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Review Momentum Pictures / Out Of Time [2003]
Actors & Directors
  • Denzel Washington
  • Sanaa Lathan
  • Dean Cain
  • John Billingsley (II)
  • Eva Mendes
  • Carl Franklin
Release date: 2004-05-10
Run time: 101 min.
RRP: £19.99
Price: £3.99

Review Out Of Time [2003] / Momentum Pictures:

The Denzel Washington thriller Out of Time is quite enjoyable if you ignore its implausible plotting. Partly inspired by 1948's The Big Clock and its nominal 1987 remake No Way Out, this reunion of Washington and his Devil in a Blue Dress director Carl Franklin is about a man-in this case the police chief (Washington) of sleepy Banyan Key, Florida-who falls into a trap set by others, sinks into legal quicksand of his own making, and must race the clock to extricate himself from a series of incriminating setbacks. The Florida setting adds welcome character to the pot-boiler plot, and Washington's screen credibility makes it easy to overlook the absurdities of rookie writer David Collard's screenplay. Eva Mendes is sharp and sensible as Washington's estranged wife (do you think they'll reconcile for a happy ending?), and the talented John Billingsley-whose portrayal of Dr Phlox on TV's Enterprise is vastly underrated-is a constant delight as Washington's medical examiner, beer buddy and wily co-conspirator. -Jeff Shannon.

Review MGM Entertainment / Into The Blue [2005]
Actors & Directors
  • Jessica Alba
  • Chris Taloa
  • Scott Caan
  • John Stockwell
  • Nicola Paciotta
  • Paul Walker
Release date: 2006-02-27
Run time: 106 min.
RRP: £19.99
Price: £2.28

Review Into The Blue [2005] / MGM Entertainment:

Stunning tropical scenery and gorgeous athletic movie stars may not make a movie great, but they sure don't hurt. Jared (Paul Walker, The Fast and the Furious) dreams of finding sunken treasure and making millions, but his girlfriend Sam (Jessica Alba, Fantastic Four, Sin City) is content with their poor but idyllic life in the Bahamas. Still, when they find artefacts from a 19th century pirate ship, she gets caught up in the excitement-until they also find a crashed plane full of smuggled cocaine. Naturally, someone's going to want that cocaine back. From there, Into the Blue is a surprisingly well-plotted action film, unpredictable in its specifics if familiar in its broader outlines. Even more pleasant, the action itself stays plausible and genuinely engaging throughout. Jared seems able to hold his breath for a preternaturally long time, but aside from that the film is meticulous about the dangers and threats the characters face and is all the stronger for it. Add to this its unabashed ogling of Alba and Walker (both of whom are astonishing physical specimens) and you have a solid romp. [+]
Also featuring Scott Caan (Ocean's Eleven), Tyson Beckford (Biker Boyz), and Josh Brolin (Flirting With Disaster) as a slimy rival treasure hunter. -Bret Fetzer.

Review MGM Entertainment / Terror on the Britannic (Juggernaut)
Actors & Directors
  • David Hemmings
  • Richard Lester
  • Omar Sharif
  • Anthony Hopkins
  • Ian Holm
  • Richard Harris
Release date: 2005-05-23
Run time: 106 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £2.96

Review Terror on the Britannic (Juggernaut) / MGM Entertainment:


Review ITV DVD / Cadfael - The Complete Series 1 [1994]
Actors & Directors
  • Graham Theakston
  • Sebastian Graham Jones
  • Anthony Green (II)
Release date: 2004-03-15
Run time: 302 min.
RRP: £14.99
Price: £6.48

Review Cadfael - The Complete Series 1 [1994] / ITV DVD:

Brother Cadfael, the medieval mystery-solving monk, is a fascinating detective, at once a man of God, of science, and even of action. Derek Jacobi stars as the former "soldier, sailor, sinner, and Crusader" who has his faith tested by crimes of royal intrigue and baffling murders that seem to plague 12th-century Shrewsbury. You'll find few Benedictine monks so skilled at using a quarterstaff, but beware never to tell him your theory of how a crime "must" have been committed. "We must always be wary of 'must'," he states. "Nothing is certain. " And so attest these divine mysteries based on the books by Ellis Peters. Each feature-length episode is self-contained but plays against the backdrop of England's civil war between forces loyal to King Stephen and those to Empress Maud. Eoin McCarthy costars as local Under-Sheriff Hugh Beringar, who relies on Cadfael when murder subverts his efforts to keep the peace. -Donald Liebenson.

