Hudson, Hugh

Chariots of Fire (Two-Disc Special Edition)

The come-from-behind winner of the 1981 Oscar for best picture, Chariots of Fire either strikes you as either a cold exercise in mechanical manipulation or as a tale of true determination and inspiration. The heroes are an unlikely pair of young athletes who ran for Great Britain in the 1924 Paris Olympics: devout Protestant Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), a divinity student whose running makes him feel closer to God, and Jewish Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), a highly competitive Cambridge student who has to surmount the institutional hurdles of class prejudice and anti-Semitism. There's delicious support from Ian Holm (as Abrahams's coach) and John Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson as a couple of Cambridge fogies. Vangelis's soaring synthesized score, which seemed to be everywhere in the early 1980s, also won an Oscar. Chariots of Fire was the debut film of British television commercial director Hugh Hudson (Greystoke) and was produced by David Puttnam. --Jim Emerson

Winner of four Academy Awards(R) including Best Picture! The inspiring true story of British athletes competing in the 1924 Olympics. Ben Cross and Ian Charleson head a sterling cast of newcomers and veterans. The story told in flashback of two young British sprinters competing for fame in the 1924 Olympics. Eric a devout Scottish missionary runs because he knows it must please God. Harold the son of a newly rich Jew runs to prove his place in Cambridge society.Running Time: 124 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA UPC: 085393190828

Greystoke - The Legend of Tarzan

One of those legendary missed opportunities, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes is a movie that should have been great but wound up the victim of conflicting egos and wrong-headed choices. Based on a screenplay by Robert Towne (who took his name off it when he wasn't allowed to direct) and directed by Hugh Hudson (riding high on the basis of Chariots of Fire), the film tried to rethink the Tarzan legend of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and boy, did it have to: By casting French-accented Christopher Lambert as Tarzan, the filmmakers had to transform his white-hunter mentor Ian Holm into a Frenchman to explain those inflections in Tarzan's monosyllabic speech. The film has some amazing jungle footage and a truly touching relationship between Tarzan and the apes--but it gets pretty silly when Tarzan gets to London and hooks up with Sir Ralph Richardson, as his grandfather. --Marshall Fine

An infant raised to manhood among savage apes, living by his wits and the law of the jungle, returns to society to claim his inheritance of humanity and privilege. This collision of "wild" and "civilized" worlds is the extraordinary saga of Tarzan, chronicled in Edgar Rice Burroughs' popular book series. Starring: Christopher Lambert, Andie MacDowell, Ian Holm

I Dreamed of Africa

Based on the memoirs of party-girl-turned-conservationist Kuki Gallman, I Dreamed of Africa never comes close to living up to its title; the mood is more prosaic travelogue than oneiric wonderment. After a car accident warns Kuki of her mortality, she resolves to grow up, a process that mysteriously involves marrying a man she barely knows and moving with him and her young son to the wilds of South Africa. There she learns new beau Paolo is less reliable than she thought, but also that the sun-baked plains and roaming beasts of Africa speak to her in a way the nightlife of Italy did not. (We learn of her blossoming humanity because she introduces herself to the servants; a probing study of interpersonal relationships this isn't.) Kim Basinger obviously feels connected to the role--she can stride across a room with a majestic self-righteousness that the film should have drawn upon more--but she's defeated by a script composed of repetitive vignettes that have no cumulative effect and a director (Hugh Hudson) who keeps the film's emotional impact curiously flat and diffuse except for the crass, manipulative moments every 20 minutes or so. Sure the photography's lovely, but really, how hard is it to get a nice shot of flamingoes at dawn? --Bruce Reid

Chariots of Fire

The come-from-behind winner of the 1981 Oscar for best picture, Chariots of Fire either strikes you as either a cold exercise in mechanical manipulation or as a tale of true determination and inspiration. The heroes are an unlikely pair of young athletes who ran for Great Britain in the 1924 Paris Olympics: devout Protestant Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), a divinity student whose running makes him feel closer to God, and Jewish Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), a highly competitive Cambridge student who has to surmount the institutional hurdles of class prejudice and anti-Semitism. There's delicious support from Ian Holm (as Abrahams's coach) and John Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson as a couple of Cambridge fogies. Vangelis's soaring synthesized score, which seemed to be everywhere in the early 1980s, also won an Oscar. Chariots of Fire was the debut film of British television commercial director Hugh Hudson (Greystoke) and was produced by David Puttnam. --Jim Emerson

My Life So Far

If pretty pictures and sweet intentions were enough to generate a classic family film, My Life So Far would rival How Green Was My Valley and George Cukor's Little Women. But those movies have strength and an acute sense of loss along with the sweetness and light, while--despite a death or two and the teasing prospect of adultery--My Life So Far doesn't really engage anything that would disrupt its rosy childhood memoir.

First-person narrator Fraser Pettigrew (Robert Norman) is age 10 in 1920, a moment when it seems that the charmed life of Kiloran, the rambling Scottish estate he shares with several generations of his relentlessly quaint family, will go on forever. Even a stray shellshock casualty from the Great War--a sub-Dickensian bogeyman who haunts the grounds--is treated as a picturesque bit of local color. The family is what counts: would-be inventor Colin Firth, eccentric paterfamilias and sphagnum moss farmer; his wife Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who traded an opera career for multiple maternity; crusty uncle Malcolm McDowell, who hopes to inherit Kiloran from matriarch Rosemary Harris and evict everybody; and Irène Jacob, the beauteous young Frenchwoman to whom the uncle is engaged and over whom everyone else goes gaga. Not to mention a gaggle of precocious siblings, colorful servants, and oddball interlopers.

