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.

For Rosemary's Baby, his modern horror tale about Satanic worship and a pregnant woman's decline into madness, Roman Polanski moves from the traditional monolithic mansions of Gothic flicks to an apartment building in New York City. Based on Ira Levin's novel, the story concerns Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy Woodhouse who find the apartment of their dreams in a luxurious complex in Manhattan. Soon after moving in and making friends with a group of elderly neighbours, Guy's career takes off and Rosemary discovers she is pregnant. Their happiness seems complete. But gradually Rosemary begins to sense that something is wrong with this baby, and slowly and surely her life begins to unravel. Polanski uses such subtle means to build up the sense of preternatural disquiet that initially you suspect Rosemary's prenatal paranoia to be a figment of her imagination. But the guilty parties and their demonic plan to make Rosemary the receptacle of their master's child are eventually revealed and, as Rosemary looses her grip on reality, she realises that no one can be trusted. The performances are excellent throughout; Farrow as the young wife is so fragile that you wonder how she made it unscathed to adulthood and John Cassavetes is horrifyingly duplicitous as her husband Guy. But the real star is Polanski's masterful direction. The mood is at the same time oppressive and hysterical with the mounting terror coming from the situation and gradually unravelling plot rather than any schlock horror moments. [+]

Like a cross between C. S. I. : Crime Scene Investigation and Darren Aronofsky's indie feature Pi, Numb3rs blends crime-drama with mathematics for a smart and creepy spin on the police-detective genre. Executive produced by Ridley Scott (Alien) and Tony Scott (True Romance), the series centres on a pragmatically minded FBI agent, Don Eppes (Northern Exposure's Rob Morrow), who invites his math-genius younger brother, Charlie (David Krumholz), to help him solve challenging cases using mathematical theories based on equations and probability. Dark and moody with a near-cinematic feel, Numb3rs has won both fans and acclaim for its innovative approach to the conventional crime-drama formula. This collection presents all 24 episodes from the show's second series, which includes guest appearances by Mary Kay Place, Graham Greene, Lou Diamond Phillips, and Colin Hanks.

We were promised that it would all end "in fire". Maybe at the end of its five-year run Babylon 5 fulfilled that promise for some viewers, but the announcement that a spin-off series, Crusade would serve to complete story threads moved the goalposts for most. It was a brave idea to attempt bridging the segue into Crusade via this fourth TV movie, but after the ending given by the episode "Sleeping in Light", the timing seems a little last-minute. Bruce Boxleitner gives one last greyed-up and chiselled performance as Sheridan-now President of the new Alliance. Overseeing an unveiled fleet of prototype Victory Destroyer ships, he receives visions offering warning about a lingering danger despite the end of the Shadow War. Though advised and manipulated by Technomage Galen (Peter Woodward), Sheridan is still unable to prevent the unleashing of the Drakh's last Planet Killer weapon. Infused in Earth's atmosphere, this plague will take five years to go "live" and then kill every last human. So begins the premise for the new show. It's a little too incomplete to satisfy as an individual movie. Watching it in conjunction with "War Zone" (the Crusade pilot episode) will give a better understanding of what's motivating everyone. [+]

Considered by many to be the greatest B movie ever made, the original-release version of Orson Welles's film noir masterpiece Touch of Evil was, ironically, never intended as a B movie at all-it merely suffered that fate after it was taken away from writer-director Welles, then reedited and released in 1958 as the second half of a double feature. Time and critical acclaim would eventually elevate the film to classic status (and Welles's original vision was meticulously followed for the film's 1998 restoration), but for four decades this original version stood as a testament to Welles's directorial genius. From its astonishing, miraculously choreographed opening shot (lasting over three minutes) to Marlene Dietrich's classic final line of dialogue, this sordid tale of murder and police corruption is like a valentine for the cinematic medium, with Welles as its love-struck suitor. As the corpulent cop who may be involved in a border-town murder, Welles faces opposition from a narcotics officer (Charlton Heston) whose wife (Janet Leigh) is abducted and held as the pawn in a struggle between Heston's quest for truth and Welles's control of carefully hidden secrets. The twisting plot is wildly entertaining (even though it's harder to follow in this original version), but even greater pleasure is found in the pulpy dialogue and the sheer exuberance of the dazzling directorial style. -Jeff Shannon.

