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In the 1995 movie "Waterworld," Kevin Costner was the draw in more ways than one. To much of the audience, he was still the glamorous movie star who had managed to pull off a blockbuster "Robin Hood" movie despite his inability to successfully nail an English accent. To others, he seemed like he might be a potential trainwreck on the verge of derailment. "Waterworld" had fallen victim to many behind-the-scenes tales of sinking sets, director fights, and Costner rewriting the script to make himself look better. Ultimately, for one reason or another, enough people were curious about the film that it turned a profit. However difficult he may have been behind the scenes, the star turned out to still have it.

Within the movie, however, the person everyone wants to see is Enola, a nine year-old girl whose back tattoo features an encoded map to the last bit of dry land on a post-climate change world.

Actors Windsor Davies and Donald Sinden’s characters are once again engaged in a game of one-upmanship, as their hit British sitcom, ‘Never the Twain,’ has been brought back to life on Forces TV. In honor of the one-year anniversary of Davies’ passing, the television network is broadcasting repeat episodes of the popular 1980s television comedy […]

The post Actor Windsor Davies Feels Things are Never the Twain as Comedy is Broadcast on Filmon TV appeared first on Shockya.com.

Sadly, he’s the best thing in this over-sentimental drama about a gruff writer’s final days in picture-perfect Portugal

Sometimes cosmic misfortune is a film’s good luck. This creaky, sentimental drama might have passed gently into the televisual ether were it not that it granted the late Sir John Hurt his final lead role. (He subsequently took a supporting part in unreleased spy thriller Damascus Cover.) Its middling-to-minor pleasures stem almost exclusively from watching a sunhatted Hurt pottering around the Algarve as Ralph, an ornery old literary goat determining to use the days remaining in the wake of a bleak health diagnosis to organise the means and method of his passing, and attempt reconciliation with his estranged son.

Adapted from a play originally penned by NJ Crisp as a Donald Sinden vehicle, Eric Styles’ film has one other advantage in roseate location shooting: every poolside conversation will do wonders for holiday home sales.

Featuring an all-star cast lead by Patrick Stewart alongside Neve Campbell, Joan Sims, Donald Sinden and Cherie Lunghi comes a magical adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s classic tale The Canterville Ghost, which makes its UK Blu-ray debut and DVD release thanks to Second Sight Films. This spellbinding adventure will enchant and entertain the whole family in the holidays and beyond and arrives on Blu-ray and DVD on 30 October 2017 and we have a copy on Blu-ray to be won.. Contest Ends on Monday, November 13, 2017...

By Tim Greaves

The year is 1962. Aggrieved when Algeria is granted independence by President Charles de Gaulle, the militant underground alliance known as the Organisation Armée Secrète botches an attempt to assassinate him. Within months many of the conspirators, including their top man, have been captured and executed. The remaining Oas leaders, bereft of funds, take refuge in Austria and warily decide to contract an outside professional to do the job for them. They settle on a British assassin (Edward Fox), who chooses to be identified as Jackal. The Oas orchestrate several bank robberies to cover his exorbitant fee of half a million dollars whilst the mechanics of the plotting are left entirely to Jackal's discretion. After capturing and interrogating another alliance member, the French authorities learn of Jackal's existence and, suspecting another attempt on de Gaulle's life may be imminent, they set their best man – Deputy Commissioner Claude Lebel (Michel Lonsdale) – on his tail.

British theater, film and TV actor Donald Sinden has died at the age of 90 after suffering from prostate cancer, his son told the BBC on Friday.‎ He said he died of the disease at his home in Kent, England. In the U.K., Sinden was best known as a Shakespearean actor, but also appeared in more than 70 film and TV productions. He was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (Cbe) in 1979 on the Queen's honor list and then knighted in 1997 for his services to drama. He was therefore typically addressed as

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Sir Donald Sinden has died, aged 90.

The Plymouth-born actor was known for his Shakespearean stage roles but also for appearing in more than 70 movies and television shows throughout his career.

Donald rose to prominence after appearing in '80s sitcom Never the Twain, as well as BBC crime drama Judge John Deed in the '00s.

He was awarded a Cbe in 1979, followed by a knighthood in 1997 for his services to drama.

The actor had been battling prostate cancer for several years and passed away at his home in Kent, his son Marc Sinden confirmed.

