"Director: John R"

• Fort Apache | DVD | (19/02/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  John Ford's 1948 classic stars John Wayne as a cavalry officer used to doing things a certain way out West at Fort Apache. Along comes a rigid, new commanding officer (Henry Fonda) who insists that everything on his watch be done by the book, including dealings with local Indians. The results are mixed: greater discipline at the fort, but increased hostilities with the natives. Ford deliberately leaves judgements about the wisdom of these changes ambiguous, but he also allows plenty of room in this wonderful film for the fullness of life among the soldiers and their families--community rituals, new romances--to blossom. Fonda, in an unusual role for him, is stern and formal as the new man in charge; Wayne is heroic as the rebellious second; Victor McLaglen provides comic relief; and Ward Bond is a paragon of sturdy and sentimental masculinity. All of this is set against the magnificent, poetic topography of Monument Valley. This is easily one of the greatest of American films. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com

• Toy Story/Toy Story 2 | Blu Ray | (10/05/2010) from £53.98   |  Saving you £-25.99 (-92.90%)   |  RRP £27.99

  Toy Story There is greatness in a film that can be discussed, dissected, and talked about late into the night. Then there is genius that is right in front of our faces--you smile at the spell it puts you into and are refreshed, and not a word needs to be spoken. This kind of entertainment is what they used to call "movie magic" and there is loads of it in this irresistible computer animation feature. Just a picture of these bright toys on the cover of Toy Story looks intriguing as it reawakens the kid in us. Filmmaker John Lasseter's shorts illustrate not only a technical brilliance but also a great sense of humour--one in which the pun is always intended. Lasseter thinks of himself as a storyteller first and an animator second, much like another film innovator, Walt Disney. Lasseter's story is universal and magical: what do toys do when they're not played with? Cowboy Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks), Andy's favourite bedroom toy, tries to calm the other toys (some original, some classic) during a wrenching time of year--the birthday party, when newer toys may replace them. Sure enough, Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) is the new toy that takes over the throne. Buzz has a crucial flaw, though--he believes he's the real Buzz Lightyear, not a toy. Bright and cheerful, Toy Story is much more than a 90-minute commercial for the inevitable bonanza of Woody and Buzz toys. Lasseter further scores with perfect voice casting, including Don Rickles as Mr. Potato Head and Wallace Shawn as a meek dinosaur. The director-animator won a special Oscar "For the development and inspired application of techniques that have made possible the first feature-length computer-animated film". In other words, this movie is great. --Doug Thomas Toy Story 2 John Lasseter and his gang of high-tech creators at Pixar create another entertainment for the ages. Like the handful of other great movie sequels, Toy Story 2 comments on why the first one was so wonderful while finding a fresh angle worthy of a new film. The craze of toy collecting becomes the focus here, as we find out Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) is not only a beloved toy to Andy but also a rare doll from a popular 60s children's show. When a greedy collector takes Woody, Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) launches a rescue mission with Andy's other toys. To say more would be a crime because this is one of the most creative and smile-inducing films since, well, Toy Story. Although the toys look the same as in the 1994 feature, Pixar shows how much technology has advanced: the human characters look more human, backgrounds are superior, and two action sequences that book-end the film are dazzling. And it's a hoot for kids and adults. The film is packed with spoofs, easily accessible in-jokes and inspired voice casting (with newcomer Joan Cusack especially a delight as Cowgirl Jessie). But as the Pixar canon of films illustrates, the filmmakers are storytellers first. Woody's heart-tugging predicament can easily be translated into the eternal debate of living a good life versus living for forever. Toy Story 2 was deservedly a huge box-office success. --Doug Thomas, Amazon.com

• Faces Of Death | DVD | (15/12/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

• Guns At Batasi | DVD | (02/08/2010) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Guns At Batas

• Four Men And A Prayer | DVD | (12/05/2014) from £8.99   |  Saving you £4.00 (44.49%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Four Men And A Prayer

• Waltz Of The Toreadors | DVD | (14/05/2007) from £8.98   |  Saving you £3.00 (42.92%)   |  RRP £9.99

  The immortal Peter Sellers is hilarious as a pompous retired general who still has a taste for the ladies in French playwright Jean Anouilh's philosophical farce. A lusty comedy of manners ""Waltz of the Toreadors"" tempers its treatment of an old rake's delusions with generous dollops of wit and compassion.

