Al Pacino is in workaday Mad Mentor mode (see Donnie Brasco and Devil's Advocate) as the CIA talent scout who lures the brooding, intense™ Colin Farrell into the fold while director Roger Donaldson tries to rekindle memories of his definitive '80s paranoia thriller No Way Out by inserting a screamingly obvious twist into a 'mole in the agency' finale.
A handsomely filmed 1976 comedy adventure from a Wilbur Smith novel set in Africa during WWI, Shout At The Devil fails to register. True Blue Brit Roger Moore hooks up with alcoholid Lee Marvin, and they take on the German Navy. Explosions follow. Marvin hams outrageously.
The cross-cutting is seamless—'20s England, '50s California and presentday New York feeding off each other, resonating, as our disaffected heroines, played impeccably by Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep, flirt with total internal breakdown. And still, it's all about that nose. Kidman's prosthetic nose. Bumpy, spongy, and slightly off-colour. You either buy it, or you don't.
DIRECTED BY Ridley Scott
STARRING Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto, Hatry Dean Stanton
Opened October 31, Cert 15, 115 mins
Scott's franchise-launching 1979 future-shocker is one of those rare, pure, primal films that works as both highbrow modern myth and trouser-soiling midnight movie.
Full of incident and introducing a slate of new characters, including Alan Cummings' edge-of-camp Nightcrawler, this workmanlike sequel plays less thrillingly second time round on a small screen. In addition to the expected commentaries, the second disc has more info about the film's making, the comic's history and what Ian McKellen had for tea on Day 28 of shooting than even a diehard fan could possibly want.
Corporate exploitation, US foreign policy, K-Mart, small-town rednecks, the NRA and Charlton Heston are all in the firing line as shaggy documentarian, and now best-selling author, Michael Moore tackles America's self-destructive gun culture. Mostly witty and irreverent, it's also sporadically profound—see the terrifying slow-mo security footage of the Columbine massacre and Chuck Heston's final broken and bewildered interview.
