Video Find the Perfect Gift    Send a Gift Certificate
Search 
Home › Drama
Review Acorn Media / Testament Of Youth [1979]
Actors & Directors
  • Hazel Douglas
  • Cheryl Campbell
  • Moira Armstrong
  • Rupert Frazer
  • Rosalie Crutchley
  • Emrys James
Release date: 2001-01-22
Run time: 220 min.
RRP: £16.99
Price: £45.00

Review Testament Of Youth [1979] / Acorn Media:


Actors & Directors
  • Sophie Okonedo
  • James Nesbitt
  • Berwick Kaler
  • Juliet Aubrey
  • Robert Carlyle
  • Michael Winterbottom
Release date: 1999-02-01
Run time: 82 min.
RRP: £10.99
Price: £14.98

Review Go Now [1995] / 2 Entertain Video:


Review Entertainment in Video / Gummo
Actors & Directors
  • Chloe Sevigny
  • Harmony Korine
  • Max Perlich
  • Linda Manz
  • Jacob Reynolds
Release date: 1999-04-26
Run time: 85 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £24.95

Review Gummo / Entertainment in Video:


Review 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment / Inn Of The Sixth Happiness [1958]
Actors & Directors
  • Ingrid Bergman
  • Robert Donat
  • Mark Robson
  • Athene Seyler
  • Michael David
  • Curd Jürgens
Release date: 1995-06-05
Run time: 152 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £9.95

Review Inn Of The Sixth Happiness [1958] / 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment:


Review Warner Home Video / Blood And Orchids [1986]
Actors & Directors
  • Sean Young
  • Jane Alexander
  • Jerry Thorpe
  • Jose Ferrer
  • Kris Kristofferson
Release date: 1996-02-12
Run time: 174 min.
Price: £9.99

Review Blood And Orchids [1986] / Warner Home Video:


Review Cinema Club / Jilly Cooper's The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous [1997]
Actors & Directors
  • Hugh Bonneville
  • Robert Knights
  • Joanna Jeffrees
  • Stephen Billington
  • Derek de Lint
  • Nichola Cordey
Release date: 2002-07-08
Run time: 146 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £9.99

Review Jilly Cooper's The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous [1997] / Cinema Club:


Review Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainm / Her Majesty Mrs Brown [1997]
Actors & Directors
  • Judi Dench
  • Geoffrey Palmer
  • Antony Sher
  • Billy Connolly
  • John Madden
  • Gerard Butler
Release date: 1998-07-06
Run time: 101 min.
RRP: £14.99
Price: £0.84

Review Her Majesty Mrs Brown [1997] / Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainm:

A romantic drama, this John Madden film looks at the relationship between Queen Victoria and John Brown, a commoner who, though a servant, becomes her closest friend and confidant. As such, he proves the catalyst to bring her back into public life and out of her private mourning for the late Prince Albert. But the closeness of their friendship sets tongues wagging about the impropriety of what appears to be an affair between queen and commoner (an issue the film never directly addresses). Mrs Brown's charm lies in the flinty give-and-take between the wonderfully starchy Judi Dench as Victoria and the robust Scottish comedian Billy Connolly, here playing it straight as a strong-willed Scotsman who comes to enjoy the power he wields by virtue of having the queen's ear. Antony Sher is also striking as Prime Minister Disraeli, in a performance that all but shimmers with unspoken malice. -Marshall Fine.

Review MTM HOME VIDEO / Ruth Rendell Mysteries - A New Lease Of Death [1991]
Actors & Directors
  • Herbert Wise
  • Sharon Maughan
  • Christopher Ravenscroft
  • George Baker
  • Peter Egan
  • Denis Lill
Release date: 1998-03-16
Run time: 143 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £6.53

Review Ruth Rendell Mysteries - A New Lease Of Death [1991] / MTM HOME VIDEO:


Review 4 Front Video / To Kill A Mockingbird [1962]
Actors & Directors
  • Ruth White (II)
  • Gregory Peck
  • Rosemary Murphy
  • John Megna
  • Robert Mulligan
  • Frank Overton
Release date: 2001-01-15
Run time: 124 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £9.99

Review To Kill A Mockingbird [1962] / 4 Front Video:

