Hard to imagine now but long before Richard Attenborough became Lord Dickie, benevolent patriarch of British moviedom, he specialised in playing weaselly little thugs and punks. Brighton Rock, adapted from Graham Greene's classic novel, offered him one of his best early roles as Pinkie, juvenile leader of a seedy gang of racetrack crooks in the Sussex seaside town. When it seems an innocent young waitress may know too much about one of their killings, Pinkie decides to keep her quiet by marrying her. But in Greene's world of guilt-ridden Catholicism and inexorable doom, it was never going to be that easy. Is the famous twist ending a cop-out? That depends just how much irony you read into it. But the Brighton atmosphere, all tawdry gaiety shot through with a crackling undercurrent of fear, is so vivid you can smell it. Made with a cool, dispassionate eye by the Boulting Brothers (before they turned jokey with the likes of I'm Alright Jack, for instance) and superbly shot by Harry Waxman, this is one of Britain's few great contributions to the noir thriller cycle. Young Dickie, twitchy, vicious and terrified, is a revelation-and don't miss William Hartnell, the original Dr Who, as his cynical sidekick. -Philip Kemp Rightly regarded as a genuine classic of British cinema, Brighton Rock has stood the test of time remarkably well to emerge as a tense, original thriller. Although there is much that is old-fashioned here (particularly the less than convincing East End accents), the tale of feuding gangster factions holds up favourably compared to modern-day efforts. [+]

As its title suggests, Layer Cake is a crime-thriller that cuts into several levels of its treacherous criminal underworld. The title is actually one character's definition of the drug-trade hierarchy, but it's also an apt metaphor for the separate layers of deception, death and betrayal experienced by the film's unnamed protagonist, a cocaine traffic middle-man played with smooth appeal by Daniel Craig (Casino Royale). Listed in the credits only as "XXXX," the character is trapped into doing a favour for his volatile boss, only to have tables turned by his boss's boss (Gosford Park) in a twisting plot involving a stolen shipment of Ecstasy, a missing girl, duplicitous dealers, murderous Serbian gangsters, and a variety of low-lifes with their own deadly agendas. As adapted by J. J. Connolly (from his own novel) and directed by Matthew Vaughan (who earned his genre chops as producer of Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch), Layer Cake improves upon those earlier British gangland hits with assured pacing, intelligent plotting, and an admirable emphasis on plot-moving dialogue over routine action. Sure, it's violent (that's to be expected) and not always involving, but it's smarter than most thrillers, and Vaughan's directorial debut has a confident style that's flashy without being flamboyant. This could be the start of an impressive career. -Jeff Shannon.

Perhaps the cleverest Hollywood movie of its generation, Adaptation is a loose adaptation of Susan Orlean's novelistic non-fiction book The Orchid Thief. It is also a unique exercise in autobiographical fantasy on the part of screenwriter Charles Kaufman (who shares credit with his fictional brother) and a worthy follow-up to director Spike Jonze's first Kaufman-scripted movie Being John Malkovich. Opening on the set of Being John Malkovich, with the writer (played by an intense Nicolas Cage) ordered out of the way by a minion, Adaptation. proceeds to follow more strands than spaghetti. The neurotic Kaufman wins the job of turning Orlean's book into a script and has trouble getting a handle on it, while his more upbeat brother (also Cage) takes a Robert McKee scriptwriting seminar and cranks out a serial killer screenplay that attracts a major buzz. In flashbacks, Orlean (Meryl Streep) works on a New Yorker article and then a book about "orchid thief" John Laroche (Chris Cooper), a toothless Sam Shepard figure who heads a crew of Seminoles who poach rare flowers ostensibly in order to preserve them from extinction, encouraging the Darwinian process of adaptation essential to evolution. Kaufman ends up taking a seminar with McKee (Brian Cox, hilarious) and the film changes (or adapts) into a bizarre Hollywood thriller with drugs manufactured from flowers, a shoot-out between the writers and the subjects in the Florida everglades and a defiant climactic use of a plot device (deus ex machina) and narrative strategy (voice-over) McKee has ordered Kaufman not to use. So dazzling that it defuses the argument that the hero genuinely has no idea what to do with his material, this film examines the rules of filmmaking and breaks them, shoots off in all directions (a brief history of life on earth sped up) but is held together by performance and direction, and will give the viewer enough material for a week's worth of debates and arguments afterwards. -Kim Newman.

British films about sex are fairly rare, and mostly embarrassing: from the painfully anxious (Brief Encounter) to the hopelessly naff (the Carry On films). What a treat then is Rita, Sue and Bob Too, Alan Clarke's filming of a stage play by young Andrea Dunbar. It's an unsentimental, gleefully lewd comedy about shagging. Tagged for its cinema release in 1987 as "Thatcher's Britain with its knickers down", it even provoked a minor moral hullabaloo in the newspapers. Rita (Siobhan Finneran) and Sue (Michelle Holmes) are two giggly Bradford lasses stuck on a ramshackle housing estate. They keep themselves in fags by occasional baby-sitting for nouveau riche couple Bob (George Costigan) and Michelle (Lesley Sharp). Bob fancies himself rotten, but Michelle has ruled that sex is off the menu. So one night, driving Rita and Sue home, Bob detours to the Yorkshire moors and offers the girls a little something extra in his front seat. Rita and Sue decide to grab it while they can. Alan Clarke's cult following is founded on his bleak, brilliant films about violent young men (Scum, The Firm, Made in Britain). [+]