"Even though his death was expected, it is still a huge loss to his family and we, his brother, his son, his four grandchildren and great-grandchild will all miss his humour and knowledge," he said.

"We would all like to share our appreciation for the Pilgrims Hospice and the carers that looked after him and us with such dignity,...

Mark Kennedy, Associated Press

Jake Coyle, Associated Press

New York (AP) - Elaine Stritch, the brash theater performer whose gravelly, gin-laced voice and impeccable comic timing made her a Broadway legend, has died. She was 89.

Joseph Rosenthal, Stritch's longtime attorney, said the actress died Thursday of natural causes at her home in Birmingham, Michigan.

Although Stritch appeared in movies and on television, garnering three Emmys and finding new fans as Alec Baldwin's unforgiving mother on "30 Rock," she was best known for her stage work, particularly in her candid one-woman memoir, "Elaine Stritch: At Liberty," and in the Stephen Sondheim musical "Company."

A tart-tongued monument to New York show business endurance, Stritch worked well into her late 80s, most recently as Madame Armfeldt in a revival of Sondheim's musical "A Little Night Music." She replaced Angela Lansbury in 2010 to critical acclaim.

In 2013, Stritch - whose signature "no pants" style...

Actor who played many major Shakespearean roles on the stage

Few actors played as many major Shakespearean roles as did Paul Rogers, a largely forgotten and seriously underrated performer, who has died aged 96. It was as though he was barnacled in those parts, undertaken at the Old Vic in the 1950s, by the time he played his most famous role, the vicious paterfamilias Max in Harold Pinter's The Homecoming at the Aldwych theatre in 1965 (and filmed in 1973).

Staunch, stolid and thuggish, with eyes that drilled through any opposition, Rogers's Max was a grumpy old block of granite, hewn on an epic scale, despite the flat cap and plimsolls – horribly real. Peter Hall's production for the Royal Shakespeare Company was monumental; everything was grey, chill and cheerless in John Bury's design, set off firstly by a piquant bowl of green apples and then by the savage acting.

The Homecoming...

Joss Whedon's California-set Much Ado, filmed in black and white over 12 days, is a charming and witty triumph

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There was a great fear in the 1960s and 70s that various respected directors who'd moved into making epics and blockbusters would be unable to return, even occasionally, to more modest productions. Some of them didn't, most notably David Lean. Some of them did, most impressively John Huston with Fat City, Wise Blood and The Dead. The same query was raised over Francis Ford Coppola and, more recently, hangs over Christopher Nolan. But the 49-year-old Joss Whedon has triumphantly answered the question.

After scripting Buffy the Vampire Slayer for TV and the first Toy Story for the cinema, Whedon rose fairly rapidly to direct The Avengers with a budget of $220m. His producers apparently insisted that between the long shooting schedule on...

Directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani have been unjustly overlooked for two decades. Now they're back with a prize-winning new film acted by a cast of prison inmates

The Taviani brothers are among the last titans of classic Italian cinema. They came of age in the era of Rossellini and Pasolini; they count Bertolucci among their contemporaries; they have been a nurturing influence on younger countrymen such as Nanni Moretti. They won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1977 for Padre Padrone, an odyssey of rural hardship shot through with transformative fantasy and theatricality. It begins with the Sardinian farmer's son, on whose memoir the film is based, handing a prop to the actor who will be playing him; another scene allows us access to the inner monologue of a goat with which a boy is having sex ("I am going to shit in your milk!"). That playfulness persists in the wartime...

1948 was a good year for mermaids.

In Britain, producer Betty E. Box presented Miranda, starring Glynis Johns as a Cornish water-nymph who goes on dry land disguised as an invalid, making merry with the menfolk. Six years later, a sequel, Mad About Men, continued the character's amorous adventures in Technicolor.

Meanwhile in America, William Powell romanced mute mermaid Ann Blyth, an apparent manifestation of his mid-life crisis, in Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid. (Tarzan and the Mermaids, the same year, did not supply any true amphbious ladies.)

What do these fish stories reveal about their respective countries of origin? None of the films' directors have much in the way of auteur credentials—Ken Annakin directed the first Miranda film, staying true to the tradition of innocuous entertainment which was the defining quality of his career, and Ralph Thomas directed the second: though his son Jeremy has produced major films for Bertolucci and Cronenberg,...

