Oscar Nominee: Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium

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Oscar Nominee

The Verdict

Nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor, The Verdict is "stirring, entertaining cinema" (US)! This Blu-ray - release is packed with compelling special features including on-camera interviews with Oscar winner Paul Newman and legendary director Sidney Lumet and is the perfect way to experience "one of the finest courtroom movies ever made" (New York)! Frank Galvin (Newman) is a boozy washed-up attorney with a losing streak a mile long. so when he's handed a lucrative out-of-court settlement, everyone expects him to take the money and run.

Cool Hand Luke

His crime: nonconformity. His sentence: the chain gang. Paul Newman plays one of his best loved roles as Cool Hand Luke, the loner who won't - or can't - bend to the arbitrary rules of his captivity. A cast of fine actors, including George Kennedy in his Oscar winning role of Dragline and the indelible Jo Van Fleet as Luke's mother, give Newman solid support. And Strother Martin is the Captain who taunts Luke with the now legendary line, "What we've got here is...failure to communicate." No failure here.

Educating Rita

Academy Award-winner Michael Caine along with Julie Walters earned well-deserved 1983 Oscar nominations (Best Actor and Best Actress, respectively) for their outstanding performances in this brilliant, bittersweet comedy. Walters is Rita, a working-class woman seeking the path to self-discovery. Bored with her life as a hairdresser, and under pressure from her husband to start a family, she enrolls in literature tutorials at a British university determined to better herself. Caine is Frank Bryant, the disillusioned English professor who is assigned to teach her.

Awakenings

Robin Williams plays Dr. Malcolm Sayer, a shy research physician who uses an experimental drug to "awaken" the catatonic victims of a rare disease. DeNiro co-stars as Leonard, the first patient to receive the controversial treatment. His awakening, filled with awe and enthusiasm, proves a rebirth for Sayer, too, as the exuberant patient reveals life's simple - but unutterably sweet - pleasures to the introverted doctor. Encouraged by Leonard's stunning recovery, Sayer administers the drug to other patients.

Airport

Combining a gripping story, intense action and ground-breaking special effects, Airport paved the way for a whole new style of disaster film and became a trend-setting box office blockbuster. The tension-filled adventure stars Burt Lancaster as the manager of an international airport who must juggle personal crises with professional responsibilities as he attempts to keep his blizzard-torn facility open to rescue a bomb-damaged jetliner.

A Passage To India

This adaptation of E.M. Forster's mysterious tale of British racism in colonial India turned out to be master director David Lean's final film. Subtle and grand at the same time, Lean's adaptation is faithful to the book, rendering its blend of the mystical and the all-too human with exquisite precision. Judy Davis plays a young British woman traveling in India with her fiancé's mother. While visiting a tourist attraction, she has a frightening moment in a cave--one that she eventually spins from an instant of mental meltdown into a tale of a physical attack that ruins several lives.

The Guns Of Navarone

This rousing, explosive 1961 WWII adventure, based on Alistair MacLean's thrilling novel, turns the war thriller into a deadly caper film. Gregory Peck heads a star-studded cast charged with a near impossible mission: destroy a pair of German guns nestled in a protective cave on the strategic Mediterranean island of Navarone, from where they can control a vital sea passage.

The Conformist

This story opens in 1938 in Rome, where Marcello has just taken a job working for Mussollini and is courting a beautiful young woman who will make him even more of a conformist. Marcello is going to Paris on his honeymoon and his bosses have an assignment for him there. Look up an old professor who fled Italy when the fascists came into power. At the border of Italy and France, where Marcello and his bride have to change trains, his bosses give him a gun with a silencer. In a flashback to 1917, we learn why sex and violence are linked in Marcello's mind.

Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan

A shipping disaster in the 19th Century has stranded a man and woman in the wilds of Africa. The lady is pregnant, and gives birth to a son in their tree house. Soon after, a family of apes stumble across the house and in the ensuing panic, both parents are killed. A female ape takes the tiny boy as a replacement for her own dead infant, and raises him as her son. Twenty years later, Captaine Phillippe D'Arnot discovers the man who thinks he is an ape.

Das Boot

This is the restored, 209-minute director's cut of Wolfgang Petersen's harrowing and claustrophobic U-boat thriller, which was theatrically re-released in 1997. Originally made as a six-hour miniseries, this version devotes more time to getting to know the crew before they and their stoic captain (J¸rgen Prochnow) get aboard their U-boat and find themselves stranded at the bottom of the sea. Das Boot puts you inside that submerged vessel and explores the physical and emotional tensions of the situation with a vivid, terrifying realism that few movies can match.

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