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Review Cinema Club  / Gulliver's Travels [1996]
Actors & Directors
  • James Fox
  • Charles Sturridge
  • Mary Steenburgen
  • Ted Danson
  • Ned Beatty
  • Edward Fox
Release date: 2002-04-08
Run time: 206 min.
Creator: Simon Moore
RRP: £5.99
Price: £9.74

Review Gulliver's Travels [1996] / Cinema Club:

Ebulliently imaginative and far more cleverly presented than you would expect from a TV miniseries, this adaptation of Gulliver's Travels succeeds by never pandering to the lowest common denominator. Closely based on Jonathan Swift's 1726 classic, it is enhanced by dazzling special effects from Jim Henson Productions and a superb, multi-ethnic cast. The biggest surprise is Ted Danson in the title role-one of his best performances, even if he is the only person in England with an American accent. He conveys amusement, amazement and intelligence as he travels from one strange country into another. Not that anyone back in Blighty believes Mr Gulliver's tales of little people or giants. The story is told in flashback from an insane asylum, where he is forcibly confined. This far outshines several previous adaptations of Swift's satirical novel. -Rochelle O'Gorman, Amazon. com.

Review Mosaic  / If These Walls Could Talk 2
Actors & Directors
  • Jenny O'Hara
  • Elizabeth Perkins
  • Anne Heche
  • Vanessa Redgrave
  • Paul Giamatti
  • Jane Anderson
  • Marian Seldes
  • Martha Coolidge
Release date: 2003-01-27
Run time: 96 min.
Creator: Sylvia Sichel
RRP: £5.99
Price: £14.99

Review If These Walls Could Talk 2 / Mosaic:


Review Universal Pictures UK  / Lock, Stock And Four Stolen Hooves [2000]
Actors & Directors
  • Sheree Folkson
  • Ralph Brown
  • Daniel Caltagirone
  • Lorraine Chase
  • Nick Brimble
  • Terry Bird
Release date: 2000-06-05
Creator: Chris Baker
RRP: £10.99
Price: £7.50

Review Lock, Stock And Four Stolen Hooves [2000] / Universal Pictures UK:


Review Sony Pictures Home Entertainment  / Picnic [1956]
Actors & Directors
  • Kim Novak
  • Susan Strasberg
  • Joshua Logan
  • Cliff Robertson
  • Betty Field
  • William Holden
Release date: 1994-08-30
Run time: 108 min.
Creator: William Inge
RRP: £10.99
Price: £19.95

Review Picnic [1956] / Sony Pictures Home Entertainment:


Review 2 Entertain Video  / Armistead Maupin's More Tales Of The City - Episodes 4-6 [1998]
Actors & Directors
  • Barbara Garrick
  • Olympia Dukakis
  • Colin Ferguson
  • Pierre Gang
  • Bill Campbell
  • Laura Linney
Release date: 1998-07-27
Run time: 145 min.
Creator: Nicholas Wright
RRP: £12.99
Price: £24.99

Review Armistead Maupin's More Tales Of The City - Episodes 4-6 [1998] / 2 Entertain Video:


Review MGM Entertainment  / On The Beach [1959]
Actors & Directors
  • Gregory Peck
  • Donna Anderson
  • Ava Gardner
  • Fred Astaire
  • Stanley Kramer
  • Anthony Perkins
Release date: 2000-09-18
Run time: 134 min.
Creator: Nevil Shute
RRP: £9.99
Price: £14.99

Review On The Beach [1959] / MGM Entertainment:


Review 2 Entertain Video  / The Mill On The Floss [1997]
Actors & Directors
  • Cheryl Campbell
  • Graham Theakston
  • Bernard Hill
  • James Frain
  • Joanna David
  • Emily Watson
Release date: 1997-03-03
Run time: 117 min.
Creator: Hugh Stoddart
RRP: £12.99
Price: £12.38

Review The Mill On The Floss [1997] / 2 Entertain Video:


Review Paramount Home Entertainment  / Sabrina Fair [1954]
Actors & Directors
  • Humphrey Bogart
  • William Holden
  • Walter Hampden
  • Audrey Hepburn
  • John Williams
  • Billy Wilder
Release date: 1997-02-03
Run time: 109 min.
Creator: Samuel A. Taylor
RRP: £5.99
Price: £2.38