• Mickey Rooney Collection | DVD | (14/04/2008) from £10.49   |  Saving you £-6.50 (N/A%)   |  RRP £3.99

  The Mickey Rooney Collection (3 Discs)

• Robin Hood - Series 1 Vol.3 | DVD | (26/02/2007) from £6.54   |  Saving you £13.45 (67.30%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The BBC's Robin Hood is a big budget re-imagining of the classic tale with a unique blend of exhilarating action wit and romance all headed by a bright young cast of actors. Robin Hood delights as he fights the authority of the evil Sheriff of Nottingham with outrageous scams disguises tricks and ingenuity breathtaking archery and incredible swordplay. All the while he romances the heavenly Maid Marian and champions the poor with his band of merry men! This release features the third part of the first series

• Shaft Trilogy | DVD | (05/03/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £30.99

  The original and hippest version of Shaft cruised onto cinema screens in 1971. John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) is an African-American private eye who has a rocky relationship with cops, an even rockier one with Harlem gangsters, and a healthy sex life. The script finds Shaft tracking down the kidnapped daughter of a black mobster, but the pleasure of the film is the sum of its attitude, Roundtree's uncompromising performance, and the thrilling, Oscar-winning score by Isaac Hayes. Director Gordon Parks (The Learning Tree) seems fond of certain detective genre clichés (e.g., the hero walking into his low-rent office and finding a hood waiting to talk with him), but he and Roundtree make those moments their own. Shaft produced a couple of sequels, a follow-up television series, and a remake starring Samuel L. Jackson, but none had the impact this movie did. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com Shaft's Big Score is the first sequel to the super-hip 1971 original. When a pal of detective John Shaft is murdered in a bombing, New York's coolest private eye finds himself caught in the middle of a power struggle between black and white gangsters over the numbers racket in Queens. Directed by Gordon Parks (who does a brief cameo as a croupier in an illegal casino) and written by Ernest Tidyman (both of whom made the original Shaft), this film lacks the pacing of its progenitor. Roundtree is at his best when he's questioning a woman he's just met about a suspect while at the same time beguiling her into the sack (ah, those lazy, crazy days of the sexual revolution). The finale--a shootout in a cemetery, followed by a car-boat-helicopter chase through Queens and up the Harlem River--is preposterously drawn-out: Shaft, impervious to machine-gun fire, winds up tripping, spraining his ankle, and limping while running from the chopper; two shots later, he's sprinting like a halfback. Look for late Muhammad Ali trainer Drew Bundini Brown as a wise-cracking mobster. --Marshall Fine, Amazon.comShaft 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

• The Little Mermaid/the Little Mermaid II (Disney) | DVD | (06/11/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £29.99

  The Little Mermaid: Disney's 28th animated masterpiece. Awash with breathtaking animation unforgettably colourful characters and two Academy Awards for score and song ""Under The Sea "" The Little Mermaid is one of Disney's most cherished films. Ariel the fun-loving and mischievous mermaid is enchanted with all things human. Disregarding her father's order to stay away from the world above the sea she swims to the surface and in a raging storm rescues the prince of her dreams. Determined to be human she strikes a bargain with the devious sea witch Ursula and trades her fins and beautiful voice for legs. With her best friend the adorable and chatty Flounder and her reluctant chaperone Sebastian the hilarious reggae-singing Caribbean crab at her side Ariel must win the prince's love and save her father's kingdom -- all in a heart-pounding race against time! The Little Mermaid II - Return To Sea: After rejoicing over the birth of their daughter Melody Ariel and Eric must face a new threat from Ursula's revengeful sister Morgana - a threat that forces them to hide Melody's true mermaid heritage. Melody a young princess curious about her roots ultimately ventures into the sea against her parents' wishes. There she meets new friends and in her dreams to be a mermaid becomes a pawn in Morgana's plot to gain control of the Seven Seas. Ariel must reunite with her childhood friends Sebastian Flounder and Scuttle to rescue her daughter and restore harmony to the family.

• The Town That Cancelled Christmas | DVD | (02/11/2009) from £8.08   |  Saving you £1.91 (23.64%)   |  RRP £9.99

  The Town That Cancelled Christmas

• The Death And Life Of Bobby Z | Blu Ray | (14/04/2008) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  One Man. Two Lives. Countless Enemies. Marked for death by a biker gang ex-Marine convict Tim Kearney (Paul Walker) just got one last chance to walk out of jail alive. A scheming DEA agent (Laurence Fishburne) needs somebody to impersonate recently deceased drug-lord Bobby Z... and Tim happens to be a dead ringer. It's a risky proposition but if Tim plays his part right he may be able to claim Bobby Z's smoking hot exgirlfriend (Olivia Wilde) and a cool fortune in illegal profits. Unfortunately taking on Bobby Z's name also means taking on his bloodthirsty enemies. Caught in the crossfire Tim runs for his life as he tries to find a way out of his deadly masquerade.