Ranked 34 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest American Films, To Kill a Mockingbird is quite simply one of the finest family-oriented dramas ever made. A beautiful and deeply affecting adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee, the film retains a timeless quality that transcends its historically dated subject matter (racism in the Depression-era South) and remains powerfully resonant in present-day America with its advocacy of tolerance, justice, integrity and loving, responsible parenthood. It's tempting to call this an important "message" movie that should be required viewing for children and adults alike, but this riveting courtroom drama is anything but stodgy or pedantic. As Atticus Finch, the small-town Alabama lawyer and widower father of two, Gregory Peck gives one of his finest performances with his impassioned defence of a black man (Brock Peters) wrongfully accused of the rape and assault of a young white woman. While his children, Scout (Mary Badham) and Jem (Philip Alford), learn the realities of racial prejudice and irrational hatred, they also learn to overcome their fear of the unknown as personified by their mysterious, mostly unseen neighbour Boo Radley (Robert Duvall, in his brilliant, almost completely nonverbal screen debut). What emerges from this evocative, exquisitely filmed drama is a pure distillation of the themes of Harper Lee's enduring novel, a showcase for some of the finest American acting ever assembled in one film, and a rare quality of humanitarian artistry (including Horton Foote's splendid screenplay and Elmer Bernstein's outstanding score) that seems all but lost in the chaotic morass of modern cinema. -Jeff Shannon.

Review Paramount Home Entertainment / Sex And The City - Series 2 [1999]
Actors & Directors
  • Sarah Jessica Parker
Release date: 2001-11-05
Run time: 471 min.
RRP: £29.99
Price: £11.25

Review Sex And The City - Series 2 [1999] / Paramount Home Entertainment:

Much like the novels of Fanny Burney or Jane Austen 200 years before, Sex and the City tackles that perennial female conundrum, how to maintain independence from men (intellectual, sexual, financial) while seeking the ideal life-partner for whom that much-cherished independence can safely be sacrificed. So it is that Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha prowl relentlessly the canyons of Manhattan in search of mates, all of whom fall woefully short of their needs in one crucial way or another. Yet, with biological clocks ticking and suppressed nesting instincts fighting back, the foursome occasionally find themselves dangerously close to despair. The dating game can be deadly serious sometimes. Which is why Sex and the City is not just good TV, it's great TV: for all its refreshingly cynical wit and superficial vivaciousness, the show has at its heart a streak of pathos and painful truth that resonates deeply with its audience. In the show's second season, the scrutiny falls more on the women than their succession of useless dates. Carrie has to learn the painful truth about Big all over again; Miranda has panic attacks about being alone for the rest of her life; Sam is humiliated by the ladies who lunch into confessing that she's a whore; and Charlotte is reduced to trading kinky foot massages for free shoes. Savage love, indeed. On the DVD: Sex and the City, Season 2 has all 18 episodes on three discs. Frustratingly, the menus have no "Play All" facility so you can't just sit back and enjoy-each episode requires navigation from the main menu to an episode list to a redundant preview screen before the play selection is offered. [+]
There are mini trailers for each episode and a short (eight-minute) promo featurette. The picture is a little fuzzy in places, doubtless the result of transfer from NTSC format, but is still an improvement over the first season. -Mark Walker.

Review Artificial Eye / The Piano Teacher [2001]
Actors & Directors
  • Susanne Lothar
  • Benoît Magimel
  • Isabelle Huppert
  • Annie Girardot
  • Udo Samel
  • Michael Haneke
Release date: 2002-05-27
Run time: 129 min.
RRP: £15.99
Price: £8.50

Review The Piano Teacher [2001] / Artificial Eye:

An unexpected critical (Grand Prix at Cannes) and commercial (three months in London's West End) success on its release in 2001, The Piano Teacher is a provocative, but ultimately frustrating, film. The intensifying relationship between Erika Kohut, a Viennese piano teacher whose musical focus is gradually undone by sexual repression, and Walter Klemmer, her uninhibited but unsuspecting student and admirer, lacks an underlying motivation, either physical or emotional, to sustain the tortuous encounters of the film's later stages. Director Michael Haneke powerfully evokes the claustrophobic décor of the flat that Kohut shares with her dictatorial yet ineffectual mother, with whom her relationship progresses from the pitiful to the farcical. And farce of the blackest kind is what the film descends to, as Kohut and Klemmer play out a vicious game of sado-masochistic control with an intriguing but indecisive conclusion. Isabelle Huppert is magnificently assured as Kohut, but Benoît Magimel often seems confused as Klemmer, while Annie Girardot resorts to a caricature of the mother. Fans of classical piano will enjoy the masterclass and rehearsal sequences during the first hour, though music is then relegated to a minor role-its deeper relevance to the film being ultimately difficult to define. English subtitles are provided, and the monochrome shades in which the scenes abound come through with suitably wan intensity. Yet it's hard not to feel that a more profound inquiry into the darker side of sexual desire has been lost along the way. -Richard Whitehouse.

