Tag Archives: UK

He’s always on call for this sort of job!
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A fictional account of the real life, eleven day, never explained 1926 disappearance of famed murder mystery writer Agatha Christie is presented. On a cold winter day, her damaged car with her expensive fur coat is found abandoned at the side of a country road. While the authorities initially suspect that she could have committed suicide, her pompous husband, Col. Archibald Christie, who is less than cooperative with the authorities, is adamant that she is still alive. What he doesn’t tell them is that he recently asked her for a divorce so that he could marry his secretary, Miss Nancy Neele. Although the divorce request was not a total surprise since she knew of the extramarital affair, Mrs. Christie still did not want to grant him the request since she still loves him. Concurrently, American newspaper columnist Wally Stanton was scheduled to conduct an interview with Mrs. Christie. Since he can no longer do so with her disappearance, Stanton instead tries to find out himself what …
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Nora Walker is told that her British fighter pilot husband is missing in action and presumed killed in World War II. On V.E. Day, Nora gives birth to their son, who she names Tommy. While Tommy is an adolescent, Nora marries Frank, a shifty camp counselor. Shortly thereafter, Tommy suffers an emotionally traumatic experience associated with his father and step-father, which, based on things told to him at that time, results in him becoming deaf, dumb and blind, a situation which several people exploit for their own pleasure. As Nora tries several things to bring Tommy out of his psychosomatic disabilities, Tommy, now a young man, happens upon pinball as a stimulus. Playing by intuition, Tommy becomes a pinball master, which in turn makes him, and by association Nora and Frank, rich and famous. Nora literally shatters Tommy to his awakening, which ultimately leads to both the family’s rise and downfall as people initially try to emulate Tommy’s path then rebel against it.
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Maverick American filmmaker Robert Altman takes a witty and absorbing look at the foibles of the British class system in this intelligent murder mystery set in the early ’30s. Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon) and his wife Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott Thomas) are a pair of wealthy British socialites who have invited a variety of friends, relatives, and acquaintances to their mansion in the country for a weekend of hunting and relaxation…
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The true story of Operation Market Garden, the Allies attempt, in September 1944, to hasten the end of WW2 by driving through Belgium and Holland into Germany. The idea was for US airborne divisions to take the towns of Eindhoven and Nijmegen and a British airborne division, reinforced by a Polish airborne brigade, to take the town of Arnhem. They would be reinforced, in due course and in turn, by the British XXX Corps, land-based and driving up from the British lines in the south. The key to the operation was the bridges, as if the Germans held or blew them, the paratroopers could not be relieved. Faulty intelligence, Allied high command hubris and stubborn German resistance would ensure that Arnhem was a bridge too far.
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Two powerful German guns control the seas past the Greek island of Navarone making the evacuation of endangered British troops on a neighboring island impossible. Air attack is useless so a team of six Allied and Greek soldiers is put ashore to meet up with partisans to try and dynamite the guns. The mission is perilous enough anyway but are the Germans on the island getting further help too?
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Celebrated actors Kenneth Branagh (Hamlet) and Helen Mirren (Prime Suspect) star in this film by award-winning playwright Alan Plater about one of the great love affairs and greatest scandals of the twentieth century – D. H. Lawrence’s passionate relationship with Frieda Weekley.
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Mark Conrad, a habitual drunk and troublemaker with a shady past, is expelled by Hong Kong police after one too many bar fights. He’s sent to Macao on the Fa Tsan, a ferry owned by Captain Hart. Conrad’s papers are out of order and Macao refuses him entry. Unable to go ashore, Conrad is a permanent passenger on the ferry with Hart, who detests him. It’s all one long, lazy voyage for Conrad until one fateful trip when an encounter with a typhoon and pirates forces Conrad to choose between an aimless drifter’s life and becoming a man again.
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Signing a contract, Jack Torrance, a normal writer and former teacher agrees to take care of a hotel which has a long, violent past that puts everyone in the hotel in a nervous situation. While Jack slowly gets more violent and angry of his life, his son, Danny, tries to use a special talent, the “Shining”, to inform the people outside about whatever that is going on in the hotel.
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In 1941 an American journalist in Greece is given a secret list of collaborators. He is helped by the Greek resistance as he is pursued across the country by the Nazis.
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