Director Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard) and writer Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep) adapted James M. Cain’s hard-boiled novel into this wildly thrilling story of insurance man Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), who schemes the perfect murder with the beautiful dame Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck: kill Dietrichson’s husband and make off with the insurance money. But, of course, in these plots things never quite go as planned, and Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) is the wily insurance investigator who must sort things out. From the opening scene you know Neff is doomed, as the story is told in flashback; yet, to the film’s credit, this doesn’t diminish any of the tension of the movie. This early film noir flick is wonderfully campy by today’s standards, and the dialogue is snappy (“I thought you were smarter than the rest, Walter. But I was wrong. You’re not smarter, just a little taller”), filled with lots of “dame”s and “baby”s. Stanwyck is the ultimate femme fatale, and MacMurray, despite a career largely defined by roles as a softy (notably in the TV series My Three Sons and the movie The Shaggy Dog), is convincingly cast against type as the hapless, love-struck sap. –Jenny Brown

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The Maltese Falcon is still the tightest, sharpest, and most cynical of Hollywood’s official deathless classics, bracingly tough even by post-Tarantino standards. Humphrey Bogart is Dashiell Hammett’s definitive private eye, Sam Spade, struggling to keep his hard-boiled cool as the double-crosses pile up around his ankles. The plot, which dances all around the stolen Middle Eastern statuette of the title, is too baroque to try to follow, and it doesn’t make a bit of difference. The dialogue, much of it lifted straight from Hammett, is delivered with whip-crack speed and sneering ferocity, as Bogie faces off against Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet, fends off the duplicitous advances of Mary Astor, and roughs up a cringing “gunsel” played by Elisha Cook Jr. It’s an action movie of sorts, at least by implication: the characters always seem keyed up, right on the verge of erupting into violence. This is a turning-point picture in several respects: John Huston (The African Queen) made his directorial debut here in 1941, and Bogart, who had mostly played bad guys, was a last-minute substitution for George Raft, who must have been kicking himself for years afterward. This is the role that made Bogart a star and established his trend-setting (and still influential) antihero persona. –David Chute

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Blu-ray Disc Home Cinema System. By using combination of real speakers and virtual speakers, the listener is encircled by surround speakers and more natural and smoother surround can be enjoyed especially in action scenes such as car chase scene, as if you are sitting in the centre of the theatre. With the new bamboo cone speakers the sound becomes much more responsive. Vocals are more pure and clearer, and the dialogue being crisper and easier to understand than ever before.

• 5.1 Channel Sound
• Integrated Dock for iPod
• Blu-Ray/DVD/-R/-RW/+R/+RW Play
• SD Memory Card & USB Port
• 1000W Total Output

Panasonic SC-BT230EB-K Blu-Ray 5.1 Home Cinema (4Xsats,1000W) <- Read More

Probably the most magical and entertaining game you will ever play.

We cannot recommend this one enough. Lovingly crafted by Amanita Design (of Samorost fame), Machinarium is an outstanding example what happens when close group of designers pour their heart and soul into something very special. This should be the benchmark for all adventure games.
Simply Beautiful.
Enjoy – Notcot

Collectors Edition includes:

• Additional CD with the games music and 5 additional bonus sound tracks
• Booklet including never seen before concept art
• A3 Poster
• A printed walkthrough

Machinarium is a puzzle video game developed by Amanita Design. The goal of Machinarium is to solve a series of puzzles and brain teasers. The puzzles are linked together by an overworld consisting of a traditional point and click adventure story.

The overworlds most radical departure is that only objects within the player characters reach can be clicked on. Machinarium is notable in that it contains no dialogue, neither spoken nor written. The game instead uses a system of animated thought bubbles.

Machinarium : Collectors Edition (PC/Mac DVD)

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Product Description
Blu-ray Disc Home Cinema System. By using combination of real speakers and virtual speakers, the listener is encircled by surround speakers and more natural and smoother surround can be enjoyed especially in action scenes such as car chase scene, as if you are sitting in the centre of the theatre. With the new bamboo cone speakers the sound becomes much more responsive. Vocals are more pure and clearer, and the dialogue being crisper and easier to understand than ever before.

• 5.1 Channel Sound
• Integrated Dock for iPod
• Blu-Ray/DVD/-R/-RW/+R/+RW Play
• SD Memory Card & USB Port
• 1000W Total Output

Panasonic SC-BT230EB-K Blu-Ray 5.1 Home Cinema

Buy Now for £374.44

Amazon.co.uk Review
I Spit on Your Grave, writer-director Meir Zarchi’s controversial story of rape and revenge, has lost none of its ability to shock viewers since it first gained notoriety in 1978. Camille Keaton (grand-niece of Buster Keaton and, later, Zarchi’s wife) stars as a young woman who is terrorised and then brutally assaulted by four men while on vacation. After slowly pulling herself together, she methodically tracks down and butchers each of the perpetrators. Zarchi’s film has been consistently accused of celebrating violence against women, and while the rape scenes are graphic, they also lack the voyeuristic qualities that earmark other similarly plotted exploitation films. If anything, Zarchi is guilty of awkward scripting; the dialogue is leaden, and Keaton’s transformation from victim to avenger is too swift. But to label him a pornographer is wrong, and while the film is challenging–perhaps more than most audiences can bear–its depiction of the psychology of violence is undeniably powerful. –Paul Gaita

I Spit On Your Grave

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Amazon.co.uk Review
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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Amazon.co.uk Review
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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