Samuel L Jackson and Colin Farrell swagger through S. W. A. T. , a guns-and-big-trucks macho extravaganza based on the 1970s TV show of the same name, in which police teams are brought in to take care of extremely dangerous situations. Jackson plays a sergeant brought out of retirement to form a new squad, which includes rebellious Farrell and tough babe Michelle Rodriguez. After a lot of training and head-butting with a smarmy police captain, the squad gets assigned to transfer the head of a European crime cartel (Olivier Martinez) who's declared on television that he'll give $100 million to anyone who gets him out. Every scumbag in Los Angeles descends to claim the money, turning a routine transfer into a bullet-filled gauntlet. Despite some gaps in logic and a generic flavour, S. W. [+]

Winner of five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, The Deer Hunter is simultaneously an audacious directorial conceit and one of the greatest films ever made about friendship and the personal impact of war. Like Apocalypse Now, it's hardly a conventional battle film-the soldier's experience was handled with greater authenticity in Platoon-but its depiction of war on an intimate scale packs a devastatingly dramatic punch. Director Michael Cimino may be manipulating our emotions with masterful skill, but he does it in a way that stirs the soul and pinches our collective nerves with graphic, high-intensity scenes of men under life-threatening duress. Although Russian-roulette gambling games were not a common occurrence during the Vietnam war, they're used here as a metaphor for the futility of the war itself. To the viewer, they become unforgettably intense rites of passage for the best friends-Pennsylvania steelworkers played by Robert De Niro, John Savage and Oscar winner Christopher Walken-who may survive or perish during their tour through a tropical landscape of hell. Back home, their loved ones must cope with the war's domestic impact, and in doing so they allow The Deer Hunter to achieve a rare combination of epic storytelling and intimate, heart-rending drama. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. com.

The second series of The Sopranos, David Chase's ultra-cool and ultra-modern take on New Jersey gangster life, matches the brilliance of the first, although it's marginally less violent, with more emphasis given to the stories and obsessions of supporting characters. Sadly, the programme makers were forced to throttle back on the appalling struggle between gang boss Tony Soprano and his Gorgon-like Mother Livia, the very stuff of Greek theatre, following actress Nancy Marchand's unsuccessful battle against cancer. Taking up her slack, however, is Tony's big sister Janice, a New Age victim and arrant schemer and sponger, who takes up with the twitchy, Scarface-wannabe Richie Aprile, brother of former boss Jackie, out of prison and a minor pain in Tony's ass. Other running sub-plots include soldier Chris (Michael Imperioli) hapless efforts to sell his real-life Mafia story to Hollywood, the return and treachery of Big Pussy and Tony's wife Carmela's ruthlessness in placing daughter Meadow in the right college. Even with the action so dispersed, however, James Gandofini is still toweringly dominant as Tony. The genius of his performance, and of the programme makers, is that, despite Tony being a whoring, unscrupulous, sexist boor, a crime boss and a murderer, we somehow end up feeling and rooting for him, because he's also a family man with a bratty brood to feed, who's getting his balls busted on all sides, to say nothing of keeping the Government off his back. He's the kind of crime boss we'd like to feel we would be. Tony's decent Italian-American therapist Dr Melfi's (Loraine Bracco) perverse attraction with her gangster-patient reflects our own and, in her case, causes her to lose her first series cool and turn to drink this time around. Effortlessly multi-dimensional, funny and frightening, devoid of the sentimentality that afflicts even great American TV like The West Wing, The Sopranos is boss of bosses in its televisual era. -David Stubbs.

Based on Robert Ludlum's novel, The Hades Factor puts a bio-terrorism spin on a good old-fashioned spy thriller storyline for this tense TV mini-series. Stephen Dorff is top-billed as a former spy turned medical researcher who is pulled back into the espionage business when a new and mysterious disease erupts simultaneously in three military-sensitive regions. The target of the investigation centers on another covert operative (Mira Sorvino), who made off with a black-market virus in the middle of a government sting. The film's solid cast, which includes Blair Underwood and two Hustons-Danny and Anjelica (as the U. S. President)-helps the suspension of belief required for this sort of story considerably, and director Mick Jackson delivers the required amount of action at a brisk and engaging clip. Squeamish viewers should know that the outbreak scenes are particularly grisly for a television production. -Paul Gaita.

The three films in this Terry Thomas Collection-The Naked Truth, Too Many Crooks and Make Mine Mink-are each an unalloyed delight from beginning to end. Though produced on slim budgets they possess witty scripts by Michael Pertwee, deft direction in two instances by Mario Zampi, inventive music scores and marvellous casts featuring two generations of British actors, from Athene Seyler to a young Kenneth Williams. Individually and as an ensemble these players are a pleasure to watch. But of course Terry Thomas, the catalyst of the collection, runs the gamut with a plethora of facial expressions, body language and verbal repartee that contribute so much to the unbuttoned joy of each film. In the earliest of them, The Naked Truth (1957), TT plays a dodgy peer of the realm being blackmailed in the company of Peter Sellers, Peggy Mount and Shirley Eaton by a gutter press journalist, Dennis Price ("Don't try to appeal to my better nature, because I haven't one"). The moments of slapstick are brought off to a tee as when the larger-than-life Peggy Mount attempts a suicide drop from her window to be saved by an awning on a shop front. Too Many Crooks (1959) has TT being blackmailed once again, this time for the hoards he's stashed away as a renowned tax dodger. Look out for the very funny court scene, where TT makes three appearances on separate charges, before a bemused magistrate, John Le Mesurier. Make Mine Mink (1960), the odd one out in this collection, was adapted from a West End stage farce, Breath of Spring. TT leads a gang of middle-aged biddies who decide to brighten up "the dullness of the tea time of life", by staging a series of robberies on furriers, then donating the proceeds to charitable concerns. [+]

Baz Luhrmann (Strictly Ballroom) takes a shot at reinventing Shakespeare's story of star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet as a visual pastiche inspired by MTV imagery, Hong Kong action-picture clichés, and Luhrmann's own taste for deliberate, gaudy excess. The result is explosive chaos, both in terms of bullets and visual sensibility, which some may find impossible to stick with for more than a few minutes. Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes play the leads, though not with much distinction, while Pete Postlethwaite makes a huge impression as this movie's version of Friar Laurence. The film is successful in spots, but overall its fever-dream game plan is difficult to ride out. -Tom Keogh.