The Last Samurai gives epic sweep to an intimate story of cultures at a crossroads as Japan undergoes tumultuous transition to a more Westernised society in 1876-77. In America, tormented Civil War veteran Captain Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) is coerced by a mercenary officer (Tony Goldwyn) to train the Japanese Emperor's troops in the use of modern weaponry. Opposing this "progress" is a rebellion of samurai warriors, holding fast to their traditions of honour despite strategic disadvantage. As a captive of the samurai leader (Ken Watanabe), Algren learns, appreciates, and adopts the Samurai code, switching sides for a climactic battle that will put everyone's honour to the ultimate test. All of which makes director Edward Zwick's noble epic eminently worthwhile, even if its Hollywood trappings (including an all-too-conventional ending) prevent it from being the masterpiece that Zwick and screenwriter John Logan clearly wanted it to be. Instead, The Last Samurai is an elegant mainstream adventure, impressive in all aspects of its production. It may not engage the emotions as effectively as Logan's script for Gladiator, but like Cruise's character, it finds its own quality of honour. -Jeff Shannon.

Harry Hook's adaptation is not as faithful to the William Golding novel as you'd wish (they excised the "Lord of the Flies" dialogue with Simon!) and because of it, the movie is less allegorical and less resonant. A group of young men from a military academy are stranded on an island. The group quickly becomes fractious with a passive section led by Ralph, trying to get rescued, and a hunter faction, led by Jack, trying to procure meat and "have fun. " Peter Brook's 1963 filming seemed to get closer to the Darwinist sense of this cultural disintegration. Here, the hunter faction seems more like Peter Pan's Lost Boys than the bloodthirsty murderers they are. The performances, particularly young Getty, don't quite carry the weight of the situation. It's still, however, sobering to slowly watch the school uniforms traded for war paint, and the little boys turn into little savages. -Keith Simanton.

James Hilton's novel Lost Horizon proposes a perfect hidden community within the uncharted Himalayas, a land where peace reigns and the inhabitants live for hundreds of years. So indelible is this mythical land that its name has entered the culture: Shangri-La. Director Frank Capra, riding high during his mid-'30s hot streak, spared no expense in creating Hilton's paradise onscreen, taxing the coffers of Columbia Pictures and the patience of mogul Harry Cohn. The results, however, are magical: shimmering, seductive, and maybe a bit foolish, truly the creation of an idealist (understandably, the spectacular art direction won an Oscar). And Capra's hero is an idealist, too. Ronald Colman, at his most marvelously elocutionary, plays a wise diplomat whose plane crashes in the snows of Tibet. He and the other survivors are guided to Shangri-La, where they wrestle with the invitation to stay. The young Jane Wyatt plays Colman's love interest, but leaving a more lasting impression are H. B. Warner as the benevolent Chang and Sam Jaffe, in great old-age makeup, as the wizened High Lama. [+]