Spun is an unclassifiable ensemble piece, intentionally bleached of soulfulness and high on visual invention and comic depravity. Set in northern Los Angeles, where meth freaks lurch from one motel room to another in search of companionship and a score, the film stars Jason Schwartzman as Ross, whose life is rapidly disintegrating. Fielding phone messages from his mother and trying in vain to reach an old girlfriend, Ross spends most of his time on a feverish circuit with the half-mad Cookie (Mena Suvari) and Nikki (Brittany Murphy), the dangerously paranoid Spider Mike (John Leguizamo), and a macho drugmaker called the Cook (Mickey Rourke). Director Jonas Akerlund's story is non-existent, but then again Spun is driven by the blurry, hellish energy of a life lived on speed. An obvious influence is Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, but Akerlund is interested in nightmarish set pieces than tiny horrors of misfired nerve endings and ravaged time. -Tom Keogh.

One of the greatest screen biographies ever produced, Patton is a monumental film that won seven Academy Awards and gave George C Scott the greatest role of his career. It was released in 1970 when protest against the Vietnam War still raged in the States and abroad. Inevitably, many critics and filmgoers struggled to reconcile the events of the day with the film's glorification of US General George S Patton as a crazy-brave genius of World War II; how could a film so huge in scope and so fascinated by its subject be considered an anti-war film? The simple truth is that it's not-Patton is less about World War II than about the rise and fall of a man whose life was literally defined by war and who felt lost and lonely without the grand-scale pursuit of an enemy. George C Scott embodies his role so fully, so convincingly, that we can't help but be drawn to and fascinated by Patton as a man who is simultaneously bound for hell and glory. The film's opening monologue alone is a masterful display of acting and character analysis and everything that follows is sheer brilliance on the part of Scott and director Franklin J Schaffner, aided in no small part by composer Jerry Goldsmith's masterfully understated score. Filmed on an epic scale at literally dozens of European locations, Patton does not embrace war as a noble pursuit, nor does it deny the reality of war as a breeding ground for heroes. Through the awesome achievement of Scott's performance and the film's grand ambition, General Patton shows all the complexities of a man who accepted his role in life and (like Scott) played it to the hilt. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. comOn the DVD: The widescreen print of the movie (which was originally filmed using a super-wide 70mm process called "Dimension 150") is handsomely presented on the first disc, with a remastered Dolby 5. 1 soundtrack. [+]

A box-office hit when released in 1994, this sprawling, frequently overwrought familial melodrama may get sillier as its plot progresses, but it's the kind of lusty, character-based epic that Hollywood should attempt more often. It's also an unabashedly flattering star vehicle for Brad Pitt as Tristan-the rebellious middle son of a fiercely independent Montana rancher and military veteran (Anthony Hopkins)-who is routinely at odds with his more responsible older brother, Alfred (Aidan Quinn), and younger brother, Samuel (Henry Thomas). From the battlefields of World War I to his adventures as an oceangoing sailor, Tristan's life is full of personal torment, especially when he returns to Montana and finds himself competing with Alfred over Samuel's beautiful widow (Julia Ormond), whose passion for Tristan disrupts the already turbulent Ludlow clan. Under the wide-open canopy of Big Sky country, this operatic tale unfolds with all the bloodlust, tragedy, and scenery-chewing performances you'd expect to find in a hokey bestselling novel (in fact, it's based on the acclaimed novella by Jim Harrison), but it's a potent mix that's highly entertaining. Not surprisingly, John Toll won an Academy Award for his breathtaking outdoor cinematography. -Jeff Shannon.

Frequency is really two different-though inextricably linked-movies. First, the emotional drama of a father and son reunited after 30 years of separation. Then there is a science fiction thriller, in which a couple of chance solar storms, occurring exactly 30 years apart, can provide the agency through which the father and son can communicate using the very same ham radio in parallel time frames of 1969 and 1999. The son is John Sullivan (Jim Caviezel), a cop, and his father is Frank (Dennis Quaid), a firefighter who died on the job when John was six, which just happens to be tomorrow for Frank when he and his now-adult son begin talking across time. This is great for John, because now he can warn his dad about the upcoming fire and avert the catastrophe that left him fatherless for most of his life. Accomplishing this gives John new memories of his life with Dad, but unfortunately alters the course of a serial killer, with tragic effect on John's family history. Since John is a cop, and the case he's working on turns out to be the same unsolved case from 30 years before, he and his father work together over the ham radio to solve the case and hopefully avert the tragedy that befell their family. Time-travel stories have always been problematic, demanding either an extra degree of credulity on the part of the audience or an extra level of explanation on the part of storytellers, which is invariably cumbersome. Frequency handles the troublesome time paradoxes by having John explain how, having altered his past, he now experiences both timelines, as if he's had two pasts that converge in his present. And as changes continue to be wrought in John's past, we see him becoming more and more confused. [+]