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James and the Giant Peach (Walt Disney Pictures Presents)
: essential video:Roald Dahl's modern classic for children becomes a delightful combination of live action and stop-motion animation by the team that made The Nightmare Before Christmas: director Henry Selick and producers Tim Burton (Batman) and Denise Di Novi. The story concerns young James (played for real and through voice-overs by Paul Terry), who is orphaned and left in the charge of two cruel aunts (Miriam Margolyes, Joanna Lumley). Rescued by a mysterious fellow (Pete Postlethwaite), James ends up inside a giant peach, drifting over the Atlantic Ocean in the company ...
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Life Is Sweet
: essential video:Roald Dahl's modern classic for children becomes a delightful combination of live action and stop-motion animation by the team that made The Nightmare Before Christmas: director Henry Selick and producers Tim Burton (Batman) and Denise Di Novi. The story concerns young James (played for real and through voice-overs by Paul Terry), who is orphaned and left in the charge of two cruel aunts (Miriam Margolyes, Joanna Lumley). Rescued by a mysterious fellow (Pete Postlethwaite), James ends up inside a giant peach, drifting over the Atlantic Ocean in the company ...
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Black Beauty (Clam)
: :Don't waste this one on your children: buy it for yourself. A spectacular adaptation of the Anna Sewell novel, this is faithful to the source material but creates a life of its own on the screen. Told from the point of view of the horse, it recalls a time and a place that could be both beautiful and cruel. Black Beauty faced both hardship and kindness as he passed through the hands of many owners throughout his life. Some are generous, but the agonies endured by the title character may be ...
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Prime Suspect 3
: :Don't waste this one on your children: buy it for yourself. A spectacular adaptation of the Anna Sewell novel, this is faithful to the source material but creates a life of its own on the screen. Told from the point of view of the horse, it recalls a time and a place that could be both beautiful and cruel. Black Beauty faced both hardship and kindness as he passed through the hands of many owners throughout his life. Some are generous, but the agonies endured by the title character may be ...
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Dinotopia (EP Version)
:Description:A fantastic marriage of state-of-the-art computer technology, thrilling live action, and breathtaking ingenuity, ' Dinotopia' emerges as one of the most ambitious and technically advanced projects in the history of television. While flying on holiday with their estranged father, Karl (Tyron Leitso) and David (Wentworth Miller) find themselves in unexpected bad weather, which sends their plane crashing to the shores of Dinotopia. In this fantastic lost world, built upon long-established principles of mutual respect, humans and dinosaurs peacefully coexist. The two brothers are as astounded by the benevolent creatures as they ...
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Total Eclipse
: :This biographical account of the tempestuous, taboo-shattering love affair between two 19th century French poets--Paul Verlaine (David Thewlis) and Arthur Rimbaud (Leonardo DiCaprio)--didn't do much at the box office when it was released in 1995. But after the success of Titanic, it became somewhat infamous when Playgirl magazine announced its intention to publish nude pictures of DiCaprio taken from the film. (Nobody much seemed to care that Thewlis, who also starred in Mike Leigh's Naked, also appears nude in Total Eclipse.) The truth is, the nudity in question only lasts for ...
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Besieged
: :Two disparate worlds come together in thoroughly unexpected ways in this intriguing film directed by Academy Award winner Bernardo Bertolucci. The opening sequence, in an impoverished, unnamed African dictatorship, is painfully intense: we watch in horror as the movie's heroine, Shandurai (serenely beautiful Thandie Newton), witnesses the brutal arrest of her husband, a rebellious reformer. Then suddenly we are transported to Rome, where Shandurai is studying medicine and cleaning house for a reclusive, wealthy pianist, Mr. Kinsky (David Thewlis). Knowing nothing of her past, Kinsky falls hopelessly in love with Shandurai. ...
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Seven Years in Tibet
: :If it hadn't been for Brad Pitt signing on to play the lead role of obsessive Austrian mountain climber Heinrich Harrer, there's a good chance this lavish $70 million film would not have been made. It was one of two films from 1997 (the other being Martin Scorsese's exquisite Kundun) to view the turmoil between China and Tibet through the eyes of the young Dalai Lama. But with Pitt onboard, this adaptation of Harrer's acclaimed book focuses more on Harrer, a Nazi party member whose life was changed by his experiences ...
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Trial (1963)
: :On the morning of his 30th birthday, senior bank clerk Josef K. is put under arrest by men who refuse to identify themselves. He's not taken into custody, and nobody will--or even can--tell him the charges against him. Josef refuses to take it seriously, and thus begins his descent into the mad vagaries of a court system that is as enigmatic as it is ominous. This BBC coproduction of the Franz Kafka book features a screenplay by Harold Pinter (Turtle Diary, The French Lieutenant's Woman) that starts out full of wit and ...
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Gangster No. 1
: :This glinting, scalding gangland phantasmagoria offers a sort of funhouse-mirror refraction of the life and career of a British hooligan so elemental in his right villainy that he's merely identified as 'Gangster.' The action begins in 1999, with Malcolm McDowell brutishly savoring his eminence as a crime lord; but more of the film is taken up with an extended flashback to 1968, when his youthful self--played by Paul Bettany (but voiced by McDowell during private reveries)--got his start. Bettany's patron is Freddie Mays, 'the Butcher of Mayfair' (David Thewlis), a comparatively ...
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