List Price: $19.94 Our Price: $10.97YOU SAVE $8.97!
Buy it
DVD The Dresser
It's life in the Theater with a capital T in this film adaptation of the London and Broadway hit by Ronald Harwood. Though we see other people, the film is really a duet between Sir (Albert Finney), an aging actor-manager who runs his own theater company, and Norman (Tom Courtenay), his dresser, who gets him into costume and, ultimately, into shape to go onstage each night. Sir is on his last legs; Norman is alternately his cheerleader, his parent, and his whipping boy--whatever it takes to get Sir up to performance level each night. Finney perfectly captures the vainglorious insecurity of this aging ham, whose career has never quite matched his expectations but who has to convince himself each night (with Norman's help) that a performance in the provinces is as big a deal as treading the boards in the West End. The film lives and dies, however, with Courtenay's neatly nuanced performance as Norman. No man is a hero to his valet--but Courtenay finds the affection along with the disdain that are part of this character. A great backstage tale. --Marshall Fine
A very poignant, and at times quite funny, movie about an aging and senile actor (Albert Finney) and his pampering and much abused gay dresser (Tom Courtenay), set in England during WW II. The interplay between Finney and Courtenay is marvelous; Finney treats his dresser horrendously but loves and needs him. Courtenay takes all the abuse because he lives his sheltered life through Finney and is grateful for that. Bravura performances by both, and a very moving film. Definitely worth a watch.
Great film, but where are the special features!?
Tragic that there are no special features offered...there's such a wealth of available material that could have been used.
Regardless, Finney & Courtenay in this tour de force prove to be one of the greatest on-screen couples in film history!
Lovers of the arts--be it theatre or film or both--will revel in this great piece!
Peter Yates ' masterpiece?
This sensitive artwork, definitively is by itself a hitherto in this genre. I don't see of any other movie who can match with this in this plot. The intimate world of an actor backstage dealing with all the kaleidoscopic issues around his circumstance.
Albert Finney is one of my top favorite actors. He has a special and fine eye to chose underground but fascinating characters, and in this time this could not be the exception.
If you are a hard fan of the theater world, this film is for you.
This movie deserves a just review, if only to debunk the notion that the film bears any resemblance to the 'The Dead Poets Society.' It is a uniquely English work that illustrates what it is to keep a stiff upper lip -- after a fair amount of quivering.
Albert Finney is masterful as Andrew Crocker-Harris, the stern and unyielding teacher of classics who has, rather suddenly, found himself at the end of his career. With modernity regnant in society, Crocker-Harris faces students uninterested in the great literary works of antiquity and a successor who intends to abolish the tenets of a curriculum that once produced the most learned citizens of any nation. Crocker-Harris can clearly see that his time is passing. But unlike 'Dead Poets,' which sends the unacceptable message that suicide... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Albert Finney - Greta Scacchi Director(s): Mike Figgis DVD Release Date: Released the 01 March 2004 Usually ships within 24 hours
List Price: $14.99 Your Price: $13.49YOU SAVE $1.5!
Buy it
Annette Bening's outstanding performance is the best reason to see Being Julia, a highly melodramatic adaptation of the 1937 novel Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham. With a prestigious pedigree (director Istvan Szabo and screenwriter Ronald Harwood share impressive theatrical backgrounds) and a stellar cast including Jeremy Irons, Bruce Greenwood, and Juliet Stevenson, the film's backstage and onstage theatrics take place in pre-World War II London, when the venerable actress Julia (Bening) fends off middle-age by romancing a stage-struck young American (Shaun Evans) in a calculated attempt to retain some youthful vitality while airing her own dirty laundry onstage in a glorious act of divine diva behavior. Treating life and theater as one big play in which she's the perpetual... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Michael Gambon - Annette Bening - Jeremy Irons Director(s): István Szabó DVD Release Date: Released the 22 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $26.96 Your Price: $24.26YOU SAVE $2.7!
Buy it
This 1975 film sits near the top of any list of the best films of the 1970s, perhaps in the top five and, in some people's minds, at the pinnacle itself. Robert Altman, at his most Altmanesque, spins together plot strands involving two dozen people over the course of one particularly busy weekend in Music City, USA. Though several of the story lines deal with country-western stars--played by Henry Gibson, Ronee Blakley and Karen Black--the plot also deals with the country scene's wannabes, the business people who pull the strings and the operative for a mysterious presidential candidate who is trying to get the de facto endorsement of some of the country stars by having them appear at a rally for him. (The unknown but rocketing presidential aspirant was eerily echoed the next year, when... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Robert Altman DVD Release Date: Released the 15 August 2000 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $9.98 Your Price: $9.98YOU SAVE $0!
Buy it
The definitive screen adaptation of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, the 1961 production of The Innocents remains one of the most effective ghost stories ever filmed. Originally promoted as the first truly "adult" chiller of the big screen (a marginally valid claim considering the release of Psycho a year earlier), the film arrived at a time when the thematic depth of James's story could finally be addressed without the compromise of reductive discretion. And while the Freudian anxiety that fuels the story may seem tame by today's standards, the psychological horrors that comprise the story's "dark secret" are given full expression in a film that brilliantly clouds the boundary between tragic reality and frightful imagination.
The peril facing a lone American amid Third World political turmoil is elegantly communicated in this important film from Costa-Gavras (Z), adapted by the director and Donald Stewart from Thomas Hauser's nonfiction book. The key to its power onscreen stems from the decision not to center the action merely on the disappearance of Charles Horman (John Shea), but also on the search for him by his father Ed (Jack Lemmon)--and on Ed's discovery of a son he never knew. The Oscar-winning script flows freely between that search and Charles's earlier experiences in the unnamed country (in the true account, Chile). Providing a link between those two stories is Charles's wife Beth (Sissy Spacek), who follows her father-in-law around a country in chaos, teeming with reckless authority and... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Jack Lemmon - Sissy Spacek Director(s): Costa-Gavras DVD Release Date: Released the 23 November 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $9.99 Your Price: $9.99YOU SAVE $0!
Buy it