Whether or not you can sympathise with its fascistic/vigilante approach to law enforcement, Dirty Harry (directed by star Clint Eastwood's longtime friend and directorial mentor, Don Siegel) is one hell of an American cop thriller. The movie makes evocative use of its San Francisco locations as cop Harry Callahan (Eastwood) tracks the elusive "Scorpio killer" who has been terrorising the city by the Bay. As the psychopath's trail grows hotter, Harry becomes increasingly impatient and intolerant of the frustrating obstacles (departmental red tape, individuals' civil rights) that he feels are keeping him from doing his job. A characteristically taut and tense piece of filmmaking from Siegel (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Shootist, Escape from Alcatraz), it also remains a fascinating slice of American pop culture. It was a big hit (followed by four sequels) that obviously reflected-or exploited-the almost obsessive or paranoid fears and frustrations many Americans felt about crime in the streets. At a time when "law and order" was a familiar slogan for political candidates, Harry Callahan may have represented neither, but from his point of view his job was simple: stop criminals. To him that end justified any means he deemed necessary. -Jim Emerson.

Cape Fear (1962) Superior to Martin Scorsese's punishing 1991 remake, this 1962 thriller directed by J. Lee Thompson (The Guns of Navarone) stars Robert Mitchum as a creepy ex-con angry at the attorney (Gregory Peck) whom he believes is responsible for his incarceration. After Mitchum makes clear his plans to harm Peck's family, a fascinating game of crisscrossing ethics and morality takes place. Where the more recent version seemed trapped in its explicitness, Thompson's film accomplishes a lot with a more economical and telling use of violence. The result is a richer character study with some Hitchcockian overtones regarding the nature of guilt. -Tom Keogh Cape Fear (1991) Martin Scorsese's 1991 remake of J. Lee Thompson's 1962 thriller dabbles a bit in some fascinating psychological crosscurrents between its characters, but it finally trades in all that rich material for extensive and gratuitous violence. Robert De Niro plays a serial rapist released from prison after 14 years. Angry because his appalled attorney (Nick Nolte) made it easy for him to be convicted, this monster is out to hurt Nolte's character through his wife (Jessica Lange) and daughter (Juliette Lewis). The themes of interlocking guilt and anger between these people suggests a smart film in the making. [+]

James Toback's Black and White, a portrait of white and black culture mixing it up on the streets of Manhattan, is like two films colliding. In the centre of the swirl are a group of upper-class white teens (led by Elijah Wood and pop singer Bijou Phillips) who appropriate hip-hop culture to rebel against their affluent lifestyle, and a posse of gangstas and drug dealers (led by rap producer Oli "Power" Grant) who are themselves trying to get off the streets and into the business culture through their music. Ageing indie filmmaker Toback has long shown an interest in character contradictions and quirks. Here the dynamic works: the two groups are genuinely curious about one another and mix with a cautious but untroubled ease. Less successful is the contrived drama that orbits this cultural mix but never quite meshes-such as Ben Stiller as a self-loathing New York cop who blackmails college basketball star Allan Houston into betraying his boyhood buddy turned street criminal. Toback spices his Altmanesque style of restless camera work and impressionistic intercutting with attitude, nervous energy, and in-your-face sex. There's an interesting story to be told here, but the provocative cultural mix gets lost in the self-conscious melodrama and only periodically roars to life, notably in the edgy, unpredictable scenes with Mike Tyson (an inspired bit of casting that works marvellously). Also featured are rapper Raekwon, supermodel Claudia Schiffer, Brooke Shields, and Robert Downey Jr. -Sean Axmaker, Amazon. com.

Claude Chabrol's nervy and nasty little 2001 thriller Merci Pour le Chocolat is based on Charlotte Armstrong's novel The Chocolate Cobweb. In Chabrol's hands it becomes a vehicle of considerable power for the unsettling, disturbed qualities of actress Isabelle Huppert, who has been one of his most important muses over the years (their other collaborations include La Cérémonie and Rien ne va Plus). Huppert plays Mika, the owner of a Swiss chocolate factory, now married to a world-class concert pianist (Jacques Dutronc) and with a stepson who is obsessive about making the family's drinking chocolate every day. As the clues unravel, it soon becomes clear that Mika is damaged goods. When Dutronc acquires a piano student (Anna Mougalis) in curious circumstances, Mika is forced to escalate her secret agenda. Huppert is fascinating throughout and the film is sinewy and, for the most part, rather clever, evoking shades of Hitchcock and Clouzot. Liszt's Les Funérailles is the ominous leitmotif, worked on by Dutronc and his protégé, and the Lausanne setting creates an other-worldliness which seems almost sterile. Only at the end does the picture dwindle into an almost Strindbergian inertia as Mika's motivation seems to evaporate in a rather unsatisfactory way. Until then it is spellbinding. -Piers Ford.