Young Adam's David MacKenzie makes an impressive directorial debut with this low-key but unpredictable thriller about two travellers who stumble across a strange community in the remote Scottish Highlands. It benefits from a nice mix of quirky humour and quiet menace, plus a sprinkling of the supernatural for good measure. Bleak, but still well worth the journey.
Potentially ridiculous premise about a cabal of gamblers who harness the power of, er, luck, is admirably sustained by gutsy turns from Leonardo Sbaraglia as a lucky plane crash survivor mentored by lucky earthquake survivor Eusebio Poncela in order to take revenge on casino owner and lucky holocaust survivor Max Von Sydow. Fractured narrative, arty mise-en-scène and punchy pacing from director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo also help.
The Omen echoes throughout Simon Wincer's camp but sporadically affecting 1980 re-imagining of Rasputin. Here the Mad Monk has been replaced by Robert Powell's mysterious glam-rock psychic healer, who cures the leukaemia-stricken son of venal senator David Hemmings and uses magic to expose the senator's crimes. It's clunky and dated, but Powell's typically messianic performance smoothes over the cracks.
Gung-ho navy flyboys Willem Dafoe and Brad Johnson, disillusioned with America's half-hearted prosecution of the war in Vietnam, attempt to hurry the conflict to a conclusion by taking it upon themselves to bomb Hanoi. Hilarious macho nonsense from John Milius at his most demented, in other words.
A key tome in the lovers-on-the-lam canon, with uncredited mastershots from a fledgling Martin Scorsese, Honeymoon Killers is the tale of a bloated, psychotic nurse (Shirley Stoler—Divine meets Louise Fletcher), her oily Spanish lover (Tony Lo Bianco) and the various needy, neurotic, half-witted women they deceive and murder. Startling photography, am-dram performances, and deeply misogynistic.
One of the most revered of Krzysztof Kieslowski's "10 commandments" series, the late director's determinedly bleak parable investigates a pointless murder and a lawyer's subsequent near-existential defence. Out the same year ('88) as A Short Film About Love, its intensity made the Polish maestro a global name.
Philip Noyce's deceptively simple tale, describing the inspirational Disneyesque homeward journey of three headstrong aboriginal children, is accompanied by a stinging assault on the rarely explored genocidal project central to Australian nationhood, and in particular the crisis of the country's infamous "Stolen Generations". The result, simultaneously palatable and unnerving, is a contemporary cinematic anomaly—a politically provocative piece of mainstream film-making.
DVD EXTRAS: Audio commentary, Making Of... documentary, trailer.
Trapped in a sweaty throng of beered-up blokes, Paul Weller live can be an endurance test. In the comfort of your own home, he's great. Recorded last October, you get all the fun of a night out in Glasgow without plastic glasses crunching underfoot as Weller trawls through 30 songs (a third of them from 2002's Illumination). Whether you prefer The Jam ("A Town Called Malice"), The Style Council ("Our Favourite Shop") or his solo work ("The Changing Man"), you're unlikely to be disappointed.