To mark the release of Twice Round the Daffidils on DVD, we’ve been given three copies to give away. It’s directed by Gerald Thomas and stars Kenneth Williams, Joan Sims, Sheila Hancock, Juliet Mills, Sir Donald Sinden, Nanette Newman and Jill Ireland.

A classic British comedy starring ‘Carry On’ legends Joan Sims and Kenneth Williams, Twice Round The Daffodils sees a group of four male patients arrive at a sanatorium to be treated for TB. As they adjust to their new home, each one of them starts to take a shine to the nurses that are there to care for them.

From the Carry On series team (producer Peter Rogers, director Gerald Thomas and writer Norman Hudis) and starring many of our well-loved British comedic stars, Twice Round The Daffodils is often considered an unofficial Carry On film.

To be in with a chance of winning this great prize,...

“This is a story of the battle of the Atlantic. The story of an ocean, two ships and a handful of men. The men are the heroes. The heroines are the ships. The only villain is the sea, the cruel sea that man has made more cruel.”

So begins Charles Frend’s film of the best selling novel of the same name by Nicholas Monsarrat. This opening statement, delivered in voiceover, tells us so much about the film we are about to watch and the film lives up to what promises are inherent in this opening so well.

The Cruel Sea is not a simple good vs. evil gung-ho war film featuring ‘our boys’ taking out Nazis in the middle of the Atlantic but a rich character piece made only eight years after the war it depicts and all the more powerful and reflective because of it. Interestingly, for instance,...

To celebrate the digitally remastered release of The Cruel Sea on 13th June, Optimum Home Entertainment have given us three copies of the film to give away on Blu-ray. The movie is directed by Charles Frend and stars Jack Hawkins, Donald Sinden and John Stratton.

The novel The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monserrat was an unflinching portrayal of life at sea during WWII on a boat tasked with protecting convoys and seeking and destroying U-boats. A runaway success, the novel had already sold over 4 million copies in just 2 years when Ealing decided to make the film version. Filmed aboard an actual Royal Navy corvette, The Cruel Sea tells the story of the sailors aboard the Hms Compass Rose: the bonds that form between them, the daily pressures they face and their epic struggle to overcome the enemy. Nominated for a BAFTA for Best British Film, The Cruel Sea stars Jack Hawkins,...

Father’s day is on the horizon and a whole bunch of cool Blu-ray’s are being released to celebrate that fact, a few films of which are particularly some of my Dad’s favourites.

Sam Peckinpah’s bloody anti-war movie Cross of Iron (out June 3rd), the British Wwi classic The Cruel Sea (June 13th) and the excellent Ice Cold Alex (June 13th), all digitally restored and available on the first time in Blu-ray. Excitedly if you are in London on father’s day weekend, the Odeon Panton St are showing Cross of Iron and Ice Cold in Alex from June 17th!

Owf have three copies of all three films to give away…

6 June: Cross Of Iron – Only On Bluray – Digitally Restored

Heralded as the most anti-war war film ever made, Cross Of Iron is a bloody and thought-provoking depiction of the horrors of war featuring an epic battle...

The people have spoken. Ashton Kutcher and Kevin Costner will be sobbing into their breakfasts, for the film you wanted us to live blog today is Kathryn Bigelow's K19: The Widowmaker. What happened when Catherine Shoard sat down at 12:05 to watch it on Channel 4?

11.47am: It's matinee time again here at the Guardian; join us from noon for an upsetting tale of deep sea disaster.

12.04pm: Yikes - ok folks, slightly close call, but here in time for the credits I think.

12.04pm: It's beginning. Militaristic font there. With a little light Russia style string twanging. And definite ominous orchestral undertones.

12.05pm: So - based on true events. Set in 1961. Submarine distaster at the height of the Cold War.

12.06pm: Buttons. Action. Men. Uniforms. Liam Neeson doing faint Russian accent - the way to signify they're all Soviet rather than actually talking in Russian.

12.07pm: I'm finding this quite exciting.

Heather Mills is secretly romancing a millionaire theater producer.

The former model, the ex-wife of Beatles legend Sir Paul McCartney, has enjoyed several dates with Marc Sinden but is keen to keep the fledgling relationship under wraps.

A source said: "They met a while ago through mutual friends and have seen each other a number of times."

Heather has told friends the West End producer, who is the son of British actor Sir Donald Sinden, is her "total confidante."...