend (Lori Petty). As Johnny gets closer to cracking the case he learns the truth of Bohdi's most important lesson - if you want the ultimate thrill you have to pay the ultimate price.