Kimberly Peirce's follow-up to Boys Don't Cry is another issue-driven look at its era: Stop-Loss hinges on U. S. military policy allowing Iraq War soldiers to be returned to combat even after their official enlistment times are up. In this case, a band of brothers return to home turf in Brazos, Texas, only to discover that team leader Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) has gotten a Stop-Loss order to head back to the Middle East. After some flavourful sketches of small-town Texas life and the awkwardness of re-adjustment, the movie somewhat clumsily hits the road, where there's more wheel-spinning than deep insight. Peirce and co. seem to want to hit all the Iraq War bases, which may be one reason the film lacks a strong focus. Supporting soldiers Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are rather more interesting than Phillippe's brooding hero, and Abbie Cornish is stuck in a thankless torn-between-two-lovers storyline. Stop-Loss is incredibly sincere, but the film feels like a project that began with an issue and a cause, rather than compelling characters. -Robert Horton.

The rise and fall of the notorious Roman Emperor Caligula, showing the violent methods that he employs to gain the throne, and the subsequent insanity of his reign - he gives his horse political office and humiliates and executes anyone who even slightly displeases him. He also sleeps with his sister, organises elaborate orgies and embarks on a fruitless invasion of England before meeting an appropriate end. There are various versions of the film, ranging from the heavily- truncated 90-minute version to the legendary 160-minute hardcore version which leaves nothing to the imagination (though the hardcore scenes were inserted later and do not involve the main cast members). (Written by Michael Brooke).

Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Michael J. Pollard.

It's a Free World, the latest collaboration from the Palme d'Or winning director Ken Loach, writer Paul Laverty and producer Rebecca O'Brien is a drama rooted in the world of illegal employment in contemporary Britain. The story follows ill-educated Angie, who is tired of being messed around by her chauvinistic bosses at the recruitment agency where she finds Polish workers low paid jobs in the UK. When she walks out of her job, she has a point to prove to all those who know her. Angie begins work in a twilight zone between gang masters and employment agencies in a tale set against the background of flexible labour, globalisation, double shifts and lots of happy, happy consumers. It's a Free World was awarded the Best Screenplay at the 2007 Venice Film Festival and Loach and team won the coveted Palme d'Or in Cannes last year for The Wind that Shakes the Barley, which went on to be his most successful ever UK release. The DVD includes fantastic `extra' material, including an exclusive Director's Commentary by Ken Loach.

E Annie Proulx's "quirky" bestseller The Shipping News gets the Lasse Hallstrom treatment, but the results don't match Chocolat or The Cider House Rules. Lifelong loser Quoyle (Kevin Spacey) suffers in a terrible wig-abused by his bitter Dad, snoozing through dead-end jobs, overwhelmed by a mad Cate Blanchett. On the same day, his parents commit suicide and runaway Petal drowns in a car crash. With ominous Aunt Agnis (Judi Dench) and angelic daughter Bunny, Quoyle relocates to Quoyle Point, moving into a dilapidated family house tethered on a storm-wracked cliff. He takes a job as a reporter, fitting into a feud between owner (Scott Glenn) and editor (Pete Postlethwaite) and begins a tenuous romance with widow Wavey (Julianne Moore). Happiness threatens, but the weight of an awful past bears down, along with premonitions of doom, decapitation murders and a lot of bad weather. until a cathartic storm sorts it all out. Spare Spacey, miscast as the novel's obese hero, underplays to the point of invisibility. [+]

Brilliantly conceived, superbly directed, and beautifully acted, Babel is inarguably one of the best films of 2006. Director Alejandro González Iñárritu and his co-writer, Guillermo Arriaga (the two also collaborated on Amores Perros and 21 Grams) weave together the disparate strands of their story into a finely hewn fabric by focusing on what appear to be several equally incongruent characters: an American (Brad Pitt) touring Morocco with his wife (Cate Blanchet) become the focus of an international incident also involving a hardscrabble Moroccan farmer (Mustapha Rachidi) struggling to keep his two young sons in line and his family together. A San Diego nanny (Adriana Barraza), her employers absent, makes the disastrous decision to take their kids with her to a wedding in Mexico. And a deaf-mute Japanese teen (the extraordinary Rinko Kikuchi) deals with a relationship with her father (Koji Yakusho) and the world in general that's been upended by the death of her mother. It is perhaps not surprising, or particularly original, that a gun is the device that ties these people together. Yet Babel isn't merely about violence and its tragic consequences. It's about communication, and especially the lack of it-both intercultural, raising issues like terrorism and immigration, and intracultural, as basic as husbands talking to their wives and parents understanding their children. Iñárritu's command of his medium, sound and visual alike, is extraordinary; the camera work is by turns kinetic and restrained, the music always well matched to the scenes, the editing deft but not confusing, and the film (which clocks in at a lengthy 143 minutes) is filled with indelible moments. Many of those moments are also pretty stark and grim, and no will claim that all of this leads to a "happy" ending, but there is a sense of reconciliation, perhaps even resolution. "If You Want to be Understood. [+]

It's goodbye to Capeside, hello to Boston in Dawson's Creek's fifth season (a. k. a. : Dawson's Creek: The College Years). While the end of the fourth season sent the five friends their separate ways-Dawson (James Van Der Beek) to USC Film School, Joey (Katie Holmes) to Wilmington College, Jen (Michelle Williams) and Jack (Kerr Smith) to Boston Bay College; and Pacey (Joshua Jackson) to the high seas-it doesn't take them long to find themselves together again. That's a good thing, especially when tragedy strikes a family member and threatens to tear the survivors apart. More than anything, the fifth season seems to be about falling into bad relationships. Jen dates a cute but sleazy musician (Chad Michael Murray), Pacey gets a job in a restaurant where he pursues a woman (Lourdes Benedicto) already having an affair with a married man, then fends off a vampish new boss (Sherilyn Fenn, Twin Peaks). Joey is drawn to her handsome English professor (Ken Marino). And Jack joins a frat, becomes a jerk, and starts a devoted relationship with his beer bottle. [+]

