You wouldn't think that a movie, which mostly consists of two old guys talking could be a thriller, but that's exactly what L'Homme du Train is. French singer Johnny Hallyday plays a professional criminal who comes to a small town to take part in a robbery. By chance, he meets talkative Jean Rochefort, who invites the laconic Hallyday to stay at his house because the hotel is closed. The two form an unlikely friendship, each curious about (and envious of) the other's life. But all the while plans for the robbery continue, while Rochefort is preparing for a dangerous event of his own. The pitch-perfect performances make L'Homme du Train completely involving. Rochefort and Hallyday play off of each other beautifully; it's impossible to put your finger on what makes these subtle, supple scenes so magnetic. The whole is directed with spare authority by Patrice Leconte (La Veuve de Saint-Pierre). -Bret Fetzer.

The flaws are easily forgiven in this beautiful version of Louisa May Alcott's novel. A stirring look at life in New England during the Civil War, Little Women is a triumph for all involved. We follow one family as they split into the world, ending up with the most independent, the outspoken Jo (Winona Ryder). This time around, the dramatics and conclusions fall into place a little too well, instead of finding life's little accidents along the way. Everyone now looks a bit too cute and oh, so nice. As the matron, Marmee, Susan Sarandon kicks the film into a modern tone, creating a movie alive with a great feminine sprit. Kirsten Dunst (Interview with the Vampire) has another showy role. The young ensemble cast cannot be faulted, with Ryder beginning the movie in a role akin to light comedy and crescendos to a triumphant end worthy of an Oscar. -Doug Thomas.

NASA's worst nightmare turned into one of the space agency's most heroic moments in 1970, when the Apollo 13 crew was forced to hobble home in a disabled capsule after an explosion seriously damaged the moon-bound spacecraft. Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton play (respectively) astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise in director Ron Howard's intense, painstakingly authentic docudrama. The Apollo 13 crew and Houston-based mission controllers race against time and heavy odds to return the damaged spacecraft safely to Earth from a distance of 205,500 miles. Using state-of-the-art special effects and ingenious film-making techniques, Howard and his stellar cast and crew build nail-biting tension while maintaining close fidelity to the facts. The result is a fitting tribute to the Apollo 13 mission and one of the biggest box-office hits of 1995. -Jeff Shannon NASA's worst nightmare turned into one of the space agency's most heroic moments in 1970, when the Apollo 13 crew was forced to hobble home in a disabled capsule after an explosion seriously damaged the moon-bound spacecraft. Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, and Bill Paxton play (respectively) astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise in director Ron Howard's intense, painstakingly authentic docudrama. The Apollo 13 crew and Houston-based mission controllers race against time and heavy odds to return the damaged spacecraft safely to Earth from a distance of 205,500 miles. Using state-of-the-art special effects and ingenious filmmaking techniques, Howard and his stellar cast and crew build nail-biting tension while maintaining close fidelity to the facts. The result is a fitting tribute to the Apollo 13 mission and one of the biggest box-office hits of 1995. [+]

Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Tomas, the happily irresponsible Czech lover of Milan Kundera's novel, which is set in Prague just before and during the Soviet invasion in 1968. Lena Olin and Juliette Binoche are the two vastly different women who occupy his attention and to some extent represent different sides of his values and personality. In any case, the character's decision to flee Russian tanks with one of them-and then return-has profound consequences on his life. Directed by Philip Kaufman, this rich, erotic, fascinating character study with allegorical overtones is a touchstone for many filmgoers. Several key sequences-such as Olin wearing a bowler hat and writhing most attractively-linger in the memory, while Kaufman's assured sense of the story inspires superb performances all around. -Tom Keogh.

Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday is a massive 150-minute American football drama which, for all its ferocity and cynicism, is as soft-centred and clichéd as any Rocky-style underdogs-make-good crowd-pleaser. The Miami Sharks have lost three games in a row and their coach, Al Pacino in an intense performance as the only half-decent major character in the film, faces crisis when untested quarterback Willie Beamen (an excellent Jamie Foxx) becomes an overnight star. Fame goes to Beamen's ego; manager Cameron Diaz ruthlessly wheels-and-deals; and team doctor James Woods sacrifices medical ethics for his career. The Gladiator-esque close-up "shakycam" visuals reflect the player's POV yet make many scenes almost incomprehensible, while the ludicrously fragmented (seven composers, 80 songs) rap-metal-ambient soundtrack obscures much of the dialogue. The world of American football is presented as brutal, nightmarish and corrupting, the players mainly drug-taking, money-grubbing, whoring, foul-mouthed barbarians. So when Stone's last act offers his hollow men as heroes, mythological noble warriors incarnate, the attempted feel-good finale rings seriously false. Stone exposed the rotten heart of the American dream to infinitely greater effect in JFK (1991), is here too much in love with his target for the shots to hit home. -Gary Dalkin On the DVD: The first disc presents the director's cut of Any Given Sunday. The UK cinema cut was nine minutes shorter than the US release. The director's cut starts with the longer US version, removes 11 minutes, adds six, including one of the most shocking and horrifying images seen on screen in some time, then re-edits several other sequences. [+]

The corridors of Whitehall have, of course, proved a rich trough for comedy in the past, but sitting among the finest must be The Thick Of It, a terrific, insightful and desperately entertaining satire. This complete first season follows the antics of Hugo Abbot, a simple MP, whose ongoing fight with his party's spin doctors provides just one richly mined strand for the show. Skilfully mixing drama and comedy, and shot in the increasingly popular fly-on-the-wall documentary style, The Thick Of It manages to be both laugh-out-loud funny, yet eerily scary at the same time. The credit, clearly, lies with the brains and the cast behind the programme. In front of the camera, both Chris Langham and the seemingly-brutal Peter Capaldi have won the plaudits, but much of the acclaim also needs lying at the doorstep of Armando Iannucci. Iannucci already has a comedy CV that few can rival, both in front of and behind the lens, and it's testament to the quality of The Thick Of It that it stands next easily next to anything in his back catalogue. This unmissable DVD brings together all the episodes from the little-seen-yet-rarely-rivalled maiden season (although the Christmas special is missing), and it's a real comedy treat. Bluntly, The Thick Of It is a modern day classic, and through the DVD release, more people can finally get the chance to see why. -Jon Foster.