Review Sabrina Fair [1954] / Paramount Home Entertainment:

Audrey Hepburn is the delightful, young, eponymous Sabrina, the daughter of a chauffeur who is hopelessly in love with David Larrabee (William Holden), the playboy younger son in the rich Long Island household her father works for. In order to help her forget her woes, Sabrina is shipped off to cooking school in Paris. While there, she befriends a baron who provides a bit of culture-and the encouragement to snip off her childlike ponytail. Upon her return to New York, Sabrina is transformed into a sophisticated woman, and David is entranced by her. However, his older brother Linus (Humphrey Bogart) has arranged David's marriage to Elizabeth Tyson in order to seal a business merger and thus must steer David away from Sabrina. To do this, Linus takes on the task of wooing her for himself. Full of great dialogue ("A woman happy in love, she burns the soufflé; a woman unhappy in love, she forgets to turn on the oven") and wonderful performances, this film is a romantic masterpiece. Also enjoyable is the 1995 remake, starring Julia Ormond and Harrison Ford. -Jenny Brown For almost 20 years Audrey Hepburn's pixie-like features lit up Hollywood's silver screens with hit after hit and she became not only a screen icon, but also a style icon (with a little help from Givenchy), and still features high in polls of the world's most beautiful women. It's perhaps no surprise, then, that Paramount have chosen to honour her with a box set of some of her best-known films. [+]
However, this is only "some of", with the absence of her dazzling performances in Roman Holiday and My Fair Lady, leaving three out of the four films included here lacking in comparison. Breakfast at Tiffany's is the strongest and certainly the best-loved Hepburn film in this collection, offering beautifully comic performances by both Hepburn and her leading man, George Peppard. Funny Face also makes a welcome entry, if only for the wonderful performance by Fred Astaire; Hepburn, though, was not a strong enough dancer to hold her own against Astaire's brilliance. Sabrina holds its own as the Cinderella story of a chauffeur's daughter who turns into a beautiful society girl, but it was clearly a quick and easy vehicle for Paramount to produce in the wake of Hepburn's success in Roman Holiday. The mysterious entry of the collection is Paris When It Sizzles, probably one of Hepburn's least-known and most quirky films, with two parallel love stories played out on the screen. Although not an obvious hit and hard work in places it offers an interesting screwball performance by Hepburn, even if the sparks did not fly with her screen partner William Holden. On the DVD: The Audrey Hepburn Collection offers a nice clean widescreen transfer for three of its movies, but Sabrina is a full-frame transfer that lacks something in comparison. All but Breakfast at Tiffany's (which has a 5. 1 Dolby Digital soundtrack) are mono sound transfers, which is only a real disappointment in Funny Face because of George and Ira Gershwin's score. The special features are also lacking, with only a trailer offered on two of the films and a mildly interesting documentary on Sabrina. The best is the featurette on Funny Face, which charts the success of Paramount in the 1950s, but offers nothing a film fan would not have known already. All in all this is an attractive box set, but perhaps one for the die-hard Hepburn fan only. -Nikki Disney.

Actors & Directors
  • James Avery
  • Jennifer Darling
  • Barry Gordon
  • Cam Clarke
  • Rob Paulsen
Release date: 1990-10-01
Run time: 43 min.
Creator: Stan Sakai
RRP: £4.99
Price: £19.98

Review Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles - The Invasion Of The Punk Frogs / Abbey Home Media:


Review Paramount Home Entertainment  / The Warriors [1979]
Actors & Directors
  • Brian Tyler
  • Walter Hill
  • Michael Beck
  • Dorsey Wright
  • James Remar
  • David Harris
Release date: 1994-09-12
Run time: 89 min.
Creator: Sol Yurick
RRP: £5.99
Price: £2.96

Review The Warriors [1979] / Paramount Home Entertainment:

Walter Hill's controversial 1979 drama was blamed for causing gang violence at theatres, but now it looks as highly stylised and pulpy as Hill (Last Man Standing) intended. The plot finds a New York gang having to cross the territory of rivals in order to get to their own 'hood. A sort of urban Western with a comic-book pace, artificial colours, fable-like tone and broad acting, the film isn't intended to steep us in gritty realities so much as spin a decadent fantasy out of them. Still, this is a tough film with an almost futuristic element to its characterisations of gang activity, and it is more absorbing than Hill's more elaborate youth opera of punk wars, Streets of Fire. -Tom Keogh, Amazon. com.