This is all very slight, but amiable--sort of a Miramax dry run for The Cider House Rules without the darkness or the novelistic vision. The lakes, skies, and knobby hills around Argyll, Scotland, are unexceptionably gorgeous. --Richard T. Jameson

Colin Firth (BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY), Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (LIMBO), and Malcolm McDowell (MR. MAGOO) star in this delightfully charming comedy about the fun and awkwardness of growing up! Young Fraser Pettigrew has always been an adventurous child. But with the arrival of his sexy French aunt Heloise (Irene Jacob -- U.S. MARSHALS), Fraser enters a truly eye-opening summer of discovery as he learns some delicious truths about adulthood and the comic eccentricities of his loving family! Also featuring Rosemary Harris (HAMLET), the great ensemble cast lights up the screen. Come join the Pettigrews as their lives are forever changed in one unforgettable season!

Chariots of Fire (Full Screen Edition)

The come-from-behind winner of the 1981 Oscar for best picture, Chariots of Fire either strikes you as either a cold exercise in mechanical manipulation or as a tale of true determination and inspiration. The heroes are an unlikely pair of young athletes who ran for Great Britain in the 1924 Paris Olympics: devout Protestant Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), a divinity student whose running makes him feel closer to God, and Jewish Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), a highly competitive Cambridge student who has to surmount the institutional hurdles of class prejudice and anti-Semitism. There's delicious support from Ian Holm (as Abrahams's coach) and John Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson as a couple of Cambridge fogies. Vangelis's soaring synthesized score, which seemed to be everywhere in the early 1980s, also won an Oscar. Chariots of Fire was the debut film of British television commercial director Hugh Hudson (Greystoke) and was produced by David Puttnam. --Jim Emerson

Revolution [Region 2]

This big and sometimes messy movie achieves the seemingly impossible: it demythologizes the American Revolution and lets us see it in a completely new light. Hugh Hudson (Chariots of Fire) has directed a starkly beautiful, powerfully visceral portrait of war from the point of view of the little people who are swept along in its wake. Al Pacino is Tom Dobb, a poor, illiterate trapper bringing up a young son when rebellion breaks out in New York. Dobb's small boat is requisitioned for the war effort, and he and his son become reluctant conscripts. It takes six months and some truly vile treatment by the British before the conflict becomes personal for Dobb and he makes the American cause his own. The Dobb family's tale intersects that of British Sergeant Major Peasy (a formidable Donald Sutherland) and his own son. As the tide of the war turns, the enemies' fortunes are reversed. Tom's love interest, Daisy McConnahay (Nastassja Kinski), is a fiery beauty who breaks from her family of wealthy Tories (British sympathizers) to fight for freedom. Kinski is wonderful as a living Lady Liberty, and Pacino has some extraordinary moments of raw emotion as Dobb. The film's highlights include authentic, grisly re-creations of famous Revolutionary War battles, including Yorktown and Valley Forge. This movie will draw you in, gradually but inexorably, as it creates its convincing and compelling world. --Laura Mirsky

Lumiere & Company

Some of the world's leading directors (David Lynch, Spike Lee, Wim Wenders, Zhang Yimou, John Boorman) use the original Lumiere picture camera to create short films all over the world. Interactive Menus, Production Notes, Scene access, Trailer, Languages: French, Subtitles: English

I Dreamed of Africa [Region 2]

Based on the memoirs of party-girl-turned-conservationist Kuki Gallman, I Dreamed of Africa never comes close to living up to its title; the mood is more prosaic travelogue than oneiric wonderment. After a car accident warns Kuki of her mortality, she resolves to grow up, a process that mysteriously involves marrying a man she barely knows and moving with him and her young son to the wilds of South Africa. There she learns new beau Paolo is less reliable than she thought, but also that the sun-baked plains and roaming beasts of Africa speak to her in a way the nightlife of Italy did not. (We learn of her blossoming humanity because she introduces herself to the servants; a probing study of interpersonal relationships this isn't.) Kim Basinger obviously feels connected to the role--she can stride across a room with a majestic self-righteousness that the film should have drawn upon more--but she's defeated by a script composed of repetitive vignettes that have no cumulative effect and a director (Hugh Hudson) who keeps the film's emotional impact curiously flat and diffuse except for the crass, manipulative moments every 20 minutes or so. Sure the photography's lovely, but really, how hard is it to get a nice shot of flamingoes at dawn? --Bruce Reid

Chariots of Fire [Region 2]

The come-from-behind winner of the 1981 Oscar for best picture, Chariots of Fire either strikes you as either a cold exercise in mechanical manipulation or as a tale of true determination and inspiration. The heroes are an unlikely pair of young athletes who ran for Great Britain in the 1924 Paris Olympics: devout Protestant Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), a divinity student whose running makes him feel closer to God, and Jewish Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), a highly competitive Cambridge student who has to surmount the institutional hurdles of class prejudice and anti-Semitism. There's delicious support from Ian Holm (as Abrahams's coach) and John Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson as a couple of Cambridge fogies. Vangelis's soaring synthesized score, which seemed to be everywhere in the early 1980s, also won an Oscar. Chariots of Fire was the debut film of British television commercial director Hugh Hudson (Greystoke) and was produced by David Puttnam. --Jim Emerson