Abel Ferrara's slick 1993 adaptation of Jack Finney's páranoid sci-fi novel about human beings being replaced in their sleep by alien duplicates is the third screen version, and surprisingly good considering the director was compromised by the studio's desperation for a hit. Ferrara relocates the action to a military base, and Gabrielle Anwar and Meg Tilly are among those being menaced. The SFX are gross but impressive.
Sidney Pollack directed, Coppola co-wrote, Natalie Wood, Robert Redford and Charles Bronson star; how come it's so disappointing? A Tennessee Williams adaptation, Wood plays a dreamy but slinky belle in a stifling Southern smalltown boarding house. She falls for golden stranger Redford?then gets left behind. Hard to swallow, but Wood is highly watchable, and the cinematography is exemplary.
Slightly crass 60th-anniversary edition of a six-year-old flick?a marketing gimmick that rewrites Spielberg's war record by rooting his movie in 1944, making it a document of the time, rather than a piece of late-20th-century fiction. Though it remains a spectacular, unequalled piece of action film-making.
Worth owning for the way she peels off her opera gloves as the nightclub singer caught in the snake's nest noir Gilda (1946) alone. It also features Rita chased by Fred Astaire in You Were Never Lovelier (1942); shaking her stuff with Gene Kelly and a pre-Bilko Phil Silvers in Cover Girl (1944); and being a magnificent bitch to nightclub heel Sinatra in Pal Joey (1957). Lady is a vamp.
SPIDER-MAN 2 IS THE best movie adaptation of a superhero comic since Superman 2—one each to Marvel and DC, then. Like that 1980 Christopher Reeve (R.I.P.) super-vehicle, here the eponymous character, played by Tobey Maguire with muscular sensitivity, is torn between saving the world and giving it all up for The Girl (Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane). This sets things up quite nicely for Peter Parker's biblical abdication of responsibility when the prospect of losing MJ becomes too great and inevitable return when he realises his true calling.
You'd have to be Scrooge (or rather Mr Potter) not to recognise Capra as a film-maker whose delight in the human spirit produced some of the finest, sharpest comedies of vintage Hollywood. Here's four of'em-Jimmy Stewart in You Can't Take it With You, Mr Smith Goes To Washington and everyone's festive favourite, It's A Wonderful Life, plus 1934's It Happened One Night. Heart-melting brilliance.
Robust, insightful doc by Startup.com director Jehane Noujaim examining the role of Arabic news channel Al Jazeera during the recent Gulf War. Despite being damned by Donald Rumsfeld as the mouthpiece of Al-Qaeda, Al Jazeera emerges as the only honest voice, struggling to be heard above the clamour of misinformation, manipulation and deceit (most of it, ironically, from the US networks). A real David and Goliath story, expertly told.