Actors & Directors
  • Rob Paulsen
  • Jennifer Darling
  • Cam Clarke
  • James Avery
  • Barry Gordon
Release date: 1990-11-05
Run time: 43 min.
Creator: Stan Sakai
RRP: £9.99
Price: £7.69

Review Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles - The Fifth Turtle / Abbey Home Media:


Review Warner Home Video  / Convoy [1978]
Actors & Directors
  • Madge Sinclair
  • Ali MacGraw
  • Kris Kristofferson
  • Sam Peckinpah
  • Ernest Borgnine
  • Burt Young
Release date: 1996-04-09
Run time: 106 min.
Creator: Bill L. Norton
Price: £5.99

Review Convoy [1978] / Warner Home Video:

Even in the tiny genre of films based on songs, Convoy is a strange effort-CW McCall's 1977 CB radio-themed novelty hit was just a collection of trucker slang, but here it is gussied up by Sam Peckinpah (no less) as a big rig reprise of The Wild Bunch with Kris Kristofferson as trucker outlaw hero Rubber Duck and a wonderfully oversized Ernest Borgnine as "Dirty Lyle", the "bear" who hates "breakers" and finally decides to call in the National Guard to help him enforce traffic laws with machine guns. The plot is almost invisible, as Rubber Duck and his breaker buddies just up and decide to trundle their lorries across the Western States in a dash for Mexico (no one ever mentions delivering their loads to intended destinations) and becoming such a folk hero that the creepy governor (Seymour Cassell) tries to cash in. Kristofferson and Borgnine were old Peckinpah hands, as is heroine Ali MacGraw (a characterless photographer) and sidekick Burt Young ("Love Machine" aka "Pigpen"), and there's a lot of business about cops and outlaws who mirror each other, but the main attraction is the visuals-huge trucks rolling across desert roads in clouds of dust, police cars crashing through billboards, trucks demolishing a corrupt small town. There are traces of road-movie melancholia in the depressed cafes, jails and laybys where free spirits are broken, but it's still mostly a cash-in on Smokey and the Bandit with a few rags of poetry tossed into the mix. On the DVD: A letterboxed print, enhanced for 16x9, looks pretty good, with enough widescreen to get all the trucks into the image. But otherwise this is the sort of release that passes off "chapter search" and "multilingual menus" as extras, although there are basic filmographies for the principal and a poster/photo album. The mono soundtrack comes in English, French, Spanish and Italian. -Kim Newman.

Review Second Sight Films Ltd.  / Rancho Notorious [1952]
Actors & Directors
  • Fritz Lang
  • Gloria Henry
  • William Frawley
  • Mel Ferrer
  • Marlene Dietrich
  • Arthur Kennedy
Release date: 1997-07-28
Run time: 85 min.
Creator: Silvia Richards
RRP: £12.99
Price: £1.37

Review Rancho Notorious [1952] / Second Sight Films Ltd.:


Review Artificial Eye  / La Maman Et La Putain [1973]
Actors & Directors
  • Bernadette Lafont
  • Francoise Lebrun
  • Jean-Pierre Leaud
  • Jean Eustache
Release date: 1998-11-02
Run time: 208 min.
Price: £15.99

Review La Maman Et La Putain [1973] / Artificial Eye:


Review 4 Front Video  / Scarface [1931]
Actors & Directors
  • Paul Muni
  • Richard Rosson
  • Karen Morley
  • C. Henry Gordon
  • Osgood Perkins
  • Ann Dvorak
  • Howard Hawks
Release date: 2001-01-08
Run time: 86 min.
Creator: Seton I. Miller
RRP: £5.99
Price: £6.88

Review Scarface [1931] / 4 Front Video:


