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.
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.
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.
Compiled, it seems, by lucky dip, but Stage Fright, I Confess, Dial M For Murder, The Wrong Man and North By Northwest all explain why he's still The Master. The centrepiece, though, is a special-edition Strangers On A Train (also available separately).