Review 2 Entertain Video / The Six Wives Of Henry VIII - Catherine Howard [1970]
Actors & Directors
  • Elvi Hale
  • Keith Michell
  • Anne Stallybrass
  • Annette Crosbie
  • Naomi Capon
  • Dorothy Tutin
  • John Glenister
Release date: 2000-01-24
Run time: 89 min.
RRP: £10.99
Price: £2.19

Review The Six Wives Of Henry VIII - Catherine Howard [1970] / 2 Entertain Video:


Review Warner Home Video / What Ever Happened To Baby Jane [1962]
Actors & Directors
  • Joan Crawford
  • Julie Allred
  • Robert Aldrich
  • Victor Buono
  • Bette Davis
  • Wesley Addy
Release date: 2000-09-04
Run time: 128 min.
RRP: £10.99
Price: £2.75

Review What Ever Happened To Baby Jane [1962] / Warner Home Video:

A cultish horror favourite, 1962's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? will make you think twice before hungrily unveiling a covered plate of food. Bette Davis stars as Jane Hudson, a onetime child actress and singer. As an elderly woman, she wishes to revive her vaudevillian career, but she has become a grotesque caricature of her former self. Over the years as her star faded, the star of her older sister Blanche (Joan Crawford) rose, outshining the career of the has-been Baby Jane. Jane was relegated to minor roles, which she only won when Blanche demanded that she be awarded them. The film opens years after a calamitous car accident leaves Blanche in a wheelchair, with no one to care for her except the increasingly insane and sadistic Jane and their servant, Norman. Trying to punish Blanche for her years of success, Jane tortures the house-bound woman, slowly trying to starve her to death, all the while attempting to recapture the fame of her youth. This dark drama also stars Victor Buono as the hefty pianist who answers Jane's ad for an accompanist, hoping to milk some money off the demented old woman. Both Buono and Davis were nominated for Oscars for their roles in this suspenseful and somewhat sick thriller that exploited well the real-life antagonism between Davis and Crawford, while at the same time rejuvenating both their careers. -Jenny Brown.

Review Warner Home Video / Dallas: War Of The Ewings
Actors & Directors
  • Patrick Duffy
  • Larry Hagman
  • Steve Kanaly
  • Linda Gray
  • Michael Preece
  • Michelle Johnson
Release date: 1999-03-08
Run time: 82 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £54.95

Review Dallas: War Of The Ewings / Warner Home Video:


Review Tartan Video / Mother [1926]
Actors & Directors
  • Nikolai Batalov
  • Vsevolod Pudovkin
  • Vera Baranovskaya
Release date: 1997-07-28
Run time: 81 min.
RRP: £15.99
Price: £1.95

Review Mother [1926] / Tartan Video:


Review Hollywood Pictures Home Video / Titus [2000]
Actors & Directors
  • Osheen Jones
  • Jessica Lange
  • Julie Taymor
  • Anthony Hopkins
  • Raz Degan
  • Dario D'Ambrosi
Release date: 2001-03-12
Run time: 155 min.
RRP: £9.99
Price: £19.95

Review Titus [2000] / Hollywood Pictures Home Video:

Considered by some to be Shakespeare's worst play, Titus Andronicus is a bloodthirsty tragedy full of villainous heroes and bottomless revenge-hardly the stuff of big-screen directorial debuts, it would seem. Yet Julie Taymor dives headfirst into moviemaking with Titus, a spectacular adaptation that manages to find beauty and humour in the piles of carnage. The story begins simply enough by Shakespearean standards: celebrated Roman warrior Titus Andronicus (Anthony Hopkins) returns from a hard-won victory to bury his slain sons and avenge their deaths by killing the eldest son of his enemy, Tamora, queen of the Goths (Jessica Lange). Tamora responds by seducing the impressionable new emperor and setting all of Rome into a downward spiral of revenge, madness, and death. Taymor, who won a Tony for her Broadway production of The Lion King, throws all her theatrical sensibilities at the story-armies are exquisitely choreographed, blood is shed so beautifully that it hardly seems real, and characters are costumed in symbolic combinations of ancient Roman and 20th-century garb. She plays up the dark comedy at every opportunity, and an eclectic and powerful score by Taymor's composer husband Elliot Goldenthal helps lend a carnival flavour to the story's most gruesome moments. Excellent performances from Hopkins (whose deranged Titus is more than a little reminiscent of Hannibal Lecter), Lange, and the supporting cast help make the endless treachery credible. -Claire Campbell, Amazon. com.