Review Paramount Home Entertainment / Kiss The Girls [1998]
Actors & Directors
  • Cary Elwes
  • Morgan Freeman
  • Tony Goldwyn
  • Gary Fleder
  • Alex McArthur
  • Ashley Judd
Release date: 2001-11-05
Run time: 111 min.
RRP: £15.99
Price: £3.27

Review Kiss The Girls [1998] / Paramount Home Entertainment:

Kiss the Girls is a thriller about a collaboration between two serial killers, and, coming after The Silence of the Lambs and Seven, it feels like a pale attempt to cash in on the success of those earlier, better films. That's a pity, because this film certainly has its strengths-particularly in the central performances of Morgan Freeman as a forensic detective and Ashley Judd as a would-be victim who escaped from one of the killers. Director Gary Fleder demonstrates visual flair and maintains an involving undercurrent of tension, but as this adaptation of James Patterson's novel approaches its climax, familiar elements combine to form a chronic case of thriller déjà vu. It's altogether competent filmmaking in the service of a moribund story of competing psychopaths, and by the time the serial killers reach the home stretch of their twisted contest, the movie's dangerously close to Freddy Kruger territory, with a finale that could've been borrowed from any one of dozens of similar thrillers. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. com.

Review Sony Pictures Home Entertainment / Taxi Driver [1976]
Actors & Directors
  • Jodie Foster
  • Robert De Niro
  • Harvey Keitel
  • Leonard Harris
  • Martin Scorsese
  • Albert Brooks
Release date: 2006-07-10
Run time: 109 min.
RRP: £7.99
Price: £3.40

Review Taxi Driver [1976] / Sony Pictures Home Entertainment:

Taxi Driver is the definitive cinematic portrait of loneliness and alienation manifested as violence. It is as if director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader had tapped into precisely the same source of psychological inspiration ("I just knew I had to make this film", Scorsese would later say), combined with a perfectly timed post-Watergate expression of personal, political and societal anxiety. Robert De Niro, as the tortured, ex-Marine cab driver Travis Bickle, made movie history with his chilling performance as one of the most memorably intense and vividly realised characters ever committed to film. Bickle is a self-appointed vigilante who views his urban beat as an intolerable cesspool of blighted humanity. He plays guardian angel for a young prostitute (Jodie Foster), but not without violently devastating consequences. This masterpiece, which is not for all tastes, is sure to horrify some viewers, but few could deny the film's lasting power and importance. -Jeff Shannon.

Review Prism Leisure Corporation / Mean Creek [2004]
Actors & Directors
  • Jacob Estes
  • Josh Peck
  • Ryan Kelley
  • Trevor Morgan
  • Rory Culkin
  • Scott Mechlowicz
Release date: 2006-10-02
Run time: 86 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £1.26

Review Mean Creek [2004] / Prism Leisure Corporation:


Review MGM Entertainment / Eye Of The Needle [1981]
Actors & Directors
  • Stephen MacKenna
  • Christopher Cazenove
  • Kate Nelligan
  • Donald Sutherland
  • Richard Marquand
  • Philip Martin Brown
Release date: 2001-01-08
Run time: 108 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £2.98

Review Eye Of The Needle [1981] / MGM Entertainment:


Review Optimum Home Entertainment / Mulholland Drive - Special Edition [2001]
Actors & Directors
  • Dan Hedaya
  • David Lynch
  • Robert Forster
  • Laura Harring
  • Naomi Watts
  • Justin Theroux
Release date: 2007-03-12
Run time: 141 min.
RRP: £15.99
Price: £7.34

Review Mulholland Drive - Special Edition [2001] / Optimum Home Entertainment:


Review Warner Home Video / The Getaway (Deluxe Edition) [1972]
Actors & Directors
  • Sam Peckinpah
  • Ben Johnson
  • Sally Struthers
  • Ali MacGraw
  • Steve McQueen
  • Al Lettieri
Release date: 2005-07-18
Run time: 118 min.
RRP: £18.99
Price: £3.99

Review The Getaway (Deluxe Edition) [1972] / Warner Home Video:

This original version of The Getaway is much better than the 1994 remake starring Kim Basinger and husband Alec Baldwin, but this thriller from 1972 relies too heavily on the low-key star power of Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, and the stylish violence of director Sam Peckinpah, reduced here to a mechanical echo of his former glory. McQueen plays a bank robber whose wife (MacGraw) makes a deal with a Texas politician to have her husband released from prison in return for a percentage from their next big heist. But when the plan goes sour, the couple must flee to Mexico as fast as they can, with a variety of gun-wielding thugs on their trail. MacGraw was duly skewered at the time for her dubious acting ability, but the film still has a raw, unglamorous quality that lends a timeless spin to the familiar crooks-on-the-lam scenario. As always, Peckinpah rises to the occasion with some audacious scenes of action and suspense, including a memorable chase on a train that still grabs the viewer's attention. -Jeff Shannon.

Review Optimum Home Entertainment / Agatha Christie's Evil Under The Sun [1981]
Actors & Directors
  • Colin Blakely
  • Maggie Smith
  • Guy Hamilton
  • Nicholas Clay
  • Jane Birkin
  • Peter Ustinov
Release date: 2008-01-07
Run time: 111 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £4.46

Review Agatha Christie's Evil Under The Sun [1981] / Optimum Home Entertainment:


Review Uca Catalogue / 8MM [1999]
Actors & Directors
  • Joel Schumacher
  • Anthony Heald
  • Nicolas Cage
  • Joaquin Phoenix
  • James Gandolfini
  • Peter Stormare
Release date: 2007-05-21
Run time: 118 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £1.97

Review 8MM [1999] / Uca Catalogue:

This thoroughly unpleasant thriller from the hands of Joel Schumacher (Batman and Robin) offers very little in its lurid tour of snuff films and the seedy pornographic underworld. A wooden Nicolas Cage stars as a private detective hired by a tycoon's widow, who discovers in her dead husband's safe some 8mm footage of a young girl being sexually abused and slaughtered. Cage's job is to determine the veracity of the film and to find out the girl's identity, whether she be alive or dead. What could have been a taut, nerve-jangling thriller is instead a lumbering, overwrought but underwritten tale of vigilante justice. Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker also penned the imaginative and compelling Seven but you wouldn't know it from this tired and monotonous script. Schumacher tries for echoes of both The Silence of the Lambs and Paul Schrader's Hardcore (which stars George C. Scott as a father trying to find his daughter in the seedy porn industry) but despite some slick camerawork, the film fails to draw the audience into either the mystery of the missing girl or Cage's supposed internal conflicts. It's not so much the unsavoury subject matter as it is the sloppy and unimaginative filmmaking that makes the movie unbearable. Of the entire cast only Joaquin Phoenix, as a charismatic goth boy who works at an adult book store, comes away with a memorable performance. -Mark Englehart.

Review Pathe Distribution / Read My Lips [2001]
Actors & Directors
  • Jacques Audiard
  • Emmanuelle Devos
  • Vincent Cassel
Release date: 2003-03-10
Run time: 113 min.
RRP: £19.99
Price: £3.98

Review Read My Lips [2001] / Pathe Distribution:

Workplace dramas seem to have become a French speciality, and Jacques Audiard's Read My Lips ("Sur mes levres") proves a worthy follow-up to such notable predecessors in the genre as Human Resources and Time Out ("L'Emploi du temps"). The film also nods towards Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men and Hitchcock's Rear Window, but it's none the worse for that. Carla, our anti-heroine (Emmanuelle Devos), is an ugly duckling working as a secretary for a construction company in suburban Paris. Dowdy and all-but deaf, she's exploited and put upon by her male coworkers. When her boss lets her hire an assistant she bizarrely chooses Paul (Vincent Cassel), a scruffy and none-too-bright ex-con. But an odd symbiosis grows up between this pair of losers; the combination of his petty-criminal skills and her lip-reading abilities has certain potentials. As A Self-Made Hero, his previous movie, showed, Audiard doesn't go in for lovable characters. Carla is no long-suffering saint and Paul is frankly sleazy, but this just makes their interaction all the more intriguing. Devos, glowering malevolently beneath her dark brows, and Cassel with his greasy hair and ratty moustache, turn in relishably truculent and un-starry performances, and Audiard deftly manages the transition from office comedy to gangland heist thriller with no grinding of gears. By the end the plot starts to strain belief, but it scarcely matters. [+]
The noir-ish lighting and potent use of hand-held close-ups enhance the film's sense of nervous unease, and there's ingenious use of sound to convey Carla's hearing-impaired world. Downbeat and unblinkingly amoral, Read My Lips offers pleasures that a glossier treatment would have missed entirely. On the DVD: Read My Lips has no extras on the disc beyond the trailer. But the transfer is clean and crisp, offering the full-width original ratio, and the Dolby sound captures the all-important subtleties of the soundtrack flawlessly. -Philip Kemp.