Review Tartan Video  / The Double Life Of Veronique [1992]
Actors & Directors
  • Krzysztof Kieslowski
  • Kalina Jedrusik
  • Wladyslaw Kowalski
  • Irène Jacob
  • Halina Gryglaszewska
  • Aleksander Bardini
Release date: 1993-03-22
Run time: 93 min.
Creator: Krzysztof Piesiewicz
RRP: £15.99
Price: £18.50

Review The Double Life Of Veronique [1992] / Tartan Video:


Review Warner Home Video  / THX 1138 [1970]
Actors & Directors
  • Don Pedro Colley
  • Robert Duvall
  • Maggie McOmie
  • Ian Wolfe
  • George Lucas
  • Donald Pleasence
Release date: 1995-09-18
Run time: 82 min.
Creator: Walter Murch
Price: £5.99

Review THX 1138 [1970] / Warner Home Video:

George Lucas's enigmatic feature film debut expands on a student film he made at USC. Created under the wing of producer Francis Ford Coppola, this movie is a bleak vision of a world in which technology, not man, is the ultimate dictator. Efficiency overrides every other aspect of human life, as people are reduced to code names and their lives are contained, monitored and manipulated for the sake of the system. Featuring unsettling performances by Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasance and Maggie McOmie, THX 1138 does not attempt to explain how things became this way; rather, it utilises the alienation of its characters, the stifling white-on-white imagery of its sterilised society, and the claustrophobic, droning sound design to emphasise the dangers of a world reliant on soulless technology. Even though this is not a film one will want to take in repeatedly, THX 1138 merits attention because it is that rare film that uses images and sounds-rather than relying heavily on dialogue-to communicate its dark prophecy. -Bryan Reesman.

Actors & Directors
  • Dean Jagger
  • Marianna Jones
  • Paul Stanley
  • Daryl Duke
  • Tom Courtenay
Run time: 74 min.

Review I Heard The Owl Call My Name [1973] / Odyssey:

Tom Courtenay A young priest, unaware that he is dying, is sent to a remote mission in British Columbia. Eventually aware of his illness he decides to spend his last days at the mission, among the Indians who have become his family and friends.

Actors & Directors
  • Walter Hill
  • Ralph Macchio
  • Jami Gertz
  • Joe Morton
  • Joe Seneca
  • Robert Judd
Release date: 1996-03-11
Run time: 98 min.
Creator: John Fusco
RRP: £5.99
Price: £24.99

Review Crossroads [1986] / Castlevision:


Review Cinema Club  / Dangerous Minds [1996]
Actors & Directors
  • Beatrice Winde
  • Robin Bartlett
  • George Dzundza
  • Courtney B. Vance
  • John N. Smith
  • Michelle Pfeiffer
Release date: 2000-01-17
Run time: 99 min.
Creator: Ronald Bass
RRP: £9.99
Price: £1.97

Review Dangerous Minds [1996] / Cinema Club:

This "To Ma'am with Love" is much more an escapist popcorn movie than the inner-city document its marketing suggested. Michelle Pfeiffer plays real-life former Marine Louanne Johnson, a high school English teacher who meets resistance from kids and administration alike at a tough urban school in Northern California. Pfeiffer is good and her character's overall development even survives various post-production story cuts. (A romance with Andy Garcia's character was completely eliminated before release; Garcia is nowhere in sight. ) The actors who play Johnson's students are also fine and the whole film becomes the latest in a long tradition of sentimental movies about teachers who change the lives of kids. -Tom Keogh.

Models & Brands:
Gulliver's Travels [1996], If These Walls Could Talk 2, Lock, Stock And Four Stolen Hooves [2000], Picnic [1956], Armistead Maupin's More Tales Of The City - Episodes 4-6 [1998], On The Beach [1959], The Mill On The Floss [1997], Sabrina Fair [1954], Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles - The Invasion Of The Punk Frogs, The Warriors [1979], Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles - The Fifth Turtle, Convoy [1978], Rancho Notorious [1952], La Maman Et La Putain [1973], Scarface [1931], The Double Life Of Veronique [1992], THX 1138 [1970], I Heard The Owl Call My Name [1973], Crossroads [1986], Dangerous Minds [1996]

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