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Arguably the greatest black comedy ever made, Stanley Kubrick’s cold war classic is the ultimate satire of the nuclear age. Dr. Strangelove is a perfect spoof of political and military insanity, beginning when General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), a maniacal warrior obsessed with “the purity of precious bodily fluids,” mounts his singular campaign against Communism by ordering a squadron of B-52 bombers to attack the Soviet Union. The Soviets counter the threat with a so-called “Doomsday Device,” and the world hangs in the balance while the US president (Peter Sellers) engages in hilarious hot-line negotiations with his Soviet counterpart. Sellers also plays a British military attaché and the mad bomb-maker Dr. Strangelove; George C. Scott is outrageously frantic as General Buck Turgidson, whose presidential advice consists mainly of panic and statistics about “acceptable losses.” With dialogue (“You can’t fight here! This is the war room!”) and images (Slim Pickens’ character riding the bomb to oblivion) that have become a part of our cultural vocabulary, Kubrick’s film regularly appears on critics’ lists of the all-time best. –Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com –This text refers to another version of this video.

Dr. Strangelove

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One of Alfred Hitchcock’s classics, this romantic thriller features a cast to die for: Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant and Claude Rains. Bergman plays the daughter of a disgraced father who is recruited by American agents to infiltrate a post-World War II spy ring in Brazil. Her control agent is Grant, who treats her with disdain while developing a deep romantic bond with her. Her assignment: to marry the suspected head of the ring (Rains) and get the goods on everyone involved. Danger, deceit, betrayal–and, yes, romance–all come together in a nearly perfect blend as the film builds to a terrific (and surprising) climax. Grant and Bergman rarely have been better. –Marshall Fine

Notorious

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Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is, perhaps unsurprisingly given the game’s title, the setting for this point-and-click romp which combines the best elements of Bogart-esque private eye movies with the best-known fantasy environment in the world.

The game follows the trials and tribulations of the Discworld’s first PI as he takes on his first case–a missing persons job on behalf of a darkly mysterious female client who’s husband has gone walkies.

It’s pretty standard adventure fare with pointing and clicking aplenty as the case unravels, villains are revealed and outrageously long FMV sequences disturb the flow of the plot.

OK, so far it doesn’t sound that good, right? But perseverance is the name of the game and you won’t be able to help getting drawn further into the plot to the point where it is impossible to leave it alone. The major draw in this title is the obvious input from Pratchett himself. The characters really bring this game to life, mixing the new, such as Lewton the private eye and main character, with the old, Nobby Nobbs of the City Guard, Death and the Grim Squeaker–a hilarious character who is actually the Death of Rats.

Comedy abounds here, from the obvious to the incredibly subtle, and there is plenty going on to keep you playing for quite a while.

At the end of the day, this is more suited to the Discworld fan then to someone looking idly around for an adventure game to fill in a couple of hours, but with its budget price thanks to an Infogrames re-release, Discworld Noir is a good purchase. –James Gordon

Discworld Noir

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The script for Fast Times at Ridgemont High is based on filmmaker Cameron (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous) Crowe’s time as a reporter for Rolling Stone. He was so youthful looking that he was able to go undercover for a year at a California high school and write a book about it. The film launched the careers of several young actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates and, above all, Sean Penn. The story line is episodic, dealing with the lives of iconic teen types: one of the school’s cool kids, a nerd, a teen queen and, most enjoyably, the class stoner (Penn), who finds himself at odds with a strict history teacher (a wonderfully spiky Ray Walston). This is not a great film but very entertaining and, for a certain age group, a seminal film experience.–Marshall Fine, Amazon.com

On the DVD: Amy (Clueless) Heckerling and Cameron Crowe’s commentary is revealing and indicative of a time where nudity on celluloid was shocking rather than the norm as they talk about the issues which contributed to the film’s original X-rating, as well as all the actors who originally auditioned for the roles. The transfer quality is high with little grain, and although the soundtrack is in mono rather than Dolby 5.1 it is not detrimental to the film. There’s a retrospective documentary called “Reliving Our Fast Times at Ridgemont High” featuring new interviews with most of the cast and crew, plus a highly original feature about the locations used in the film, how they looked in 1982 and how they look now. For fact buffs there’s the usual mix of biographies, theatrical trailer and production notes.–Kristen Bowditch

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

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From the outset, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was about conflict. Producers Rick Berman and Michael Piller challenged the utopian ideals of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek universe to create something totally different from its predecessors. That meant no familial camaraderie, squeaky-clean Federation diplomacy, or beige décor. Instead they wanted interpersonal friction, ruthless enemies (Gamma Quadrant Imperialists–The Dominion) and rebellion at every turn. The DS9 concept was originally facilitated by introducing the Cardassian/Bajoran war during The Next Generation‘s final days. After a muted first reception fans gradually came to accept the new look, but no one liked Star Trek without a starship and eventually the producers capitulated to viewers’ wishes by introducing the USS Defiant (an apt name) in Season 3.