Review Touchstone Home Video / The Recruit [2003]
Actors & Directors
  • Roger Donaldson
  • Colin Farrell
  • Kenneth Mitchell
  • Al Pacino
  • Bridget Moynahan
  • Gabriel Macht
Release date: 2003-11-03
Run time: 110 min.
RRP: £19.99
Price: £4.55

Review The Recruit [2003] / Touchstone Home Video:

"Nothing is as it seems" in The Recruit, a guessing-game thriller that employs plot twists and conflicting loyalties as its primary raison d'etre. Surrounded by potential deception, a newly recruited CIA officer (Colin Farrell) must determine if his manipulative instructor (Al Pacino) is being honest when he identifies Farrell's fellow recruit and love interest (Bridget Moynihan) as an enemy "mole" assigned to steal a dangerous computer virus from CIA headquarters. While claiming to offer an insider's look at CIA training methods, this engrossing yet ultimately predictable plot is pure Hollywood fantasy; any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental, leaving the perpetually unshaven and scruffily coiffed Farrell to fend for himself in Pacino's cynical arena while tracing his familial roots in the spy game. Wearing its cleverness on its sleeve, The Recruit is an adequately elaborate puzzle of perceptions. "Everything is a test", as Farrell soon realises, and attentive viewers will enjoy piecing it all together. -Jeff Shannon.

Review Sony Pictures Home Entertainment / Starsky And Hutch - Series 1-4 - Complete
Actors & Directors
  • Bernie Hamilton
  • Paul Michael Glaser
  • Antonio Fargas
  • David Sole
Release date: 2006-11-20
Run time: 3996 min.
RRP: £79.99
Price: £26.48

Review Starsky And Hutch - Series 1-4 - Complete / Sony Pictures Home Entertainment:


Review Optimum Home Entertainment / Brick [2006]
Actors & Directors
  • Emilie De Ravin
  • Joseph Gordon-Levitt
  • Rian Johnson
Release date: 2007-01-01
Run time: 105 min.
RRP: £15.99
Price: £4.28

Review Brick [2006] / Optimum Home Entertainment:


Review Touchstone Home Video / Dragonfly [2001]
Actors & Directors
  • Kathy Bates
  • Linda Hunt
  • Tom Shadyac
  • Ron Rifkin
  • Joe Morton
  • Kevin Costner
Release date: 2005-08-01
Run time: 99 min.
RRP: £15.99
Price: £4.93

Review Dragonfly [2001] / Touchstone Home Video:

"Belief gets us there", explains nun Linda Hunt to grieving widower Kevin Costner in Dragonfly. Costner plays an emergency room doctor whose ordered world is startled by "messages" from his dead wife. She's talking about the journey from life to death, but it describes the doctor's road from fact to faith equally well as he puzzles out the otherworldly events of his life. Costner's mourning comes off less lost and sad than simply emotionless and inert, but he finds good support from Kathy Bates as his sassy neighbour. Her appearances, along with a few startling horror-movie-type shocks, energise a film otherwise shrouded in loss, grief, and the hushed mood of supernatural spookiness. It's like a fusing of Ghost, The Sixth Sense, and The Mothman Prophecies, a New Age melodrama in a sentimental key that works through a rather contrived mystic mystery to a glowing climax. This is less a ghost story than a modern twist on the old-fashioned miracle. -Sean Axmaker.