Review Artificial Eye / Fanny And Alexander [1982]
Actors & Directors
  • Ingmar Bergman
  • Pernilla Allwin
  • Carl Billquist
  • Kristian Almgren
  • Kristina Adolphson
  • Börje Ahlstedt
Release date: 2002-11-04
Run time: 301 min.
RRP: £22.99
Price: £14.98

Review Fanny And Alexander [1982] / Artificial Eye:

Fanny and Alexander is one of the more upbeat and accessible films from Ingmar Bergman. This autobiographical story follows the lives of two children during one tumultuous year. After the death of the children's beloved father, a local theatre owner, their mother marries a strict clergyman. Their new life is cold and ascetic, especially when compared to the unfettered and impassioned life they knew with their father. Most of the story is seen through the eyes of the little boy and is often told in dreamlike sequences. Colourful, insightful, and optimistic, this is far less grim than most of Bergman's work. It was awarded four of the six Oscars for which it was nominated in 1984, including Best Foreign Language Film. Though this was announced as his last film, Bergman continued to work into the late 1990s, though mostly for Swedish television. -Rochelle O'Gorman, Amazon. com.

Review Vision Video Ltd. / Anne Of Green Gables - The Complete Sequel [1988]
Actors & Directors
  • Patricia Hamilton
  • Kevin Sullivan
  • Colleen Dewhurst
  • Megan Follows
  • Marilyn Lightstone
  • Richard Farnsworth
Release date: 1999-07-19
Run time: 360 min.
Price: £12.99

Review Anne Of Green Gables - The Complete Sequel [1988] / Vision Video Ltd.:

This gorgeous adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery's classic children's story is well worth watching with the whole family. Produced for Canadian television, it's one of those rare productions that actually sticks to the book and even enhances it through first-rate performances and an excellent script. Set on bucolic Prince Edward Island in the late 19th century, Anne of Green Gables is the story of Anne Shirley, an imaginative and headstrong orphan. When brother and sister Marilla and Mathew Cuthbert decide to adopt an orphan boy to help Matthew work the farm, they are astonished when Anne arrives at the train station by mistake. "What use is she to us?" grumbles the gruff Marilla. "We might be of some use to her", answers Matthew, who has taken an instant liking to the talkative Anne. As Anne grows up, her adventures are both hilarious and moving. It's a delight to watch as she forms a friendship with the beautiful Diana and her admirer-the dashing Gilbert Blythe-then dyes her hair green, cracks a slate over Gilbert's head when he calls her "Carrots", and finds a sympathetic teacher who encourages her to attend college. Richard Farnsworth is perfect as the shy and gentle bachelor Matthew, who confides to Anne that he never went courting because "I would have had to say something". Colleen Dewhurst delivers a nuanced and powerful performance as Marilla, a seemingly cold-hearted spinster whose no-nonsense exterior conceals a warm heart. [+]
And as Anne, Megan Follows strikes the perfect note, maturing from freckle-faced orphan to elegant and poised young woman. -Elisabeth Keating.

Review Ica Projects Ltd. / Kids Return [1997]
Actors & Directors
  • Takeshi Kitano
  • Michisuke Kashiwaya
  • Ken Kaneko
  • Masanobu Ando
  • Leo Morimoto
  • Hatsuo Yamatani
Release date: 2000-09-11
Run time: 107 min.
Price: £5.99

Review Kids Return [1997] / Ica Projects Ltd.:


Review Warner Home Video / Sweet Dreams [1986]
Actors & Directors
  • Ann Wedgeworth
  • James Staley
  • Ed Harris
  • David Clennon
  • Karel Reisz
  • Jessica Lange
Release date: 1996-04-15
Run time: 110 min.
Price: £5.99

Review Sweet Dreams [1986] / Warner Home Video:


Browse Drama:

Models & Brands:
Testament Of Youth [1979], Go Now [1995], Gummo, Inn Of The Sixth Happiness [1958], Blood And Orchids [1986], Jilly Cooper's The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous [1997], Her Majesty Mrs Brown [1997], Ruth Rendell Mysteries - A New Lease Of Death [1991], To Kill A Mockingbird [1962], Sex And The City - Series 2 [1999], The Piano Teacher [2001], The Six Wives Of Henry VIII - Catherine Howard [1970], What Ever Happened To Baby Jane [1962], Dallas: War Of The Ewings, Mother [1926], Titus [2000], Fanny And Alexander [1982], Anne Of Green Gables - The Complete Sequel [1988], Kids Return [1997], Sweet Dreams [1986]

Top headlines:
Search 
DVD Rental: try it for free