Relying far less on technobabble than TNG, DS9 was unafraid to focus on matters of the spirit instead, demonstrating a ballsy independence from its parent shows. Taking up the gauntlet thrown down by Babylon 5, improved CGI space battles also became a fan favourite. Throughout the increasingly serialised story arc there were rebellious factions within the different establishments: Kira had belonged to the Shakaar resistance cell; the Maquis was Starfleet vs Cardassians; section 31 was a secret Starfleet group; the True Way was a Bajoran group opposed to peace; the Cardassians had their Obsidian Order and the Romulans their Gestapo-like Tal Shiar. Yet for all its constant bickering and espionage (even Bashir got to be James Bond), there was always some contemporary social commentary lurking: the Ferengi were used as a comedic foil to frown on materialistic greed; drugs were looked at via the Jem’Hadar foot soldiers’ addiction to Ketracel White.

Perhaps Sisko summed up the real heart of things: “Bajor doesn’t need a man, it needs a legend”. A future vision that retains a place for religion and spirituality turned out to be Deep Space Nine‘s first best destiny. –Paul Tonks

Equilibrium

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The first and only film shot entirely in subtitled Latin, Sebastiane is Derek Jarman’s first work as a director (though he shared the job with the less well-known Paul Humfress) and is a strange combination of gay nudie movie, pocket-sized Ancient Roman epic and meditation upon the image of Saint Sebastian. It opens with the Lindsay Kemp dance troupe romping around with huge fake phalluses to represent the Ken Russell-style decadence of the court of the Emperor Diocletian in AD 303, then decamps to Tuscany as Diocletian’s favourite guard Sebastian (Leonardo Treviglio) is demoted to ordinary soldier and dispatched to a backwater barracks because the Emperor (Robert Medley) suspects him of being a covert Christian. The bulk of the film consists of athletic youths in minimal thongs romping around the countryside, soaking themselves down between bouts of manly horseplay or sylvan frolic. It all comes to a bad end as the lecherous but guilt-ridden commanding officer Severus (Barney James) fails to cop off with Sebastian and instead visits floggings and tortures upon his naked torso, finally ordering his men to riddle the future saint with arrows, thus securing him a place in cultural history. The public schoolboy cleverness of scripting dialogue in Latin–a popular soldier’s insult is represented by the Greek “Oedipus”–works surprisingly well, with the cast reeling off profane Roman dialogue as if it were passionate Italian declarations rather than marbled classical sentences. The film suffers from the not-uncommon failing that the best-looking actor is given the largest role but delivers the weakest performance: Treviglio’s Sebastian is a handsome cipher, far less interesting than the rest of the troubled, bullying, awkward or horny soldiers in the platoon. Peter Hinwood, famous for the title role in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, can be glimpsed in the palace orgy. The countryside looks as good as the cast, and Brian Eno delivers an evocative, ambient-style score. –Kim Newman

Sebastiane

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Pandora couldn’t resist opening the forbidden box containing all the delusions of mankind, and let’s just say in Mulholland Drive David Lynch indulges a similar impulse. Employing a familiar film noir atmosphere to unravel, as he coyly puts it, “a love story in the city of dreams”, Lynch establishes a foreboding but playful narrative in the film’s first half before subsuming all of Los Angeles and its corrupt ambitions into his voyeuristic universe of desire. Identities exchange, amnesia proliferates and nightmare visions are induced, but not before we’ve become enthralled by the film’s two main characters: the dazed and sullen femme fatale, Rita (Laura Elena Harring), and the pert blonde just-arrived from Ontario (played exquisitely by Naomi Watts) who decides to help Rita regain her memory. Triggered by a rapturous Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying”, Lynch’s best film since Blue Velvet splits glowingly into two equally compelling parts. –Fionn Meade