• Noah's Ark | DVD | (29/03/2010) from £14.00   |  Saving you £-11.01 (N/A%)   |  RRP £2.99

  The ancient story of good surviving evil and in particular of one man's faith unshakeable in the face of ridicule scorn and danger. Oscar-winner Jon Voight Mary Steenburgen F. Murray Abraham and James Coburn star in this lavish and original interpretation of Noah's Ark with dazzling special effects computerised creatures depicting extinct species and a cast of thousands of animals all combining to tell the story of the epic Bible legend.

• Hammer Horror Resurrected Box Set | DVD | (20/10/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £59.99

  This Hammer Horror Resurrected box set collects Hammer movies from the mid-1960s (plus a stray 1975 title), an era when Hammer was making sequels or even sequels to sequels and occasionally cobbling together films with a lack of care that would not have passed muster in the 1950s. Nevertheless, all of these films have elements that remain pleasing and a good half of the titles represented are in the front-rank of the Hammer canon. Rasputin the Mad Monk is a bloodied-up slice of Russian history, hindered somewhat by the need to limit the sets to those that could be recycled from Dracula Prince of Darkness and a legal injunction to refrain from naming names. Christopher Lee makes a fair fist of the lead role, employing his Dracula staring eyes and wringing hands to go with an impressive false beard and using sheer force of will to dominate the Tsar's court, especially the elegantly masochistic lady-in-waiting Barbara Shelley. Frankenstein Created Woman sends Peter Cushing's Baron back to the drawing board and finds him diverted from his usual brain surgery and corpse-stitching into experimenting with cryogenic suspension and soul transference. Terence Fisher, on his third Hammer Frankenstein, directs the cynical script with cold flair. The side is let down only by Playboy Playmate Susan Denberg's insufficiently devastating lady monster. The Vengeance of She is the mildest effort in this bunch, a quickie sequel to She in which blonde, bosomy Czech "discovery" Olinka Berova did not turn out to be an international sensation along the lines of previous Hammer babes Ursula Andress and Raquel Welch. The feeble storyline peters out as the heroine is plagued by dreams that suggest she is the reincarnation of the evil ice queen Ayesha but then turns out not to be. The Plague of the Zombies is a grimmer Hammer, with cartoonish social comment ladled onto the voodoo goings-on. Cornish squire John Carson (even chillier than the usual Christopher Lee) enjoys rampaging around the countryside with his hunting pals abusing comely lasses while his fortune is kept going by the exploited living dead working his tin mine. Andre Morell has the Peter Cushing role as a concerned expert who recognises that there's voodoo in the air, and Jacqueline Pearce--unforgettable in director John Gilling's companion piece, The Reptile--is suitably affecting as the secondary heroine who turns into a seductive zombie and gets her head lopped off. In Quatermass and the Pit boffin Professor Quatermass (Andrew Keir) unearths an eerie history of insect aliens who have influenced human evolution when workmen extending the London underground discover a five million year old Martian spaceship. This is a rare intelligent science fiction movie with genuine ideas to go along with its creepy moments. 1975's To the Devil a Daughter was the last gasp of Hammer's horror cycle, an attempt to rejig Dennis Wheatley's once-popular Satanist-bashing novel into a post-Exorcist/Omen Devil movie. Fallen priest Christopher Lee tries to get teenage novice Nastassja Kinski pregnant with a monster, while pipe smoking occultist Richard Widmark does his best to foil the dastard. Sloppy, silly and awkwardly structured, with an especially limp climax (the villain is foiled by being bashed with a rock), it does manage some chills along the way, and has an interesting supporting cast of neurotics (especially Denholm Elliott, cowering inside a pentagram). This release presents a fuller version than some video or TV prints, including a strange sequence in which Kinski's womb is invaded by a repulsive demon child. The very young Kinski has a nude scene, but so does Christopher Lee's game stunt double. On the DVD: Hammer Horror Resurrected box set has no extras at all. But the films are presented in nice, anamorphic transfers which bring out the pretty pastels of the landscape around Bray Studios and the rich red splashes of blood. --Kim Newman

• Young Mr Lincoln | DVD | (21/02/2005) from £13.48   |  Saving you £-3.49 (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Revered director John Ford's fictionalized account of the early life of the American president as a young lawyer facing his greatest court case...

