The 2003 Oscar-winner as Best Foreign Language Film, this sees a German-Jewish family flee to a farm in Kenya to escape the rise of Nazism. Naturally, problems abound as the rural life turns tough, relationships disintegrate, locusts swarm and so do anti-Semites. Viewed through a child's eyes, the importance of each event is intensified, making for a visually impressive and emotionally testing experience.
William Friedkin's thriller casts Benicio Del Toro as a Special Forces killing machine running amok and Tommy Lee Jones as the man who trained him and now has to bring him in. Hokum, basically, but the knife fights are the best since David Carradine and James Remar went at each other with some gusto in The Long Riders.
Hideo Nakata, Japan's master of suspense and unease, knocks one out of the park again with this follow-up to his Ring cycle. A neurotic single mother discovers a ghostly rising damp problem in the apartment block she moves in to with her little girl. Gradually, her sanity begins to ebb away. A squelchy study in female hysteria and maternal anxiety, yes, but also a good, old-fashioned spook flick.
This Korean thriller is arrestingly stylised, impeccably directed and occasionally very beautiful, but jeesh, it's nasty stuff. A deaf-mute tries to kidnap a rich man's daughter to pay for his sister's operation. Naturally, it all goes horribly wrong. The torture of a young woman with electrical cables and the blade attack on a family of organ traffickers are especially gruesome, but beyond that, there's a withering examination of urban alienation and loneliness at play.
Six slightly funny films emerged from the Inspector Clouseau franchise through the '60s and '70s: they're not as hilarious as you recall. Peter Sellers is always looking for the humorous nugget, but pratfalls and silly accents do not make comedy gold. The Return Of... and ...Strikes Again are the high spots of the sextet. Nothing outshines Mancini's sexy theme tune.
Greenaway has more than once been known to disappear up his own aesthetics, but this collection of his short films plays to his strengths, tolerating little tedium. Disc One includes six films exploring his constant themes, from A Walk Through H (numbers, maps, the afterlife) to Windows (37 people fall through windows to their deaths). Disc Two features the obsessive Vertical Features Remake and The Falls (92 mini-biogs), and is—if you're in the mood—monumental like video art pioneer Bill Viola.
With barely a nod to the notion of storyline, this is another loud, brash series of MTV sketches, big on energy, little on brain. Somehow the idea of three scantily-clad chicks getting along okay with each other is pitched as pop-feminist empowerment. Diaz, Barrymore and Liu kick ass and chew scenery; Demi Moore is freakish; the (great) soundtrack rides roughshod over everything. Candy floss.
Who'd have thought after the debacle of Velvet Goldmine that Todd Haynes' next film would be as clever, meaningful and powerfully resonant as this masterpiece of stylised social commentary?
In the 1950s, the expatriate German director Douglas Sirk directed a series of Hollywood films that at the time were sniffily known as "women's pictures", which only later were recognised as brilliantly crafted satires, as sharply observed as novels like Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates' classic dissection of the Eisenhower years.
Misconceived pairing of Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson, but still curiously enjoyable and often funny. Sandler underplays (though not to the extent he did in Punch-Drunk Love) as a geek wrongly diagnosed with rage problems; Jack's the quack assigned to set him straight. Comic twist being: Jack's borderline deranged. While some scenes misfire, there's usually a weird (intentional or not) tension between the two, each straining to pull off this unlikely marriage. They just about do.
Feature-length spin-off from the Japanimated sci-fi TV show about a group of bounty hunters in the late 21st century. Here, they're battling renegade bio-terrorist commandos from Mars and a nanobyte virus. Innovative ideas and gizmos a-go-go, and though a tad predictable, its energy keeps you watching.