Review MGM Entertainment / The Killing [1956]
Actors & Directors
  • Stanley Kubrick
  • Elisha Cook Jr.
  • Coleen Gray
  • Jay C. Flippen
  • Vince Edwards
  • Sterling Hayden
Release date: 2002-07-15
Run time: 80 min.
RRP: £15.99
Price: £2.85

Review The Killing [1956] / MGM Entertainment:

Among Stanley Kubrick's early film output The Killing stands out as the most lastingly influential: Quentin Tarantino credits the film as a huge inspiration for Reservoir Dogs and just about any movie or TV show that plays around with its own internal chronology owes the same debt. This sort of convoluted crime caper had really kicked off with John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle in 1950. From then on, nouveau noir scripts kept trying to find new ways of telling very similar stories. Here the novel Clean Break is adapted for the screen in a jigsaw-puzzle structure that caught Kubrick's eye. With a dry narration we're introduced to the key players in a racetrack heist as it's being planned, but the story bounces back and forth between what happens to each of them during and before the big event. All of this keeps the audience guessing as to exactly how it will go wrong, while the downbeat telling, the unsympathetic characters and the excessively dramatic score clearly foretell that it will go wrong from the start. The denouement is comically daft no matter how many times you see it. On the DVD: The Killing is a no-frills DVD transfer, in 4:3 ratio and with its original mono soundtrack. Criminally, just one trailer is all that's been dug up as an extra. -Paul Tonks.

Review Warner Home Video / The Brave One [HD DVD] [2007]
Actors & Directors
  • Mary Steenburgen
  • Jodie Foster
  • Neil Jordan
  • Terence Howard
  • Naveen Andrews
  • Jane Andrews
Release date: 2008-03-03
Run time: 117 min.
RRP: £26.99
Price: £3.48

Review The Brave One [HD DVD] [2007] / Warner Home Video:


Review Universal Pictures UK / The Hitcher [2007]
Actors & Directors
  • Sophia Bush
  • Neal McDonough
  • Sean Bean
  • Dave Meyers
  • Skip O'Brien
  • Travis Schuldt
Release date: 2007-10-01
Run time: 84 min.
RRP: £19.99
Price: £4.99

Review The Hitcher [2007] / Universal Pictures UK:

20 years is a long time in the lifeline of movie plot-arc necessities. It's also a pretty big generational stretch in the lives of audience demographics, which may be part of the reason the producers of this remake of the 1986 cult horror classic felt the need to update the original spare mano-a-mano backbone into a girl-and-mano-a-mano. The Twilight Zone-ish setup is still a pretty neat idea: regular guy on a lonely highway picks up a hitchhiker who turns out to be a psychopathic killer with some very unsettling supernatural might. Fans of the original could hardly hope for a demon villain with such creepy charisma as Rutger Hauer. But Sean Bean makes a respectable replacement, with his understated stare and stewing rage that brings a new brand of hair-raising devilry to the role of hitcher John Ryder. The lone "good guy" originated by a boyish C. Thomas Howell has been upgraded to a lovesick couple. In a twisty touch, Jim (Zachary Knighton) and Grace (Sophia Bush, of One Tree Hill fame) trade gender roles, with Jim turning wimpy and feminine and Grace becoming a shotgun-toting testoster-ette. The body count's a little higher and the gore factor increased by the power of 20 (years), but some of the original film's set pieces remain much the same- body-snapping case in point being an 18-wheeler being put to use as a old-fashioned torture rack. While the original might have placed a bit more emphasis on the philosophical and existential elements of evil passing from soul to soul, it wasn't exactly an intellectual thrill ride. [+]
Likewise, 2007's The Hitcher is no art film, and it can't be faulted for choosing fright and might for audiences that are always looking for bigger and more elaborate splats for their horror entertainment buck. And if you stick out your thumb for this one, expect plenty of splat. -Ted Fry.

Browse Crime, Thrillers & Mystery:

Models & Brands:
Out Of Time [2003], Into The Blue [2005], Terror on the Britannic (Juggernaut), Cadfael - The Complete Series 1 [1994], Kiss The Girls [1998], Taxi Driver [1976], Mean Creek [2004], Eye Of The Needle [1981], Mulholland Drive - Special Edition [2001], The Getaway (Deluxe Edition) [1972], Agatha Christie's Evil Under The Sun [1981], 8MM [1999], Read My Lips [2001], The Recruit [2003], Starsky And Hutch - Series 1-4 - Complete, Brick [2006], Dragonfly [2001], The Killing [1956], The Brave One [HD DVD] [2007], The Hitcher [2007]

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