Mulholland Drive

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Roman Polanski’s brooding film noir exposes the darkest side of the land of sunshine, the Los Angeles of the 1930s, where power is the only currency–and the only real thing worth buying. Jack Nicholson is J J Gittes, a private eye in the Chandler mould, who during a routine straying-spouse investigation finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into a jigsaw puzzle of clues and corruption. The glamorous Evelyn Mulwray (a dazzling Faye Dunaway) and her titanic father, Noah Cross (John Huston), are at the black-hole centre of this tale of treachery, incest and political bribery. The crackling, hard-bitten script by Robert Towne won a well-deserved Oscar, and the muted colour cinematography makes the goings-on seem both bleak and impossibly vibrant. Polanski himself has a brief, memorable cameo as the thug who tangles with Nicholson’s nose. Chinatown is one of the greatest, most completely satisfying crime films of all time. –Anne HurleyAmazon.co.uk Review
Roman Polanski’s brooding film noir exposes the darkest side of the land of sunshine, the Los Angeles of the 1930s, where power is the only currency–and the only real thing worth buying. Jack Nicholson is JJ Gittes, a private eye in the Chandler mould, who during a routine straying-spouse investigation finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into a jigsaw puzzle of clues and corruption. The glamorous Evelyn Mulwray (a dazzling Faye Dunaway) and her titanic father, Noah Cross (John Huston), are at the black-hole centre of this tale of treachery, incest, and political bribery. The crackling, hard-bitten script by Robert Towne won a well-deserved Oscar, and the muted colour cinematography makes the goings-on seem both bleak and impossibly vibrant. Polanski himself has a brief, memorable cameo as the thug who tangles with Nicholson’s nose. One of the greatest, most completely satisfying crime films of all time. –Anne Hurley, Amazon.com

Chinatown

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In Transformers: The Movie it’s the year 2005, and the universe is going right down the toilet. Not only have the heroic Autobots lost their homeworld of Cybertron to the evil Decepticons, a giant metallic planet named Unicron is on the prowl, treating solar systems like a gigantic buffet and gunning for the Autobots’ matrix of leadership. Fortunately, struggling against the odds is what heroes do best, and it is indeed hard to keep a good robot down. As the battle rages from space to earth and back into space again, characters die, others are reborn and, ultimately, good must face evil in a climactic battle for the fate of the universe. When this animated film arrived in American cinemas in the mid-1980s, the Transformers–both the robot toys and the television show–were at the height of their popularity. Transformers The Movie took these battling ‘bots and, er, transformed them into film stars, albeit of the cult variety. The animation is a bit touch-and-go: at its best, it’s up there with classic Japanese manga; at it’s worst, it reeks of horrible 80s assembly-line productions. And the plot is little more than an advert for the (then) new toys, many of which show up as main characters in the film (Hot Rod, Kup, Ultra Magnus, Galvatron, etc). However, some of the action sequences are indeed spectacular–especially the battle for Autobot City–and the violence is a bit intense for what is, basically, a kid’s film (they may just be robots, but they still die, apparently). What really makes this film more than meets the eye, though, is the names who show up as voices in the credits: Leonard Nimoy, Judd Nelson, Robert Stack, Eric Idle and even Orson Welles, in one of his last roles, as Unicron.

On the DVD: In order to please the growing numbers of hardcore Transformers fans out there, the DVD version of Transformers: The Movie has been beefed up with loads of extra features: the original theatrical trailer, introductory footage taken from the BBC’s I Love 1984 and a picture gallery with music are all excellent additions, but best of all is Takara’s “The Four Soldiers from the Sky”. Though the dubbing and translation are a bit poor, it’s still a rare opportunity to see a Transformers episode that never aired outside of Japan.–Robert Burrow

The Transformers: The Movie

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David Lynch peeks behind the picket fences of small-town America to reveal a corrupt shadow world of malevolence, sadism and madness. From the opening shots Lynch turns the Technicolor picture postcard images of middle-class homes and tree-lined lanes into a dreamy vision on the edge of nightmare. After his father collapses in a preternaturally eerie sequence, college boy Kyle MacLachlan returns home and stumbles across a severed human ear in a vacant lot. With the help of sweetly innocent high school girl (Laura Dern), he turns junior detective and uncovers a frightening yet darkly compelling world of voyeurism and sex. Drawn deeper into the brutal world of drug dealer and blackmailer Frank, played with raving mania by an obscenity-shouting Dennis Hopper in a career-reviving performance, he loses his innocence and his moral bearings when confronted with pure, unexplainable evil. Isabella Rossellini is terrifyingly desperate as Hopper’s sexual slave who becomes MacLachlan’s illicit lover, and Dean Stockwell purrs through his role as Hopper’s oh-so-suave buddy. Lynch strips his surreally mundane sets to a ghostly austerity, which composer Angelo Badalamenti encourages with the smooth, spooky strains of a lush score. Blue Velvet is a disturbing film that delves into the darkest reaches of psycho-sexual brutality and simply isn’t for everyone. But for a viewer who wants to see the cinematic world rocked off its foundations, David Lynch delivers a nightmarish masterpiece. –Sean Axmaker

Blue Velvet

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