A prime example of 1990s independent film-making, Buffalo 66 is a little-known gem of a film which, once found, will be cherished. Vincent Gallo-the New York Bohemian extraordinaire-co-wrote the semi-autobiographical script. He also directed and starred in this dark comedy and, as if that wasn't enough, contributed to the mind-blowing soundtrack. By employing alternative filming techniques for what is, in essence, a traditional boy-meets-girl story, Gallo has created an indie movie with genuine mainstream appeal. A handheld camera and the flashback sequences use beautiful grainy cine film and 70s Polaroids, while as a whole the tone of the piece shifts between lavish theatrical images and reality TV. However, out of the many mesmerising scenes within the film, it is the isolated performances that offer the most heartfelt beauty, notably Cristina Ricci's solo light tap dance and Gazzara's mime to a song actually performed by Gallo's father in the distant past. An all-star cast also includes Angelica Huston, Ben Gazzara and Mickey Rourke. Buffalo 66 is an overlooked modern classic just waiting to be discovered. -Nikki Disney.

An unpretentious Brit-flick distinguished by a great cast, This Year's Love is writer-director David Kane's wry, funny study of six singletons in search of something-possibly love, possibly just sex-that will help them make sense of an untidy world. Aside from the acting, the film's strongest feature is its unflinching realism. The setting is North London's Camden Lock, an area that is in equal parts ultra-trendy and horrendously squalid. The characters reflect the locale: a circle of youthful drop-outs, wannabes and never-have-beens united in their common desire to surmount loneliness and find that elusive "perfect match". The central figures are newlyweds Danny and Hannah (the wonderful Douglas Henshall and Catherine McCormack) and the film in essence concerns itself with the fallout from the spectacular and rapid disintegration of their marriage. Danny first hooks up with cleaner-cum-nightclub singer Mary (a marvellously self-deprecating Kathy Burke), while Hannah finds lecherous womaniser Cameron (an unwashed Dougray Scott). Cameron's flatmate Liam (Ian Hart) fails to impress posh single mum Sophie (Jennifer Ehle in dreadlocks), who goes on to reject Danny and Cameron in turn, while Liam becomes dangerously obsessed by Hannah then Mary. So the merry-go-round of relationship swapping, unlikely coincidences and bittersweet life-lessons turns full circle. David Kane's comic dialogue is witheringly sharp, the situations (aside from all the coincidental meetings) are well-observed and the characters sympathetically three-dimensional (helped in no small part by the quality of the ensemble cast). The frequently hilarious comedy is tempered by an underlying despair: if it's not exactly Brassed Off or The Full Monty for neurotic, self-obsessed metropolitans, it's a film that's at least happy to exist in the same genre and achieves the same poignant empathy with its characters. [+]

David Lynch peeks behind the picket fences of small-town America to reveal a corrupt shadow world of malevolence, sadism and madness. From the opening shots Lynch turns the Technicolor picture postcard images of middle-class homes and tree-lined lanes into a dreamy vision on the edge of nightmare. After his father collapses in a preternaturally eerie sequence, college boy Kyle MacLachlan returns home and stumbles across a severed human ear in a vacant lot. With the help of sweetly innocent high school girl (Laura Dern), he turns junior detective and uncovers a frightening yet darkly compelling world of voyeurism and sex. Drawn deeper into the brutal world of drug dealer and blackmailer Frank, played with raving mania by an obscenity-shouting Dennis Hopper in a career-reviving performance, he loses his innocence and his moral bearings when confronted with pure, unexplainable evil. Isabella Rossellini is terrifyingly desperate as Hopper's sexual slave who becomes MacLachlan's illicit lover, and Dean Stockwell purrs through his role as Hopper's oh-so-suave buddy. Lynch strips his surreally mundane sets to a ghostly austerity, which composer Angelo Badalamenti encourages with the smooth, spooky strains of a lush score. Blue Velvet is a disturbing film that delves into the darkest reaches of psycho-sexual brutality and simply isn't for everyone. But for a viewer who wants to see the cinematic world rocked off its foundations, David Lynch delivers a nightmarish masterpiece. -Sean Axmaker.

David Cronenberg's signature obsessions flower in Eastern Promises, a stunning look at violence, responsibility, and skin. Near Christmas time in London, a baby is born to a teenage junkie-an event that leads a midwife (Naomi Watts) into the world of the Russian mob. Central to this world is an ambitious enforcer (Viggo Mortensen) who's lately buddied up with the reckless son (Vincent Cassel) of a mob boss (Armin Mueller-Stahl, doing his benign-sinister thing). Screenwriter Steve Knight also wrote Dirty Pretty Things, and in some ways this is a companion piece to that film, though utterly different in style. The plot is classical to the point of being familiar, but Cronenberg doesn't allow anything to become sentimental; he and his peerless cinematographer Peter Suschitzky take a cool, controlled approach to this story. Because of that, when the movie erupts in its (relatively brief) violence, it's genuinely shocking. Cronenberg really puts the viewer through it, as though to shame the easy purveyors of pulp violence-nobody will cheer when the blood runs in this film. Still, Eastern Promises has a furtive humour, nicely conveyed in Viggo Mortensen's highly original performance. Covered in tattoos, his body a scroll depicting his personal history of violence, Mortensen conveys a subtle blend of resolve and lost-ness. He's a true, haunting mystery man. [+]