A big summer blockbuster, Pearl Harbor is pitched as a romantic epic, but the story is essentially a frame for an impressive depiction of the Japanese attack on that "day of infamy", deploying all the modelwork, CGI, stunts and special effects necessary to trump previous screen re-enactments in Tora! Tora! Tora! and From Here to Eternity. At heart, it's another Top Gun-style exercise in heroically sublimated homosexuality as Rafe (Ben Affleck) and Dan (Josh Hartnett), lifelong buddies, fall out over a ridiculous contrivance that allows both decently to fallin love with a nurse (Kate Beckinsale) but forget all their differences when the fighting starts-as expected, their big climax comes in each other's arms, with Kate left behind as one wounded buddy extracts a promise from the other to look after his unborn child. Historical snippets are interleaved, with Mako and Jon Voigt stiff under the prosthetics asAdmiral Yamamoto and Franklin Roosevelt, and a lot of detail is given about things like the wooden rudders on the new Japanese torpedoes, the chaos in the understaffed hospital as the heroine is forced to make lipstick triage marks on wounded men's foreheads and the terrible effects of strafing. A surprisingly bright little performance from Dan Aykroyd (a sole reminder of 1941) as an intelligence analyst is balanced by an insufferably smug one from Cuba Gooding Jr as a token black supporting hero. It's the first film of the George W Bush era: aggressive and dumb as a rock, utterly uninterested in period-no one in this WWII-era army smokes, swears or uses racial abuse (Gooding's boxing opponent sneers at him because he's a cook)-and awkwardly straddles a dignified treatment of the Japanese and America's actual spasm of hatred after the attack (one soldier refuses to be treated by a Japanese doctor, but that's it). When Pearl Harbour is bombed, we see endangered dogs, drowning men and dead women, but when Tokyo gets blasted in payback only buildings are destroyed and in long-shot. Michael Bay (Armageddon) remains a jittery director, a great second-unit man who can't deal with people or stories. It borrows from Titanic and Saving Private Ryan, but tidies the war of the latter up so it can still haul in a broad audience and therefore misses the real tragic sense of the former. -Kim NewmanOn the DVD: Considering there are two discs in the special edition of this special effects homage, the second DVD is woefully short of extras. There is a 45-minute featurette on the highs and lows of bringing Michael Bay's magnum opus to the screen which, along with the usual interviews with cast and crew, features the more compelling eyewitness testimony bringing the events of December 7, 1941 to life. [+]

Nearly every biblical film is ambitious, creating pictures to go with some of the most famous and sacred stories in the Western world. DreamWorks' first animated film, The Prince of Egypt was the vision of executive producer Jeffrey Katzenberg after his ugly split from Disney, where he had been acknowledged as a key architect in that studio's rebirth (The Little Mermaid, etc. ). His first film for the company he helped create was a huge, challenging project without a single toy or merchandising tie-in, the backbone du jour of family entertainment in the 1990s. Three directors and 16 writers succeed in carrying out much of Katzenberg's vision. The linear story of Moses is crisply told, and the look of the film is stunning; indeed, no animated film has looked so ready to be placed in the Louvre since Fantasia. Here is an Egypt alive with energetic bustle and pristine buildings. Born a slave and set adrift in the river, Moses (voiced by Val Kilmer) is raised as the son of Pharaoh Seti (Patrick Stewart) and is a fitting rival for his stepbrother Rameses (Ralph Fiennes). When he learns of his roots-in a knockout sequence in which hieroglyphics come alive-he flees to the desert, where he finds his roots and heeds God's calling to free the slaves from Egypt. Katzenberg and his artists are careful to tread lightly on religious boundaries. [+]

Six Feet Under is not just a smartly written, sublimely acted soap that happens to be set in a funeral home; it's a profound mixture of emotional truths and whimsical black comedy that uses its setting to comment upon the way we live, with the omnipresent spectre of death throwing life's problems into sharp relief. Creator Alan Ball (American Beauty) understands modern neuroses more than most, it seems, and his rich sense of the absurd is given added potency, not to say piquancy, by the sometimes comically ridiculous juxtaposition of life and death. The first series introduces the Fisher family, whose already weighty emotional baggage is bolstered by the sudden demise of their patriarch, who has willed the family funeral home to his two initially hostile sons, wayward Nate (Peter Krause) and in-the-closet David (Michael C Hall). Teenage younger sister Claire (Lauren Ambrose) and repressed mother Ruth (Frances Conroy) have their own problems, as does put-upon mortician Federico (Freddy Rodriguez). The first year's unfolding story arc includes the family's resistance to a hostile big corporation, Nate's budding romance with wild card Brenda (stunningly good Rachel Griffiths), David's attempts to reconcile his Christian faith with his homosexuality, Claire's self-destructive boyfriend trouble and Ruth's gradual realisation that, although she was a wife and is a mother, she's entitled to have a life too. On the DVD: Six Feet Under, Series 1 spreads 13 episodes across four discs. Care has been taken to reflect the show's stylish look in everything from the novel external packaging to the menu layouts. Picture is good, but only standard 4:3 ratio, though sound is vivid Dolby 5. 1. The bonus features include two episode commentaries from creator Alan Ball, who happily chats about the pilot and the season finale, both of which he wrote and directed. [+]