• Big Trouble In Little China Play Exclusive | DVD | (23/03/2010) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Directed by master film-maker John Carpenter, this edge-of-your seat adventure stars Kurt Russell as Jack Burton, a tough talking, wisecracking truck driver whose hum-drum life on the road takes a sudden supernatural tailspin when his best friend's fiance is kidnapped. Speeding to the rescue, Jack finds himself deep beneath San Francisco's Chinatown. It's a murky, creature-filled world ruled by Lo Pan, a 2000-year-old magician who mercilessly presides over an empire of sprits. Dodging demons and facing baffling terrors, Jack battles his way through Lo Pan's dark domain in a full-throttle, action-riddled ride to rescue the girl. Co-starring Kim Cattrall, this effects-filled sci-fi spectacle speeds to an incredible, twist-taking finish.

• Laurel & Hardy Triple Pack | DVD | (30/01/2012) from £6.79   |  Saving you £13.20 (66.00%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Utopia:Heading for a newly inherited island, the boys are shipwrecked and marooned on an atoll which has just emerged from the sea. Along with their cook, a stowaway and a girl who is fleeing her fiance, they set up their own government on the atoll. All goes well until the singer’s fiance arrives to reveal that the new island is rich in uranium deposits. People from all over the world flock to the island, but soon the situation turns chaotic when a revolt seeks to overthrow and execute the island’s original inhabitants. Flying DeucesStan and Ollie are holidaying in Paris. Ollie intends to remain in France to marry Georgette (Jean Parker), the innkeeper’s daughter, but is heartbroken when he finds that she’s fallen in love and married dashing Foreign Legion officer Francois (Reginald Gardiner). Ollie decides instead to jump into Seine, along with Stan, but they are talked out of it by Francois who suggests they join the Legion. When they try to leave after Ollie has recovered from being jilted they are charged with desertion and sentenced to the firing squad. March Of The Wooden Soldiers:The film’s story takes place in Toyland which is inhabited by Mother Goose and other well known fairy tale characters. Stannie Dun and Ollie Dee (played by Laurel and Hardy) live in a shoe which is owned by villainous Silas Barnaby who is looking to marry Bo Peep.Our heroes try to borrow money from their employer, the toymaker, to pay off the mortgage on the shoe and keep Little Bo Peep from the clutches of the evil Barnaby. When that fails, they trick Barnaby into marrying Stannie Dum instead of Bo Peep. Engaged, Barnaby unleashes the bogeymen from their caverns to destroy Toyland.

• Sherlock Holmes - The Crooked Man / The Speckled Band | DVD | (09/06/2003) from £4.93   |  Saving you £5.06 (102.64%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Two more cases for Holmes and Watson to solve. The Crooked Man: A scandal is threatening the honour of the Army and suddenly Colonel James Barclay is found dead. His wife Nancy is immediately suspected of murder but who is the strange crooked man who holds the key to the mystery? The Speckled Band: Julia Stoner's enigmatic dying words have haunted her younger sister for the last two years. In desperation she asks for the help of Holmes and Watson who discover an undetectable murder weapon in Julia's remote country house which has no place in the English countryside.

• Edward The Seventh | DVD | (01/09/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £39.99

  The life and times of Edward VII dramatised for the television. The BAFTA award winning 1975 drama comes to DVD for the first time! Episode titles: The Boy Experiment In Education The New World Alix A Hundred Thousand Welcomes The Invisible Queen Dearest Prince The Royal Quadrille Scandal The Years of Waiting King At Last The Peacemaker Good Old Teddy!

• Times Table Adventure 2x Table : Journey to Calculus | DVD | (13/06/2011) from £8.45   |  Saving you £-3.46 (-69.30%)   |  RRP £4.99

  Learning your times tables is not the end of the world..........or is it? Billy prefers comics to maths but when asked to save Planet Calculus from Zeta the evil Number Cruncher, that's exactly what it becomes. Join Billy on this fantastic interactive adventure, learn your times tables and save the world. The Times Table Adventure is an interactive story of learning and fun, packed with songs and quizzes that make learning your tables a whole adventure. Playable on any DVD player, together wi...