By now, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan have amassed such a fund of goodwill with moviegoers that any new onscreen pairing brings nearly reflexive smiles. In You've Got Mail, the quintessential boy and girl next door repeat the tentative romantic crescendo that made Sleepless in Seattle, writer-director Nora Ephron's previous excursion with the duo, a massive hit. The prospective couple do actually meet face to face early on but Mail otherwise repeats the earlier feature's gentle, extended tease of saving its romantic resolution until the final, gauzy shot. The underlying narrative is an even more old-fashioned romantic pas de deux that is casually hooked to a newfangled device. The script, cowritten by the director and her sister, Delia Ephron, updates and relocates the Ernst Lubitsch classic, The Shop Around the Corner, to contemporary Manhattan, where Joe Fox (Hanks) is a cheerfully rapacious merchant whose chain of book superstores is gobbling up smaller, more specialized shops such as the children's bookstore owned by Kathleen Kelly (Ryan). Their lives run in close parallel in the same idealized neighbourhood yet they first meet anonymously, online, where they gradually nurture a warm, even intimate correspondence. As they begin to wonder whether this e-mail flirtation might lead them to be soul mates, however, they meet and clash over their colliding business fortunes. It's no small testament to the two stars that we wind up liking and caring about them despite the inevitable (and highly manipulative) arc of the plot. Although their chemistry transcended the consciously improbable romantic premise of Sleepless, enabling director Ephron to attain a kind of amorous soufflé, this time around there's a slow leak that considerably deflates the affair. Less credulous viewers will challenge Joe's logic in prolonging the concealment of his online identity from Kathleen, and may shake their heads at Ephron's reinvention of Manhattan as a spotless, sun-dappled wonderland where everybody lives in million-dollar apartments and colour co-ordinates their wardrobes for cocktail parties. [+]

First and foremost a star vehicle for Tom Cruise, this paper-thin Horatio Alger story of a young bartender with dreams of get-rich-quick success is notable only for Cruise's immense likeability in contrast to a creaky plot and thinly drawn characters. Cruise plays Brian Flanagan, a young entrepreneur and ladies' man who with his mentor (Bryan Brown) takes the New York bar scene by storm. Through setbacks and tragedy, Brian eventually realises there's more to life than a quick buck, and fights for the woman he loves (Elisabeth Shue). Despite its shortcomings, a worthwhile viewing for Tom Cruise fans. -Robert Lane, Amazon. com.

A politically-charged, compelling drama, Rendition sees director Gavin Hood follow up the extraordinary, Oscar-winning Tsotsi with another challenging, quality piece of cinema. This time, his attention focuses on the story of a man who is kidnapped, and shipped off to be imprisoned abroad. The reason? Suspected terrorism. And his wife has no idea where he is and what's happened. In lesser hands, Rendition could have really struggled to make its mark, but Hood very much knows what he's doing, and his film is excellent, right up to-and including-its final reel. His cast help him immensely, with Alan Arkin and Meryl Streep offering terrific support to the likes of Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal. Rendition does have some problems. Its pace sometimes wavers a little, some of the roles are slighter than you'd like, and sometimes the American-based elements pull the film back. But these are minor gripes that seem unfair to level at an ambitious drama, that is fearless about addressing issues of morality. Tightly woven on the whole, and sticking in your head long after the end credits have rolled, Rendition is intelligent film-making, that pulls very few punches. [+]

Meet Joe Black seemed almost fated to fail when it was released in 1998, but this romantic fantasy-a remake of 1934's Death Takes a Holiday-deserves a chance at life after box-office death. Although many moviegoers were turned off by director Martin Brest's overindulgent three-hour running time, those who gear into its deliberate pace will find that Meet Joe Black offers ample reward for your attention. Brad Pitt plays Death with a capital D, enjoying some time on Earth by inhabiting the body of a young man who'd been killed in a shockingly sudden pedestrian-auto impact. Before long, Death has ingratiated himself with a wealthy industrialist (Anthony Hopkins) and pursues romance with the man's beautiful daughter (newcomer Claire Forlani), whom he'd briefly encountered while still an earthbound human. Under the assumed identity of "Joe Black", he samples all the pleasures that corporeal life has to offer-power, romance, sex and such enticing pleasures as peanut butter by the spoonful. But Death has a job to do, and Meet Joe Black addresses the heart-wrenching dilemma that arises when either father or daughter (the plot keeps us guessing) must confront his or her inevitable demise. The film takes its own sweet time to establish this emotional crisis and the love that binds Hopkins's semi-dysfunctional family so closely together. But if you've stuck with the story this far, you may find yourself surprisingly affected. And if Meet Joe Black has really won you over, you'll more than appreciate the care and affection that gives the film a depth and richness that so many critics chose to ignore. -Jeff Shannon.